The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

Phonology has generally been neglected as a nexus of philosophical interest despite certain debates within the field both inviting and needing philosophical reflection. Yet, the few who have attempted such inquiry have noted something special about the field and its target. On the one hand, it shares formal and structural aspects with syntax. On the other, it seems to require more literal interpretation in terms of components such as hierarchy and sequential ordering. In this chapter, the nature of the phoneme, the theoretical centrepiece of traditional phonology, comes under scrutiny. The notion, as well as the field itself, is extended to other modalities, such as sign, in accordance with the contemporary trajectory of the field. This extension, and the connections with language and gesture in general, open up the possibility of a philosophical action theory with phonology as its basis. Motor and action theory have been proffered recently in connection with syntax, with little success. However, it’s argued that phonology serves as a better point of comparison. The chapter discusses a range of issues from autosegmental phonology, feature grammar, and sign language, to gestural grammar, motor cognition, and recent 4E approaches to cognition.

Chapter 8 moves to the third strand of the Indian linguistic tradition (alongside ‘grammar’ and semantics): phonetic and phonological analysis. This strand of the Indian tradition has particular relevance to the modern Western concept of the ‘phoneme’, which has played a central yet controversial role in phonological analysis over the last century. Several criticisms of the phoneme concept have attributed its popularity in modern linguistics to the centrality of alphabetic writing in Western society, and some have pointed to India as a contrasting situation, where writing was never alphabetic. I show that in contrast to what is often assumed, the ancient Indian tradition of phonetic and phonological analysis depended on a concept essentially equivalent to the modern concept of a phoneme, despite not being influenced by an alphabetic (or indeed, originally by any) writing system.

The third chapter is the first to exclusively address core linguistic issues by comparison of the ancient Indian and modern Western traditions. It addresses rule interaction, an issue which has been a core topic of research in Pāṇinian linguistics, and which has also been a central issue in the development of modern phonological theory, in many respects driving theoretical developments over the last fifty years. A central focus is on the Elsewhere Principle, also known as 'Pāṇini's principle', and on the outworking of this fundamental principle in different phonological theories including Lexical Phonology, Declarative Phonology and Optimality Theory.

This introduction to the volume provides background on common themes that appear across its chapters. First, it contextualizes the notions of heritage languages and heritage speakers before providing reasons why research on heritage sound systems has lagged behind work on other linguistic areas. It then offers an overview of what we have discovered to date about heritage sound systems, while also pointing out gaps and topics that merit further exploration. Motivated by the discussion in the first portion of this piece, the latter half covers the breadth, goals, and novel aspects of the current volume before providing brief summaries of the empirical studies carried out in each of its seventeen chapters.

The identification of Assyrian personal names in Babylonian sources poses a challenge because there is a considerable degree of overlap between the name repertoires of Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE. As a first step, this chapter identifies three relevant categories of names attested in Babylonian sources: distinctively Assyrian names, distinctively Babylonian names, and names common to both Assyria and Babylonia. The next step is to isolate names belonging to the first category: those that are distinctively Assyrian. To this end, the chapter identifies four diagnostic features which may occur separately or in combination: (i) Assyrian divine elements; (ii) Assyrian toponyms; (iii) Assyrian dialectal forms, and (iv) vocabulary particular to the Neo-Assyrian onomasticon. Orthography and phonology, including the treatment of sibilants, are further considerations. The chapter also addresses the historical background since this provides important context for investigating the presence of Assyrian name-bearers in Babylonia, both before and after the fall of Assyria in 612 BCE.

reviews what has been learned about how Chinese characters and words are identified. The chapter begins with a brief review of what has been learned about word identification from studies of alphabetic languages like English, using this review to identify “benchmark” findings that are then used to organize a discussion of what has been learned about Chinese character and word identification. The chapter also reviews those computer models that have been developed to simulate and explain Chinese character and word identification.

Chapter 6 presents an overview of the organization of the mental grammar. We will focus on general architectural properties of the mental grammar, that is, the units and rules that every grammar must have to capture the sound form, meaning, and syntactic structure of words and sentences. I will suggest that the grammar functions like a checking device in that it tells the language user whether linguistic expressions are well-formed (i.e., grammatical, in accordance with the rules of grammar). There is some technical detail (and many linguistic terms), but at the very least the reader will be left with the conviction that languages are quite complex. It is explained how languages allow people to express any thought they might have, drawing attention to the pivotal notion of recursivity. This chapter sets the stage for being amazed that children have pretty much full control of their language by the age of 4. By learning what a mental grammar might look like, the reader can form an idea of what it is that the child needs to acquire. Without such information, it would be difficult to discuss the role of nature and nurture in language.

This chapter introduces the concept of accent, particularly in relation to dialects and varieties of English.The chapter first defines the word 'accent', and the relationship among accent, dialect, and variety. The chapter then focuses on how we understand and describe accents, and the social meaning that accents convey in different contexts. The chapter then discusses variation within different regional varieties of English, and the use of umbrella terms such as 'British English' or 'American English' to encompass a range of social, regional, and ethnic varieties. The chapter then describes the features of the book; the final section of the chapter has a series of exercises and tasks to guide you through a revision of the contents of the chapter.

Borrowings in informal American English exhibit various modifications. Phonological changes involve the modification of their pronunciation to conform to the phonological rules of American English. Orthographical changes feature the change in spelling of borrowed expressions, with various stages of respelling or other modifications. Morphological changes include addition or removal of lexical material via standard wordbuilding processes such as lengthening or shortening. Semantic changes involve figuration and accompanying semantic shifting. Grammatical changes involve conversion in the part of speech. Finally, stylistic changes involve modification in the original register of informal borrowings which may shift their stylistic status in American English; while most borrowings exhibit no such change and retain their informal status, there are several exceptions.

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in Republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in Republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?

This introduction is a synopsis of the major trends in linguistics discussed in Part III (seventeen chapters).

Part IIIA (late nineteenth century -- 1960s) describes the decline of comparative studies, the rise and culmination of structuralist and descriptive synchronic linguistics, and the different currents in Europe and North America (four chapters).

In Part IIIB (1960s-2000, ‘recent history,'a time of considerable growth in linguistic scholarship, thirteen chapters), the following topics are considered:

• - the rise, development and impact of formal linguistics (i.e., generative approaches to syntax, semantics and phonology, and alternatives) as well as formal and non-formal cognitive approaches;

• - the turn to language use and function: new modes/tools of linguistic inquiry (methods, corpora and lexicography, technology); functionalist reactions to formalism (e.g., pragmatics, American functionalism, systemic functional linguistics); language as a communicative spoken activity (conversation analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, critical approaches to language use);

• - new interdisciplinary subfields: sociolinguistics (variational sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, language policy and planning), anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics;

• - historical linguistics (language change, grammaticalization), contact linguistics, pidgins and creoles, approaches to universal-typological linguistics;

• - applied linguistics (language teaching/learning, interdisciplinarity).

The conclusion discusses the editors’ sense of the direction of theoretical developments in linguistics since the 1960s: the general movement towards contextualization.