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The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, this book shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. This book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition. The book applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. The author's holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children's lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, the author expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages' variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, the author argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one's native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

The Discourse of Police Interviews examines how police interviews are discursively constructed and institutionally used to investigate and prosecute crimes. This volume investigates multiple discursive approaches to the analysis of police-lay person exchanges. It aims to promote dialogue not only between scholars who specialize in language and the law, but also among scholars in cognate disciplines, such as linguistic anthropology, criminology, law, and sociology, to name a few. The volume explores themes including the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview methods, such as PEACE and Reid, the role of the discursive practices of institutional representatives (e.g., police officers, interpreters) in bringing about linguistic transformations, and the impact that these transformations can have on the construction and evidential quality and value of linguistic evidence. The analysis includes an examination of both oral and written data, as well as the role of metalanguage and multimodality in understanding the police interview.

Five Germanic languages--Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese--along with two Finno-Ugric languages--Finnish and Sami--have lived in neighboring territory in the North for millennia. Though the first five languages belong to a different linguistic family than the second two, their long life together has influenced them all in sometimes surprising ways. This book investigates archaeological, cultural, and genetic evidence from deep history, beginning in the immediate post-Ice Age, to reveal where the languages and their speakers came from. The book's focus is on the crucial intersections, sometimes actually collisions, among the seven languages and their speakers. The conclusion reports on the languages of Scandinavia today and some linguistic trends that will likely affect their future.

Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with a strongly growing body of crosslinguistic studies, have revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these categories. This book argues that it’s time to revisit our conventional assumptions and reconsider our foundational questions: What exactly is a linguistic category? What kinds of categories to labels such as “subjunctive,” “imperative,” “future,” and “modality” truly refer to? In short, how categorical are categories? Current literature assumes a straightforward link between grammatical category and semantic function, and descriptions of well-studied languages have cultivated a sense of predictability in patterns over time. However, this predictability and stability vanish in the study of lesser-known patterns and languages. The ten provocative essays gathered here present fascinating cutting-edge research demonstrating that the traditional grammatical distinctions are ultimately fluid, and perhaps even illusory. Developing groundbreaking and highly original theories, the contributors in this volume seek to unravel more general, fundamental principles of TAM that can help us better understand the nature of linguistic representations.

Within the last 40 years the field of phonology has undergone several important theoretical shifts with regard to phonological representation that have now become part of standard practice in the field. The two shifts that will be taken up in this volume have some properties in common—i) both have had the effect of taking phonological analysis “off the page”, that made it necessary to think of phonology in multi-dimensional space, and ii) John Goldsmith has been a major force in bringing about these changes. The first section of this volume has to do with a radical elaboration of the abstract domains (or units of analysis) that come under the purview of phonology, along with a more multi-dimensional approach to considering their role in the system. Autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976) and feature geometry (Clements, 1981; Sagey, 1986) demonstrated this multidimensionality of phonological representation. The second radical shift that occurred in the mid-1990s has to do with machine learning and the computational techniques that phonologists had begun using to analyze large amounts of data. The empiricist view to linguistics (Goldsmith 2015) makes us rethink what doing linguistics really means. With the ability to employ computational tools that allow for the analysis of larger and larger data sets, the field has shifted from being satisfied to look for key examples that demonstrate a particular generalization to striving for statistical generalizations across large corpora of relevant data.

This book is about how the concepts of truth, knowledge, and, broadly speaking, belief are reflected and codified in the grammar of natural languages. Does language directly access the world (what is true), or does it do so via semantic representations of the world categories? Natural languages vary in the vocabulary, form, and grammatical categories they realize; yet in addressing the question of language and thought, most Continental philosophy overlooks this striking variation and almost exclusively focuses on English. This book explores the interaction between truth, knowledge, and veridicality as they interact in the grammatical phenomenon of mood choice (subjunctive, indicative), a phenomenon not systematically observed in English. Our main languages of study are Standard Modern Greek and the Romance language family, with specific emphasis on Italian and French. Mood choice is a multidimensional phenomenon involving interactions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Mood selection relies heavily on the semantics of the main clause verb, which is called a propositional attitude verb. The book addresses the meaning of various classes of propositional attitude verbs—epistemic, doxastic, memory, volitional, deontic, and modal attitudes—and find that the crucial property for mood choice is the veridicality or nonveridicality of the attitude verb. Modal verbs, the book concludes, are very similar to propositional attitudes. The book offers philosophical discussion on the nature of belief, knowledge, emotive and modal mental states, and conclude that speakers form veridicality judgments to assess the truth or falsity of sentences based on knowledge, evidence, and expectations and desires.