With unusual structural characteristics, Finnish and Saami offer interesting challenges to linguistic theories formulated around more popular languages. Grammatically, for instance, languages in the Finnic and Saami group utilize extensive systems of case inflection on nouns to signal a broad variety of relations that in almost all other languages require additional words. Phonologically, as another example, the phenomenon of "consonant gradation" is of particular interest to linguists. This volume is the first to examine the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Finnic and Saami languages within current generative linguistic frameworks. Collected here is research on these less-studies languages, some of which now face extinction.

The papers in this volume describe and analyze an array of intriguing linguistic phenomena as they occur in the Saami languages, ranging from etymological nativization of loanwords to the formation of deadjectival and denominal verbs. Saami displays a number of characteristics that are unusual from a cross-linguistic perspective, including partial agreement on verbs, a three-way quantity distinction in consonants and spectacular consonant gradation. The eight papers presented here approach these and other issues from diverse theoretical perspectives in morphology, phonology, and syntax. The volume includes an extensive research bibliography which will be helpful for anyone interested in Saami linguistics.

Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms. This volume draws together multiple perspectives on encoding and navigating structured linguistic representations, to highlight important empirical insights, and to identify key priorities for new research in this area.

This book explores the role of phonological templates in early language use from the perspective of usage-based phonology and exemplar models and within the larger developmental framework of Dynamic Systems Theory. After analysing children's first words and their adult targets, Vihman sets out procedures for establishing the children's later prosodic structures and templates, drawing on data from American and British English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Italian, and Welsh; she also provides briefer longitudinal accounts of template use in Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese. The children are found to begin with simple word forms that match their selected adult targets; this is followed by the production of more challenging words, adapted to fit the child's existing patterns. Early accuracy is replaced by later recourse to an 'inner model'--a template--of a favoured word shape. The book also examines the timing, fading, quantification, and function of child phonological templates. In addition, two chapters focus on the use of templates in adult language, in the core grammar and in the more creative morphology of colloquial 'short forms' and hypocoristics in French and Estonian and of English rhyming compounds. The idea of templates is traced back to its origins in Prosodic Morphology, but its uses are most in evidence in the informal settings of adult language 'at play'. Throughout the volume, the discussion returns to the issues of emergent systematicity, the roles of articulatory and memory challenges for children, and the similarities and differences in the function of templates for adults as compared with children.

In recent years, prosodic competence has become increasingly important in second language acquisition studies, as it is a crucial element in the identification of non-native pronunciation and message understanding. This volume is the first attempt to provide a survey of interlanguage prosody research in L2 Italian. It begins with an overview of the possible approaches to the study of rhythmic-prosodic skills acquisition in an L2. The second part of the book emphasizes the relationship between the mother tongue and a second language, and investigates the presence of transfer in prosody interlanguage development. The third part illustrates prosody’s role in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning in native-non-native interaction, and its influence on message persuasiveness. And in the fourth part, technology meets prosody in the areas of second language teaching and speech synthesis.

This book takes a journey into the fascinating world of numerical systems in South Asian languages, offering a unique exploration of the intricate patterns, cultural nuances, and historical significance embedded within the numerical frameworks of the given languages. It blends the discovery of new facts with the reinterpretation of existing ones, while developing a methodology for investigating number systems that can be applied to languages around the world. It is a groundbreaking study that unveils the complex linguistic patterns and socio-cultural significance of numerical systems in South Asian languages, offering valuable insights for researchers, linguists, anthropologists, and language enthusiasts alike. By bridging the gap between linguistics, anthropology, cultural studies, and mathematics, this book encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration by examining numeral systems from multiple angles.

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