This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception that Linguistics is a domain of dusty schoolroom grammar. It follows that linguistics can be characterised differently than as proponents of theoretical orientations who spend their brief breaks from their bone-dry work bashing each other over the head with their various favourite abstractions. The discipline may appear to outsiders as…
This volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories of embodied meaning developed in cognitive linguistics. Building on the momentum currently enjoyed by cognitive-functional approaches to language within the field of Classics, its contributors adopt, in particular, a ‘constructional’ app…
The study focuses on the investigation of the process during which raters of EFL written performance make their decisions. It consists of a pilot and a main study, each of which concentrates on assessment of writing. The rationale is to detect the decision-making processes that raters follow, which can be used for training raters, and with which the reliability of rating can be improved. The pi…
Explores translation in the context of the multi-lingual, multi-ethnic late-Ottoman Mediterranean world. Fénelon, Offenbach and the Iliad in Arabic, Robinson Crusoe in Turkish, the Bible in Greek-alphabet Turkish, excoriated French novels circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish: literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and …
The essays in this volume shed light on how, for what purposes and to what extent the Arabic language was taught and studied by European scholars, theologian, merchants, diplomats and prisoners in early modern Europe.
What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace’s Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Absolutely nothing. Yet, taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. At these moments, particularly within…
This book investigates the nature of regional variation in the early Chinese writing system through bamboo manuscripts and inscriptions dating from the late pre-imperial China (5th-3rd centuries BCE). Diachronic and synchronic comparisons of graphic details show that none of the well-recognized regional varieties developed independently from one another. Furthermore, differences in graphic comp…
This book offers a diversification model of transplanted languages that facilitates the exploration of external factors and internal changes. The general context is the New World and the variety that unfolded in the Central Highlands and the Gulf of Mexico, herein identified as Mexican Colonial Spanish (MCS). Linguistic corpora provide the evidence of (re)transmission, diffusion, metalinguistic…
This handbook introduces key elements of the philological research area called paremiology (the study of proverbs). It presents the main subject area as well as the current status of paremiological research. The basic notions, among others, include defining proverbs, main proverb features, origin, collecting and categorization of proverbs. Each chapter is written by a leading scholar-specialist…
During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot’s (2002: 625) conclusion: “[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widesprea…