This volume explores the rich history of philosophy of language in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to the twentieth century. A team of leading experts focus in particular on key metaphysical debates about linguistic content, including questions of ontological status and metaphysical grounding.

Linguistic Variation in Research Articles investigates the linguistic characteristics of academic research articles, going beyond a traditional analysis of the generically-defined research article to take into account varied realizations of research articles within and across disciplines. It combines corpus-based analyses of 70+ linguistic features with analyses of the situational, or non-linguistic, characteristics of the Academic Journal Registers Corpus: 270 research articles from 6 diverse disciplines (philosophy, history, political science, applied linguistics, biology, physics) and representing three sub-registers (theoretical, quantitative, and qualitative research). Comprehensive analyses include a lexical/grammatical survey, an exploration of structural complexity, and a Multi-Dimensional analysis, all interpreted relative to the situational analysis of the corpus. The finding that linguistic variation in research articles does not occur along a single parameter like discipline is discussed relative to our understanding of disciplinary practices, the multidimensional nature of variation in research articles, and resulting methodological considerations for corpus studies of disciplinary writing.

Offers an introduction to linguistic typology that covers various linguistic domains from phonology and morphology over parts-of-speech, the NP and the VP, to simple and complex clauses, pragmatics and language change. This title also includes a discussion on methodological issues in typology.

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language-speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life. To move toward Black linguistic liberation, Baker-Bell introduces a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This volume captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in classrooms while simultaneously illustrating how theory, research, and practice can operate in tandem in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice. A crucial resource for educators, researchers, professors, and graduate students in language and literacy education, writing studies, sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and critical pedagogy, this book features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate.

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

This book for the first time reconstructs in a single theoretical framework the more important approaches to linguistic variation found in areas as different as historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics, contrastive linguistics, language typology, so-called evaluation grammar, and current Chomskyan generative grammar (generally with an emphasis on syntax). The book concentrates on language-internal variation but also analyses typological research and considers the question of how linguistic descriptions may account for variation both within and between languages. The book's first and primary aim is adequate conceptualization in the area of linguistic variation. Its second aim is a practical one: to contribute, from a theoretical point of view, to the vast descriptive effort that is demanded in linguistics in documenting endangered languages. Its third aim is, simply, orientation. Using a non-Labovian notion of linguistic variable, the author distinguishes a holistic and a component approach to linguistic variation. A precise version of the former is developed by formulating a theory of language varieties based on the concept of variety structure of a language; it is then shown how the proposals made by major representatives of the component approach can be integrated into this framework. The theory is extended to interlanguage variation and applied, in particular, to typology. It is further extended to establish the properties of linguistic descriptions that account for variation in a unified way.