Open-Access-Bücher zur Sprachwissenschaft

In der let­zten Zeit sind u.a. diese frei ver­füg­baren Titel erschienen:

Prosodic boundary phenomena

Fabi­an Schubö, Sabine Zer­bian, San­dra Hanne & Isabell Warten­burg­er
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/379
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7777469

In spo­ken lan­guage com­pre­hen­sion, the hear­er is faced with a more or less con­tin­u­ous stream of audi­to­ry infor­ma­tion. Prosod­ic cues, such as pitch move­ment, pre-bound­ary length­en­ing, and paus­es, incre­men­tal­ly help to orga­nize the incom­ing stream of infor­ma­tion into prosod­ic phras­es, which often coin­cide with syn­tac­tic units. Prosody is hence cen­tral to spo­ken lan­guage com­pre­hen­sion and some mod­els assume that the speak­er pro­duces prosody in a con­sis­tent and hier­ar­chi­cal fash­ion. While there is man­i­fold empir­i­cal evi­dence that prosod­ic bound­ary cues are reli­ably and robust­ly pro­duced and effec­tive­ly guide spo­ken sen­tence com­pre­hen­sion across dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tions and lan­guages, the under­ly­ing mech­a­nisms and the nature of the prosody-syn­tax inter­face still have not been iden­ti­fied suf­fi­cient­ly. This is also reflect­ed in the fact that most mod­els on sen­tence pro­cess­ing com­plete­ly lack prosod­ic infor­ma­tion.

This edit­ed book vol­ume is ground­ed in a work­shop that was held in 2021 at the annu­al con­fer­ence of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprach­wis­senschaft (DGfS). The five chap­ters cov­er select­ed top­ics on the pro­duc­tion and com­pre­hen­sion of prosod­ic cues in var­i­ous pop­u­la­tions and lan­guages, all focus­ing in par­tic­u­lar on pro­cess­ing of prosody at struc­tural­ly rel­e­vant prosod­ic bound­aries. Specif­i­cal­ly, the book com­pris­es cross-lin­guis­tic evi­dence as well as evi­dence from non-native lis­ten­ers, infants, adults, and elder­ly speak­ers, high­light­ing the impor­tant role of prosody in both lan­guage pro­duc­tion and com­pre­hen­sion.

Significance in language: a theory of semantics

Jim Feist
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003259381

This book offers a unique per­spec­tive on mean­ing in lan­guage, broad­en­ing the scope of exist­ing under­stand­ing of mean­ing by intro­duc­ing a com­pre­hen­sive and cohe­sive account of mean­ing that draws on a wide range of lin­guis­tic approach­es.

The vol­ume seeks to build up a com­plete pic­ture of what mean­ing is, dif­fer­ent types of mean­ing, and dif­fer­ent ways of struc­tur­ing the same mean­ing across myr­i­ad forms and vari­eties of lan­guage across such domains, such as every­day speech, adver­tis­ing, humour, and aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing. Sup­port­ed by data from psy­cholin­guis­tic and neu­rolin­guis­tic research, the book com­bines dif­fer­ent approach­es from schol­ar­ship in seman­tics, includ­ing for­mal­ist, struc­tural­ist, cog­ni­tive, func­tion­al­ist, and semi­otics to demon­strate the ways in which mean­ing is expressed in words but also in word order and into­na­tion. The book argues for a revised con­cep­tu­al­i­sa­tion of mean­ing toward pre­sent­ing a new per­spec­tive on seman­tics and its wider study in lan­guage and lin­guis­tic research.

This book will appeal to schol­ars inter­est­ed in mean­ing in lan­guage in such fields as lin­guis­tics, seman­tics, and semi­otics.

Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe

Tomasz Kamusel­la
https://doi.org/10.7829/9789633864180

With forty-two exten­sive­ly anno­tat­ed maps, this atlas offers nov­el insights into the his­to­ry and mechan­ics of how Cen­tral Europe’s lan­guages have been made, unmade, and deployed for polit­i­cal action. The inno­v­a­tive com­bi­na­tion of lin­guis­tics, his­to­ry, and car­tog­ra­phy makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowl­edge read­i­ly avail­able to both spe­cial­ist and gen­er­al read­ers. It com­bines infor­ma­tion on lan­guages, dialects, alpha­bets, reli­gions, mass vio­lence, or migra­tions over an extend­ed peri­od of time.

The sto­ry first focus­es on Cen­tral Europe’s dialect con­tin­ua, the emer­gence of states, and the spread of writ­ing tech­nol­o­gy from the tenth cen­tu­ry onward. Most maps con­cen­trate on the last two cen­turies. The main sto­ry­line opens with the emer­gence of the West­ern Euro­pean con­cept of the nation, in accord with which the eth­no­lin­guis­tic nation-states of Italy and Ger­many were found­ed. In the Cen­tral Euro­pean view, a “prop­er” nation is none oth­er than the speech com­mu­ni­ty of a sin­gle lan­guage. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intel­lec­tu­al leap of per­ceiv­ing lan­guages as prod­ucts of human his­to­ry and part of cul­ture. Like states, nations, uni­ver­si­ties, towns, asso­ci­a­tions, art, beau­ty, reli­gions, injus­tice, or atheism—languages are arte­facts invent­ed and shaped by indi­vid­u­als and their groups.