This collection brings together contributions from a new wave of research into language, space, and place, at the intersection of various disciplines, from geography to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The authors investigate the myriad ways that people conceive of—and thereby describe—the world around them, studying the impact these ideas have on their identities, and highlighting the tension between conflicting ontologies of space. It is a timely and invaluable new resource for researchers and students in linguistics, geography, anthropology and communication.
This volume consists of revised versions of presentations given at a roundtable on “New Directions for Historical Linguistics: Impact and Synthesis, 50 Years Later” held at the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in San Antonio, Texas, in 2017, as well as an introduction by the editors. The roundtable discussed the evolution of historical linguistics since the 1966 symposium on “Directions for Historical Linguistics,” held in Austin, Texas. Six prominent scholars of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics contributed: William Labov (the only surviving author from the 1968 volume), Gillian Sankoff, Elizabeth Traugott, Brian Joseph, Sarah Thomason, and Paul Hopper (a graduate student assistant at the original symposium).
Essays in honour of Florence Abena Dolphyne, M.E. Kropp Dakubu, and Alan Stewart Duthie, the "3Ds" prominently responsible for the development of Linguistics as a discipline in the University of Ghana.
This volume brings together representative case studies and surveys that explore research into ritual language, covering theoretical and methodological approaches that reflect traditional inquiries and more recent studies. This recent literature contends that ritual language hinges on the construction of authoritative ontological models about the cosmos and its inhabitants. Ritual speech also orchestrates performances that articulate representations of collective identities, and rests on the diversity of hierarchical forms of authoritative knowledge, displayed in both oblique and direct terms. Moreover, performances, texts, and narratives associated with ritual practices are closely entwined with historical accounts that navigate current memories, recast in a diversity of ways, about ancestral beings and distant or recent pasts, or delimit a terrain in which dialectical relationships with colonial hegemony and Christian indoctrination emerge to transform the social order. Ritual narrative often offers in its structure and delivery momentous representation of the social order, social institutions, social difference, and collective identities, and may also be constituted by claims about relations among species, non-human actors, and material culture. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language addresses foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, use, and consequences of ritual language. The chapters examine the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social world. As the study of ritual speech hinges on extensive analyses of linguistic choices and styles, the contributors draw on data from a wide range of language groups and societies in the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean.
This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.
The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the “deepest” dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory. Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation seeks to take full account of these developments in a comprehensive, theoretically rich way. The introductory volume examines the concept of space and linguistic approaches to it, the structure and dynamics of language spaces, and relevant research methods. A second volume offers the first thorough exploration of the interplay between linguistic investigation and cartography, and subsequent volumes uniformly document the state of research into the spatial dimension of particular language groupings. Key features: comprehensive coverage of the field in terms of theory and methods the unique volume stands alone, since it neither is a handbook of dialectology or of areal linguistics, nor a handbook on language variation alone gathers together a great number of distinguished scholars and experts in the field
This reference work delivers an interdisciplinary, applied spatial and geographical approach to the study of languages and linguistics. This work includes chapters and sections related to language origins, diffusion, conflicts, policies, education/instruction, representation, technology, regions, and mapping. Also addressed is the mapping of languages and linguistic diversity, on language in the context of politics, on the relevance of language to cultural identity, on language minorities and endangered languages, and also on language and the arts and non-human language and communication. This reference work looks at the subject matter and contributors to the disciplines and programs in the social sciences and humanities, and the dearth of materials on languages and linguistics. The topics covered are not only discipline-centered, but in the cutting-edge fields that intersect several disciplines and also cut across the social sciences and humanities. These include gender studies, sustainability and development, technology and social media impacts, law and human rights, climate change, public health and epidemiology, architecture, religion, visual representation and mapping. These new and emerging research directions and other intersecting fields are not traditionally discipline-bounded, but cut across numerous fields. The volumes will appeal to those within existing fields and disciplines and those working the intersections at local, regional and global scales.
The Handbook of Language Mapping aims to explore the core methodological and theoretical approaches of linguistic cartography. In both empirical and theoretical linguistics, the spatial variation of language is of increasing interest and the visualization of language in space is therefore also of growing significance. It is the precondition for correct data interpretation. But how does it work? What has to be considered when drawing a map? And how has the problem been tackled so far? This book provides answers to such questions by taking a closer look at the theoretical issues surrounding cartography and at the concrete practice of mapping. The fundamental issues raised are addressed particularly well, since linguistic geography is not only one of the domains with a lengthy tradition, it is also one of the most progressive fields in linguistics. At the same time, because of their visual primacy, linguistic maps directly confront the challenges of human perception and aesthetics. In this context, envisioning the fruits of language mapping is a fascinating and inspiring endeavor, not just for experts. With its accessible texts and wealth of full-color images, the handbook not only represents a comprehensive manual serving the interests of a variety of readers, it also fills a gap in the ongoing linguistic discourse.
