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How is it that any child, anywhere, can acquire any of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages, in a matter of only a few years? This mystery has long intrigued scholars as well as those who take care of young children. Each of these thousands of languages varies from each of the others in many ways—for […]
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The New Cambridge History of the English Language represents a second edition of the original Cambridge history published in the 1990s. Much has happened in English historical linguistics in the last three decades and so it was felt that a new history should reflect these shifts in research evident in current historical studies. Specifically, the […]
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2: How the Chinese Greet One Another? The title of this entry may sound like the title of a beginner’s Chinese language course featuring the expression ni hao 你好 as a simple greeting. However, we will show that that greeting one another in Chinese is far more complex than what meets the eye, and appropriately […]
Read More1: Overview In this blog series, we will provide an overview of the representative features of Chinese politeness in daily interaction. Instead of discussing conventional topics, such as the use of honorifics in business meetings, the famous concept of ‘face’ and other phenomena typically mentioned regarding Chinese politeness, we intend to draw attention to seemingly […]
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How did Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders interact verbally with Europeans during early colonial times? In turn, how did Cook and those who followed in his footsteps talk with Islanders on their explorations of the eastern Pacific? Answers to these questions emerge from my book Language Contact in the Colonial Pacific (2014) for an interdisciplinary […]
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My book, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Early American Linguistics, addresses an audience of interested scholars and potential readers with the following concentrations: My book may also be of interest to a broader audience wishing to learn about the intricacies of nineteenth-century comparative studies in linguistics, the social sciences, and other disciplines, foremost natural history. In […]
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Imagine waking up in the morning. You read your emails with the morning coffee and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to compile the answers. Before leaving the house, you ask Siri for the weather forecast, to decide whether you need to bring your jacket. Later in the day, you interact with a customer service chatbot about […]
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Nebulae are those star nurseries familiar through the fabulous Hubble images like the one above. Languages are also born – indeed every language is reborn, quite literally in the nursery. In my new book The Interaction Engine, just like the astronomers I turn the focus not onto language itself but onto the systems that gave […]
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