In this Element, the authors introduce and apply a framework for the linguistic analysis of fake news. They define fake news as news that is meant to deceive as opposed to inform and argue that there should be systematic differences between real and fake news that reflect this basic difference in communicative purpose. The authors consider one famous case of fake news involving Jayson Blair of The New York Times, which provides them with the opportunity to conduct a controlled study of the...

The first study of its kind, Regional Variation in Written American English takes a corpus-based approach to map over one hundred grammatical alternation variables across the United States. A multivariate spatial analysis of these maps shows that grammatical alternation variables follow a relatively small number of common regional patterns in American English, which can be explained based on both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Based on this rigorous analysis of extensive data, Gr...

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts ...

Fully updated and revised, this fourth edition of Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar explains the principles of systemic functional grammar, enabling the reader to understand and apply them in any context. Halliday's innovative approach of engaging with grammar through discourse has become a worldwide phenomenon in linguistics.Updates to the new edition include:Recent uses of systemic functional linguistics to provide further guidance for students,...

The sociolinguist William Labov has worked for decades on change in progress in American dialects and on African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In Dialect Diversity in America, Labov examines the diversity among American dialects and presents the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from one another over time.Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional dif...

The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans as "divine exceptions" to natural selection. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but his hypothesis remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty year...

Written by the world-renowned pioneer in the field of modern sociolinguistics, this volume examines the cognitive and cultural factors responsible for linguistic change, tracing the life history of these developments, from triggering events to driving forces and endpoints.Explores the major insights obtained by combining sociolinguistics with the results of dialect geography on a large scaleExamines the cognitive and cultural influences responsible for linguistic ch...

Language description plays an important role in language learning/teaching because it often determines what specific language forms, features, and usages are taught and how. A good understanding of language description is vital for language teachers and material writers and should constitute an important part of their knowledge. This book provides a balanced treatment of both theory and practice. It focuses on some of the most important and challenging grammar and vocabulary usage question...

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, pers...

This lively introduction to figurative language explains a broad range of concepts, including metaphor, metonymy, simile, and blending, and develops new tools for analyzing them. It coherently grounds the linguistic understanding of these concepts in basic cognitive mechanisms such as categorization, frames, mental spaces, and viewpoint; and it fits them into a consistent framework which is applied to cross-linguistic data and also to figurative structures in gesture and the visual arts. C...

Noam Chomsky continues to be one of the most influential intellectual figures of modern times. His wide-ranging contributions to the fields of linguistics, psychology, philosophy and politics have revolutionised our view of language, the mind and human nature. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, this book explores Chomsky's key theories, especially recent developments in his Minimalist Program, addressing issues such as: how do we know a language? How do children acquire this knowl...

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, second edition offers an innovative and detailed examination of recent developments in phonology, and the implications of these within linguistic theory and related disciplines.Revised from the ground-up for the second edition, the book is comprised almost entirely of newly-written and previously unpublished chaptersAddresses the important questions in the field including learnability, phonological interfaces, tone, and ...