Synopses & Reviews
Modeling of linguistic knowledge generally involves the compartmentalization of grammar into phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic components. These components are not isolated but interacting components. It is the resulting interfaces between grammatical components that forms the main topic of this volume, discussed from the perspective of bilingual L1 acquisition in early childhood and L2 in adulthood, as well as L1/L2 in late childhood. The book contains ten contributions by members of the Research Center on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg and by other international scholars, all of them experts on multilingualism. Several pairs of languages are dealt with, among them Spanish and German, Mandarin and English, French and German, Italian and German, Turkish and English, Turkish and German, Dutch and Turkish, as well as Spoken German and German Sign language. Throughout the volume the central issue is that of representation at the interface of grammatical components.
Synopsis
Nonstandard varieties of languages have recently become an object of new interest in scholarly research. This is very much due to the advances in the methods used in data collection and analysis, as well as the emergence of new language-theoretical frameworks. The articles in this volume stem from the 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI, August 2002, Joensuu). The theme for this conference was "Dialects across borders." The selection of contributions included in this volume demonstrates how various kinds of borders exert major influence on linguistic behaviour all over the world. The articles have been grouped according to whether they deal primarily with the linguistic outcomes of political and historical borders between states (Part I); various kinds of social and regional boundaries, including borders in a metaphorical sense, i.e. social barriers and mental or cognitive boundaries (Part II); and finally, boundaries between languages (Part III).