Books in the Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics series

It is very common in Indo-European languages to derive new, compound verb forms from verb bases by adding prefixes to them. These prefixes, or preverbs, are derived from invariant forms and generally come from one of three categories: adverbs, adpositions, and inseparable particles. This title focuses on these attributes of Gothic language.

Can an author's preference for expressing modality be quantified and then used as a marker of attribution? This book explores the possibility of using the subjunctive mood as an indicator of style and a marker of authorship in Early Modern English texts.

Provides the reader with insight into phonological methods from the Prague Structuralism and Chomskyan Generativism of the last seventy-five years to an array of today's non-linear approaches by applying them to given phonological changes that act as leitmotifs in the research of German sounds through time.

Intonation is increasingly becoming a central topic in understanding the phonology of spoken language. Geoffrey Barker gives a detailed account of the intonational structure of Tyrolean German, a South Bavarian dialect of German spoken in western Austria and northern Italy, using an «autosegmental-metrical» theory of intonational phonology. Based on new fieldwork data, he provides a phonetic and phonological analysis of pitch contours in Tyrolean German with the assistance of speech analysis software. He demonstrates that Tyrolean German intonation is fundamentally different from the intonation of non-southern varieties of Standard German due to its distinctive default pitch accent. This book will appeal to both intonologists and dialectologists with its illuminating depiction of the prosodic structure of this southern dialect of German. The accompanying CD enhances the reader¿s experience with speech samples corresponding to the appropriate figures in the book.

Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, this book is of broad appeal to linguists, language educators, language policy makers, and to the German Studies community at large.

Using contemporary examples from the mass media and the author's rich experiential data, the book isolates the peculiar structural, grammatical, and stylistic characteristics of Nigerian English and shows its similarities as well as its often humorous differences with British and American English.

Applicative Arguments: A Syntactic and Semantic Investigation of German and English presents formal semantic and syntactic analyses of German and English applicative arguments. Both German and English have several types of applicative arguments, including so-called benefactive and malefactive constructions.

This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as «cup» in «a cup of tea», classifiers such as «head» in «ten head of cattle», and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components ¿ which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender ¿ and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.

This book provides an insider view of Haida language, history, and culture, and offers a perspective on Haida culture that comes not only from external research but also from intimate knowledge and experiences the author has had as a Haida Nation citizen. The book's focus on language - past, present, and future - allows insight into the Haida language documentation and revitalization process.

Offers critical methods in the study of the Divine Comedy and Dante's minor works. This book addresses the discursive aspect of Dante's works and focuses mainly on the readers, who, along with the author and the text, contributes to the making of discursive paths and discourse-generating functions through the act of reading.

This interdisciplinary collection of articles, written by scholars involved in translating the Bible into various languages around the world, demonstrates that such translation projects are promoting the vitality of local languages, both those that are endangered and those that are still fairly healthy but non-empowered.

This volume discusses the major founding scholars of "semiotics of culture", including Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Jurij Lotman, and Mikhail Bakhtin who established dialogue as the basis of all human communication.

In this book, the nominal inflectional morphology of Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek are analyzed using inheritance trees. Morphological data is drawn from parallel texts in each language; the trees may be used as a translation aid to readers of the source texts as an accompaniment to or substitute for traditional paradigms.

Truth Be Told explains how truth and falsity result from relations that sentences have to the contexts in which they occur and the circumstances at which they are evaluated. It offers a precise conception of truth and a clear diagnosis of the Liar and Grelling paradoxes.