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This book brings together a collection of studies on Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Research on Libras began in earnest 20 years ago, around the time that Libras was recognised as a national language of Brazil in 2002. Over the years, more and more deaf researchers have become sign language linguists, and the community of Libras scholars have documented this language and built robust resources for linguistic research. This book provides a selection of studies by these scholars, representing work in a variety of areas from phonology to creative literature.

Aphasia is the most common acquired language disorder in adults, resulting from brain damage, usually stroke. This book firstly explains how aphasia research and clinical practice remain heavily influenced by rule-based, generative theory, and summarizes key shortcomings with this approach. Crucially, it demonstrates how an alternative — the constructivist, usage-based approach — can provide a more plausible theoretical perspective for characterizing language in aphasia. After detailing rigorous transcription and segmentation methods, it presents constructivist, usage-based analyses of spontaneous speech from people with various aphasia ‘types’, challenging a clear-cut distinction between lexis and grammar, emphasizing the need to consider whole-form storage and frequency effects beyond single words, and indicating that individuals fall along a continuum of spoken language capability rather than differing categorically by aphasia ‘type’. It provides original insight into aphasia — with wide-reaching implications for clinical practice —, while equally highlighting how the study of aphasia is important for the development of Cognitive Linguistics.

This book comprises the proceedings of the International Perm Forum “Science and Global Challenges of the 21st Century” held on October 18th – 23rd, 2021, at Perm State University, Perm, Russia. Global challenges, which determine the main trends in the development of social and economic life in the XXI century, require the integration of specialists in various fields of knowledge. That is why the main principle of this edition is interdisciplinarity, the formation of end-to-end innovation chains, including fundamental and applied research, and the wide application of smart innovations, networks, and information technologies. The authors seek to find synergy between technologies and such fields as computer science, geosciences, biology, linguistics, social studies, historical studies, and economics. The book is of interest to researchers seeking nontrivial solutions at the interface of sciences, digital humanities, computational linguistics, cognitive studies, machine learning, and others.

The authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion, attitude, illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysis of speech. Four distinct sections (spoken corpora compilation; spoken corpora annotation; prosody; and syntax and information structure) give the book the structure in which the authors present innovative methodologies that focus on the compilation of third generation spoken corpora; multilevel spoken corpora annotation and its functions; and additionally a debate is initiated about the reference unit in the study of spoken language via information structure. The book is accompanied by a web site with a rich array of audio/video files. The web site can be found at the following address: DOI: 10.1075/scl.61.media

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2017, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2017. The 26 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Language Resources, Tools and Evaluation, Less-Resourced-Languages, Speech Processing, Morphology, Computational Semantics, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.