Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Language and Linguistics
  4. European language and linguistics
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

102 results in European language and linguistics

Page 1 of 6

Voice and Argument Structure in Basque
  • Ane Berro, Beatriz Fernández
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Basque is a language of central importance to linguists because it is a 'language isolate,' a rare type of language that is typologically 'alone' and cannot be classified as a part of any language family. Language isolates remain somewhat a mystery, and this book aims to provide an important piece of the puzzle, by both exploring the structure of Basque and shedding new light on its unique place within the languages of the world. It meticulously examines various properties of Basque, including the alignment of intransitive verbs, the introduction of dative arguments, the nature of psych predicates, the causative/inchoative alternation, impersonals, and morphological causatives. By doing so, it presents a comprehensive overview of Basque's intricacies within the realm of argument structure alternations and voice. In its final chapter, it provides an introduction to potential formal analyses of the topics discussed, paving the way for future research in the field. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Phonological Drift and Language Contact
  • The Northwest European Phonological Area
  • Pavel Iosad
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Several language families of northern Europe – Germanic, Celtic, and Uralic – share phonetic and phonological patterns that are typologically unusual. This book demonstrates how we can better understand these convergences: they exemplify the phenomenon of drift. Using the latest advances in theoretical linguistics, the study of sound change, and language variation, it offers insights into the development of these features and what they tell us about past cultural and linguistic contacts. Although the languages are not closely related, an understanding of drift grounded in the theory of the life cycle of phonological patterns reveals the workings of convergent developments. Covering a wide range of vernacular varieties, this book shows how phonological microvariation is illuminated by an approach grounded in the theory of the life cycle and historical sociolinguistics. It is essential reading for historical and theoretical linguists, and anyone with an interest in the cultural and linguistic contacts across northern Europe.

German Syntax
  • A Structure Removal Approach
  • Gereon Müller
  • Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • Exploring the major syntactic phenomena of German, this book provides a state-of-the-art account of German syntax, as well as an outline of the key aspects of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. It is one of the first comprehensive studies of the entire syntactic component of a natural language within the Minimalist Program, covering core issues including clause structure, binding, case, agreement, control, and movement. It introduces a phase-based theory of syntax that establishes Remove, an operation that removes syntactic structure, as a mirror image of Merge, which builds syntactic structure. This unified approach resolves many cases of conflicting structure assignments in syntax, as they occur with passivization, restructuring, long-distance passivization, complex prefields, bridge verbs, applicatives, null objects, pseudo-noun incorporation, nominal concord, and ellipsis. It will pave the way for similar research into other languages and is essential reading for anyone interested in the syntax of German, syntactic theory, or the Minimalist Program.

German Phonology
  • An Optimality-Theoretic Approach
  • Caroline Féry
  • Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Drawing on an optimality-theoretic framework, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the phonology of German, with its idiosyncratic array of sound patterns. It starts with the consonants and vowels and the distinctive features they consist of, moving on to account for allophonic changes in detail, as well as syllables and their weight units. Phonological processes are then explored in depth, with chapter-length explorations of feet, prosodic words, prosodic phrases, and intonation phrases, showing that the prosodic hierarchy provides the domains of most phonological processes. It also includes discussions of the interfaces of morphology and syntax with phonology, as well as prosodic phrasing and intonation. The constraint-based approach allows a new holistic perspective, simultaneously encompassing all aspects of German phonology. Wide-ranging yet accessible, it is essential reading for advanced students of both linguistics and German, as well as individual scholars seeking a one-stop resource on the topic.

The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics
  • Edited by Danko Šipka, Wayles Browne
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • The linguistic study of the Slavic language family, with its rich syntactic and phonological structures, complex writing systems, and diverse socio-historical context, is a rapidly growing research area. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook provides a systematic review of cutting-edge research in Slavic linguistics. It covers phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, lexicology, and sociolinguistics, and presents multiple theoretical perspectives, including synchronic and diachronic. Each chapter addresses a particular linguistic feature pertinent to Slavic languages, and covers the development of the feature from Proto-Slavic to present-day Slavic languages, the main findings in historical and ongoing research devoted to the feature, and a summary of the current state of the art in the field and what the directions of future research will be. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in theoretical linguistics, linguistic typology, sociolinguistics and Slavic/East European Studies.

Languages in Contact and Contrast
  • A Festschrift for Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld on the Occasion of Her 70th Birthday
  • Edited by Magdalena Szczyrbak, Anna Tereszkiewicz
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    14 October 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2020
  • This book is a collection of papers written in honour of Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. The chapters that follow have been written by linguists affiliated with different universities in Poland and abroad, all of whom wish to pay tribute to Elżbieta's outstanding work and contribution to language contact scholarship. The papers focus in large measure on contact linguistics, but some of them address also other phenomena.

Second Language Identity
  • Awareness, Ideology, and Assessment in Higher Education
  • Paul A. Malovrh, Nina Moreno
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • Increasing globalization presents both challenges and opportunities to the higher education sector. This pioneering book shows how interaction between the two fields of foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition (SLA) can facilitate more effective language development at an advanced level. Establishing a new research agenda to describe, assess, and study high-level language use, it uses mixed-methods analyses within a sociocognitive framework to explore constructs such as second language (L2) identity and critical language awareness as essential components of multilingualism and global citizenship. It approaches L2 advancedness from multiple perspectives, examining the L2 learner and their understanding of advanced language use, highlighting individual differences among foreign-language professionals regarding high-level language use, positing the need for unified departmental missions, and analysing alternative constructs to assess L2 advancedness. Throughout, analyses of quantitative and qualitative data are used to demonstrate the multiple dimensions of advanced second language use in higher education.

Camino al español
  • A Comprehensive Course in Spanish
  • 2nd edition
  • Consuelo de Andrés Martínez, Nadezhda Bonelli, Christine Cook, Anthony Trippett
  • Published online:
    22 February 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023
  • Written by a team of experienced teachers of Spanish, this textbook is designed to lead the adult beginner to a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish, giving balanced attention to the four key language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). It puts language learning into its real-life context, by incorporating authentic materials such as newspaper articles, poems and songs. It contains a learner and a teacher guide and is intended to complement study both inside and outside the classroom, by providing pair and group activities, as well as materials for independent learning. It also includes helpful reference features, such as a guide to grammatical terms, verb tables, vocabulary lists and a pronunciation guide. This extensively updated second edition features extra exercises to support the acquisition of good pronunciation, and is accompanied by a web companion that hosts expansion exercises, activities, solutions and useful links for each unit, as well transcripts, and access to brand new recordings of all the audio examples found in the book.

The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics
  • Edited by Adam Ledgeway, Martin Maiden
  • Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • The Romance languages and dialects constitute a treasure trove of linguistic data of profound interest and significance. Data from the Romance languages have contributed extensively to our current empirical and theoretical understanding of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Written by a team of world-renowned scholars, this Handbook explores what we can learn about linguistics from the study of Romance languages, and how the body of comparative and historical data taken from them can be applied to linguistic study. It also offers insights into the diatopic and diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family of languages, of a kind unparalleled for any other Western languages. By asking what Romance languages can do for linguistics, this Handbook is essential reading for all linguists interested in the insights that a knowledge of the Romance evidence can provide for general issues in linguistic theory.

The Lingua Franca
  • Contact-Induced Language Change in the Mediterranean
  • Natalie Operstein
  • Published online:
    25 November 2021
    Print publication:
    02 December 2021
  • Whose name is hidden behind the anonymity of the key publication on Mediterranean Lingua Franca? What linguistic reality does the label 'Lingua Franca' conceal? These and related questions are explored in this new book on an enduringly important topic. The book presents a typologically informed analysis of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as documented in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque, which provides an important historical snapshot of contact-induced language change. Based on a close study of the Dictionnaire in its historical and linguistic context, the book proposes hypotheses concerning its models, authorship and publication history, and examines the place of the Dictionnaire's Lingua Franca in the structural typological space between Romance languages, on the one hand, and pidgins, on the other. It refines our understanding of the typology of contact outcomes while at the same time opening unexpected new avenues for both linguistic and historical research.

English and Spanish
  • World Languages in Interaction
  • Edited by Danae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek, Daniel Schreier
  • Published online:
    17 September 2021
    Print publication:
    30 September 2021
  • This volume compares the evolution and current status of two of the world's major languages, English and Spanish. Parallel chapters trace the emergence of Global English and Spanish and their current status, covering aspects such as language and dialect contact, language typology, norm development in pluricentric languages, and identity construction. Case studies look into the use of English and Spanish on the internet, investigate mixed and alternating lects, as well as ongoing change in Spanish-speaking minorities in the US. The volume thus contributes to current theoretical debates and provides fresh empirical data. While offering an in-depth treatment of the evolution of English and Spanish to the reader, this book introduces the driving factors and the effects of the emergence of world languages in general and is relevant for researchers and students of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and typology alike.

Turkic
  • Lars Johanson
  • Published online:
    13 August 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021
  • Turkic is one of the world's major language families, comprising a high number of distinct languages and varieties that display remarkable similarities and notable differences. Written by a leading expert in the field, this landmark work provides an unrivalled overview of multiple features of Turkic, covering structural, functional, historical, sociolinguistic and literary aspects. It presents the history and cultures of the speakers, structures, and use of the whole set of languages within the family, including Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Uyghur, and gives a comprehensive overview of published works on Turkic languages, large and small. It also provides an innovative theoretical framework, employing a unified terminology and transcription, to give new insights into the Turkic linguistic type. Requiring no previous knowledge of the Turkic languages, it will be welcomed by both general readers, as well as academic researchers and students of linguistic typology, comparative linguistics, and Turkic studies.

En Contexto
  • Manual de redacción para estudiantes universitarios
  • Luis Ochoa, Enrique González Romero
  • Published online:
    07 August 2021
    Print publication:
    19 August 2021
  • Written entirely in Spanish by instructors with years of experience, this textbook is a comprehensive guide to essay writing in Spanish. It provides advanced students of Spanish with the necessary tools to write fluently and effectively, both developing their reading, writing and critical thinking skills, and teaching them to practically analyse the rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar. It is organised into six chapters, progressing in level and complexity, which take students step-by-step through the writing process. Each chapter contains a number of features such as lists of new vocabulary, assessment checklists, questionnaires, and activities based on writing samples. It also includes an accompanying web resource, which features additional exercises for students, and a lesson plan and downloadable PowerPoint presentations for teachers. By drawing on the principles of grammar, this essential resource will help students become proficient writers, across a range of textual genres.

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization
  • Edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett, John Bellamy
  • Published online:
    01 July 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021
  • Language standardization is the process by which conventional forms of a language are established and maintained. Bringing together internationally renowned experts, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of standardization, norms and standard languages. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: models and theories of standardization, questions of authority and legitimacy, literacy and education, borders and boundaries, and standardization in Late Modernity. Each chapter addresses a specific issue in detail, illustrating it with linguistic case studies and taking into account the particular political, social and cultural context. Showcasing cutting-edge research, it offers fresh perspectives that go beyond traditional accounts of the standardization of national European languages, and affords new insights into minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages. Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages.

The Dialects of Spanish
  • A Lexical Introduction
  • Travis D. Sorenson
  • Published online:
    09 April 2021
    Print publication:
    08 April 2021
  • Spanish is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, and there is extensive lexical variation between its numerous dialects. This book, the first of its kind, focuses uniquely on the origin, diversity, and geographic distribution of portions of the lexicon. The hundreds of words analysed – related to food, clothing, vehicles, and certain miscellaneous items – provide a representative study not only of the many etymological routes by which they have entered the Spanish language over time, but of the considerable diatopic variety which they display across the different Spanish-speaking nations and regions. Representative maps are provided to illustrate several instances of these astounding dialectal differences. This variation is also discussed in terms of its evident link to the historical developments of Spanish. Providing a compelling overview of lexical variety in the Spanish-speaking world, this book will interest anyone who wants to delve into the richness of this fascinating language.

Languages in the Lutheran Reformation
  • Textual Networks and the Spread of Ideas
  • Edited by Tuomo Fonsén, Tanja Toropainen, Kirsi-Maria Nummila, Miika Norro, Mikko Kauko
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019
  • This collection of essays charts the influence of the Lutheran Reformation on various (northern) European languages and texts written in them. The central themes of Languages in the Lutheran Reformation: Textual Networks and the Spread of Ideas are: how the ideas related to Lutheranism were adapted to the new areas, new languages, and new contexts during the Reformation period in the 16th and 17th centuries; and how the Reformation affected the standardization of the languages. Networks of texts, knowledge, and authors belong to the topics of the present volume. The contributions look into language use, language culture, and translation activities during the Reformation, but also in the prelude to the Reformation as well as after it, in the early modern period. The contributors are experts in the study of their respective languages, including Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, High German, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish. The primary texts explored in the essays are Bible translations, but genres other than biblical are also discussed.

Advances in Historical Orthography, c. 1500–1800
  • Edited by Marco Condorelli
  • Published online:
    02 November 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020
  • The early modern period is a key historical era for the standardisation of languages in Europe, in which orthographies played an important role. This book traces the development of European spelling systems in the early modern era, and is unique in bringing together several strands of historical research, across a diverse range of Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, including Polish, German, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Czech, Croatian and English. Whilst each chapter includes a case study on a particular language or script, the volume in general follows a broad thread of discussion based on models and methods relevant to many languages, showing how empirical approaches can be applied across languages to enrich the field of historical orthography as a whole. The first volume to diachronically explore the standardization of spelling systems from a cross-linguistic perspective, this is an invaluable resource for specialists and those interested in historical European studies more broadly.

The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics
  • Edited by Michael T. Putnam, B. Richard Page
  • Published online:
    31 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020
  • The Germanic language family ranges from national languages with standardized varieties, including German, Dutch and Danish, to minority languages with relatively few speakers, such as Frisian, Yiddish and Pennsylvania German. Written by internationally renowned experts of Germanic linguistics, this Handbook provides a detailed overview and analysis of the structure of modern Germanic languages and dialects. Organized thematically, it addresses key topics in the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of standard and nonstandard varieties of Germanic languages from a comparative perspective. It also includes chapters on second language acquisition, heritage and minority languages, pidgins, and urban vernaculars. The first comprehensive survey of this vast topic, the Handbook is a vital resource for students and researchers investigating the Germanic family of languages and dialects.

English in the German-Speaking World
  • Edited by Raymond Hickey
  • Published online:
    11 November 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019
  • English has a considerable history in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and present-day English has a significant influence on the vocabulary of modern German. Examining the ongoing influence of English on German in these countries, Raymond Hickey leads a team of authors to explore a wide range of topics, such as the history of English teaching in Germany, the type of English spoken in German-speaking countries today, and the role of English in German society. Borrowings from English in present-day German, as well as the use of English in public places, is also discussed, as is the use of English by non-Germans living in Germany, and the situation of Germany as a country with English as a foreign language. Comparisons with other European countries are also analysed, and a consideration of the German-English interface in places as far apart as the United States and Namibia, is also presented.

The History of Spanish
  • A Student's Introduction
  • Diana L. Ranson, Margaret Lubbers Quesada
  • Published online:
    12 December 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018
  • This concise textbook provides students with an engaging and thorough overview of the history of Spanish and its development from Latin. Presupposing no prior knowledge of Latin or linguistics, students are provided with the background necessary to understand the history of Spanish. Short, easy-to-digest chapters feature numerous practice exercises and activities. Chapter 'Lead-in' questions draw comparisons between English and Spanish, enabling students to use their intuition about their native language to gain a deeper understanding of Spanish. Each chapter features further reading suggestions, an outline, and a summary. Highlighted key terms are collated in a glossary. Boxes on linguistic debates teach students to evaluate arguments and think critically about linguistics. Supporting online resources include Word files of all the practices and activities in the book and an instructor's manual featuring a sample syllabus, answer key to the practices and activities, sample exams and teaching suggestions. This book is ideal for a range of courses on the history of Spanish and Spanish linguistics.

Page 1 of 6