Showing titles in Linguistics

C'est en linguiste de terrain que Claude Hagège a abordé le champ des langues. Son intérêt pour leur réalité vécue, leur chair vive et le terreau d'origine de la parole humaine en font un adepte d'une approche empirico-inductive, aboutissant ainsi à des conclusions d'ordre général à partir d'une matière concrète.

Listen to Captain of the Polestar with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. The Captain of the Polestar is a collection of strange mystery tales that are independent of each other, sometimes involving ship voyages, shipwrecks, amnesia, lost love, grand thefts, comedy, and fairy tales.

Listen to Burning Daylight with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Burning Daylight, Jack London's fictional novel published in 1910, was one of the best-selling books of that year and it was his best-selling book in his lifetime. The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character, nicknamed Burning Daylight was the most successful entrepreneur of the Alaskan Gold Rush. The story of the main character was partially based upon the life of Oakland entrepreneur "Borax" Smith.

Listen to At the Earths Core with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Dr. Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) is an English scientist who has invented a massive drill that can dig deep into the Earth. Joined by his adventure-seeking American backer, David Innes (Doug McClure), Perry accidentally discovers an underground civilization of primitive humans who live in fear of telepathic flying monsters. David becomes intrigued by the beautiful native Dia (Caroline Munro), and must rescue her when she is chosen as a human sacrifice.

A collection of short stories from such favorites as Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling are joined by others written anonymously in this anthology which will have you scratching your head and listening just a bit longer to discover the key to the mysteries.

Splendiferous Speech explores the main sources of the American vernacular - the expanding western frontier, the bumptious world of politics, and the sensation-filled pages of popular 19th-century newspapers. It's a process that started with the earliest English colonists (first word adoption - the Algonquian raccoon) and is still going strong today. Author Rosemarie Ostler takes listeners along on the journey as Americans learn to declare linguistic independence and embrace their own brand of speech.

Insulting the president is an American tradition. From Washington to Trump, presidents have been called "lazy," "feeble," "pusillanimous," and more. Our leaders have been derided as "ignoramuses," "idiots," "morons," and "fatheads," and have been compared to all manner of animals - worms and whales and hyenas, sad jellyfish, strutting crows, lap dogs, reptiles, and monkeys. Political insults tell us what we value in our leaders by showing how we devalue them. In Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels, linguist Edwin Battistella collects over 500 insults aimed at American presidents.

In the ancient country of Orn an old man called the Bee-man spends his life in the company of bees. He lives humbly and contentedly until a Junior Sorcerer happens by with some disturbing news: The Bee-man, he says, has been transformed - he once was someone (or something) entirely different. But who? Or what? A giant or a prince? A dog or a dragon? The now restless Bee-man sets out on a quest to ascertain his original form, telling himself, "When I see it, I shall be drawn toward it."

One of the first psychic vampire novels of its time - where the vampire feeds off of more than just blood - The House of the Vampire is an early classic in its genre. This Victorian novel operates in the continuum of life and death. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. Energetically inventive and infused with a relish for the supernatural, especially the trappings of the dark, The House of the Vampire delivers a horror which we know does not - but none the less conceivably might - exist and threaten ourselves.

A man stands on Owl Creek Bridge with his hands tied, preparing to face death by hanging. Then the ground slips out from under him, the rope breaks, and he has a moment to reimagine his future. Praised for its experimental shifts in time and surprise ending, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is not one to miss. It has been hailed by Kurt Vonnegut as “the greatest American short story.”

Where do our everyday words come from? The bagel you eat for breakfast, the bumf you have to wade through at the office, and the bus that takes you home again: we use these words without thinking about their origins or how their meanings have changed over time. Simon Horobin takes the listener on a journey through a typical day, showing how the words we use to describe routine activities - getting up, going to work, eating meals - have surprisingly fascinating histories.

From paddy wagon to rush hour, New York City has given us a number of our popular words and phrases, along the way fashioning a recognizable dialect all its own. Often imitated and just as often ridiculed, New York English has its own identity, imbued with the rich cultural history of (as New Yorkers tell it) the greatest city in the world. In You Talkin' to Me?, E. J. White explores the hidden history of English in New York City - a history that encompasses social class, immigration, culture, economics, and, of course, real estate.

This is a bitter, satiric comedy which concerns a wealthy, lecherous old man who pretends to be dying in order to profit from his greedy acquaintances.

Words matter. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. They have nuance and power. "Effortless", "Sassy", "Ambitious", "Aggressive": What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise, and blame, bearing an outsized influence on women's lives - to say nothing of our moods.

We acquire our native language, seemingly without effort, in infancy and early childhood. Language is our constant companion throughout our lifetime, even as we age. Indeed, compared with other aspects of cognition, language seems to be fairly resilient through the process of aging. In Changing Minds, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts examine how aging affects language - and how language affects aging.

The hero of Charlotte Brontë's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.

Rita Van Arsdale, a member of the high society in New York, is invited to an elegant party where she falls in love with a gentleman called Mr. Durand, who returns her feelings and proposes to her. But their plans are derailed after Mrs. Fairbrother, who has arrived at the party wearing a spectacular diamond, is discovered murdered in an alcove. The prime suspect is none other than Mr. Durand, so Miss Van Arsdale gets down to work to reconstruct the true course of events and prove that her love is indeed innocent.

Where There’s a Will is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s hilarious comedy involving a health spa, an heir, a would-be princess, and an impostor. The story is told by Minnie, who has essentially run the spa for years and inherited the care of its famous spring from her father. When the old doctor dies and leaves the Hope Springs Spa to his near-do-well grandson with the stipulation that he live on premises for two months in order to inherit, the grandson is nowhere to be found. So Minnie tries to save the spa by enlisting the help of family and friends to trick the lawyer....

What do we talk about when we talk about Irish? When we talk about saving or supporting a language do we mean the musical combination of syllables, or something more profound? How do new words enter a language, and what is the relationship between that strange dialect called Hiberno-English and its parent language? "Craic Baby" picks up exactly where "Motherfoclóir" left off and explores the very new and very old parts of the Irish language from a personal perspective.

This book is the basis for Whit Stillman's feature film Love and Friendship starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny.