Book Review: Geoffrey B. Saxe, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas.

A review of G Geoffrey B. Saxe, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas. Saxe offers a comprehensive treatment of social and linguistic change in the number systems used for economic exchange in the Oksapmin community of Papua New Guinea. By taking the cognition-is-social approach, Saxe positions himself within emerging perspectives that view cognition as enacted, situated, and extended. The approach is somewhat risky in that sociality surely does not exhaust cognition. Brains, bodies, and materiality also contribute to cognition—causally at least, and possibly constitutively as well (as argued by Clark & Chalmers; Renfrew & Malafouris). This omission necessarily excludes the material dimension of numeracy.

Linguistic Variation and Change in Nawfija Speech Community

The focus of this study is on linguistic change and variation in the Nawfija speech community. It distinguished dialect from other similar words and contrasted the traditional Igbo dialect with the Nawfija dialect of the Igbo language on an equal footing. The types of dialectal variations found in the Igbo Nawfija dialect were investigated in this study, as well as the question of dialect supremacy. For the creation of standard Igbo, some suggestions have been made.

Recent developments of the pragmatic markers kind of and sort of in spoken British English

This study reports on recent changes in the use of the hedges kind of and sort of in spoken British English over the past twenty years. A quantitative analysis of these features within subsets of the original BNC 1994 (BNC Consortium 2007) and BNC 2014 (Love et al. 2017) suggests a systematic encroaching of kind of into contexts that are traditionally occupied by sort of. This is highlighted in apparent-time patterns in which younger speakers are leading in use as well as real-time patterns that show a significant increase in use between 1994 and 2014.The hedges sort of and kind of are often treated as semantically equivalent, yet show distributional differences across different varieties of English. This article reports on an ongoing shift in the use of kind of as well as a relatively stable use of sort of. Its main focus is a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of both variants, which, in addition to social factors involved, teases apart some of the linguistic aspects of this shift.In line with the theme of this special issue, the article draws attention to the usefulness of comparable, or comparably made, corpora that allow for focused studies of linguistic change across speakers, generations, registers and communities.

Analogies in Castilian and in the Learning of Spanish as a Foreign Language: a Creative, Levelling and Simplifying Linguistic Phenomenon

The term analogy has been used to encompass all types of linguistic changes resulting from the imitation of other paradigmatic models since Antiquity. Currently, analogy is still used as a catchall term. However, new studies are restricting its scope and new terms appear to name linguistic change phenomena by imitation. After a brief summary of the term evolution, we will present the main phenomena of analogical creation regarding Castilian from diatopic and drastratic perspectives. Finally, we will focus on the analogy in L2 learning, mainly the ELE (Spanish as Foreign Language), by commenting according to the precepts of psycholinguistics examples from a corpus created with students of Spanish from different levels and nationalities.