Bücher der Reihe SpringerBriefs in Linguistics

This volume offers an introduction to cognitive linguistics, written by authors who were engaged in the field from its beginnings. From the point of view of the history of Linguistics, it presents the evolution of the theory over time in a range of directions, including its view of the nature of Language itself, as well as how it is acquired.

This book examines the language abilities of persons with Down Syndrome who are able to read. The text defends the 'delayed but not deviant view' of linguistic abilities by examining a range of syntactic phenomena that develop at different points for typically developing children, and for which a similar overall pattern is found for persons with Down Syndrome. The volume also defends the 'delayed but not deviant view' against challenges arising from studies of the comprehension of definite pronouns. The study fits within a picture of linguistic abilities that is modular:  skills with language do not emerge from other cognitive functions.  It is an important source of information for readers in the departments of linguistics, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science.

This book, one of the few English language publications on indigenous languages spoken in East Africa, highlights theoretical contributions on understudied East Cushitic languages, based on extensive data.

This book offers the latest insights on language documentation, a reborn, refashioned, and reenergized subfield of linguistics motivated by the urgent task of creating a record of the world's fast disappearing languages.

This book presents the effects of perceptual training on the perception of English lexical stress in rising intonation by Mandarin-speaking EFL learners in Taiwan, and shows that these effects can be positive as well as negative.

This book addresses one of the most crucial and common questions confronting planners of languages other than English, that is, how the impacts of global languages on local languages should be dealt with: internationalization or local language promotion?

This book focuses on Portuguese as an additional language and its young learners in threecase studies within the Portuguese-speaking world: Portuguese as a second language inCape Verde, Portuguese as a heritage language in Switzerland and Portuguese as a foreignlanguage in Macao SAR.

Secondly, EFL university students metalinguistically claim multiple ideologies of linguistic authenticities in terms of their usage of 'translingual Englishes' on social media as opposed to other colliding language ideologies such as linguistic purity and linguistic dystopia.

This book provides a critical introduction to the current views and controversies regarding language evolution. This book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in language evolution, especially those in the fields of linguistics, psychology, biology, anthropology, and neuroscience.

It demonstrates that it is a drawback not to distinguish word formation, and explains that the function of word formation rules is different from the function of the lexicon and rules of grammar. After making the argument for a separate word formation component, the book sets out to determine which types of rule qualify as part of this component.

This book presents multilingualism as a social phenomenon, which arises when speakers of a different language move to a new society and learn to speak the dominant language of the society.

The present volume introduces a research design intended to capture a wide range of linguistic data, elicited by means of behavioral tasks, neuroimageing data and free speech from both second language learners and first language attriters of two languages (Dutch and German) representing a wide range of language combinations and ages of onset.