Along with its companion volume, this book offers a fascinating glimpse into the current avenues of research into colour, a phenomenon which daily affects all our lives in often surprising ways. The majority of the papers originated in a 2004 conference entitled ‘Progress in Colour Studies’ which was held in the University of Glasgow, U.K. The contributions to this first volume, which is principally linguistic and anthropological in content, and to its companion on the psychological aspects of colour, present either summaries of state-of-the-art colour research in various disciplines, or in-depth accounts of certain aspects of such work. This volume includes approaches such as Natural Semantic Metalanguage, social network analysis, quantitative analysis, type modification, vantage theory, the centrality of social norms of inference, place-names and heraldry. In the process, new insights are offered into the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Sorbian, Burarra, Cape Breton Gaelic, Tzotzil, and others.

This is the first full scale attempt to record the diachronic development of this important English language variety and includes extensive essays by some of the foremost international scholars of the Scots language. The book attempts to provide a detailed and technical description of the syntax, phonology, morphology and vocabulary of the language in two main periods: the beginnings to 1700 and from 1700 to the present day. The language's geographical variation both in the past and at the present time are fully documented and the sociolinguistic forces which lie behind linguistic innovation and its transmission provide a principal theme running through the book.WINNER of the Saltire society/National Library of Scotland Scottish Research Book of the Year Award