Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and ...

Despite the significant presence of Cuban immigrants in the United States, current research on Cuban Spanish linguistics remains underexplored. This volume addresses this lacuna in Cuban Spanish research by providing a state-of-the-art collection of articles from a range of theoretical perspectives and linguistic areas, including phonological and phonetic variation, morphosyntactic approaches, sociolinguistic perspectives, and heritage language acquisition. Given increasing interest in Cub...

New research expands the linguistic understanding of dialect contact in specific communities and individualsDialect contact occurs whenever speakers of mutually intelligible language varieties interact. Many linguists are interested in the outcome of such contact—how it leads people and languages to vary and change, and what such patterns can reveal about language, mind, and society. Dialect contact can thus be approached as an individual-level or a community-level...

This volume investigates the features and challenges of medical discourse between medical professionals as well as with patients and in the media. Based on corpus-driven studies, it includes a wide variety of approaches including cognitive, corpus and diachronic linguistics. Each chapter examines a different aspect of medical communication, including the use of metaphor referring to cancer, the importance of ethics in medical documents addressed to patients and the suitability of popular s...

Code-switching – the alternating use of two languages in the same stretch of discourse by a bilingual speaker – is a dominant topic in the study of bilingualism and a phenomenon that generates a great deal of pointed discussion in the public domain. This handbook provides the most comprehensive guide to this bilingual phenomenon to date. Drawing on empirical data from a wide range of language pairings, the leading researchers in the study of bilingualism examine the linguistic, social and ...

This book is addressed to students and teachers in design degrees and researchers interested in logical thinking of design. Just like any other discipline, design must accredit its rational fundamentals to refer the conditions of knowledge that determine it as a specific object of study. Methodology is a bridge between the general principles of doing and knowing. The analysis of the design theoretic fundamentals involves an approach to its models as well as the conceptual assumptions. Like...

The central concern of this title, first published in 1994, is the syntactic nature of negation in Universal Grammar, and its relation to other functional elements in the Syntax. The study argues that negation is not a syntactic category on its own; rather, it is one of the values of a more abstract syntactic category, named Σ, which includes other sentence operators, such as affirmation and emphasis. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synt...

"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically...

A study of first and second language development in an indigenous community with implications for broader linguistic and cognitive issues.When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its compo...

In a field like L2 vocabulary teaching and learning where interest and research studies are burgeoning, this book offers a useful collection of papers that contains new ways of investigating vocabulary development, techniques for vocabulary teaching such as the Focus on Form hypothesis, word associations, and the use of concordance data. In addition, it tackles recent areas of analysis such as the treatment of vocabulary in teaching materials—an area of almost complete neglect in the liter...

This book is about bilingual young people who have been selected by their families to carry out the hard work of interpreting and translating to mediate communication between themselves and the outside world--between minority and majority communities. It examines the experiences of these young interpreters and the skills they develop in order to fulfill this role.The authors' purpose in this volume is to contribute to extending current definitions of gifted and talente...