bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Civil Rights
Authors: Cunningham David , Fox Nicole
Published: June 2013

Unlike many standard sociological concepts, “civil rights” is rarely interrogated as a phenomenon sui generis or in relation to other categories of rights, and instead is typically invoked in reference to a range of political claims, statuses, entitlements, and outcomes. Though foundational accounts of citizenship situate the sources and boundaries of civil rights, by far the most frequent usage of the term is in relation to the US civil rights movement, which has served as the central case informing prevailing theories of social movements. The movement’s canonical status and sweeping impacts on political, economic, and social life has given rise to a loosely bounded conception of an associated era, with much scholarship focusing on the contours of racial discrimination and mobility in the “post-civil rights” decades that have followed. Another area of movement influence relates to the encoding of civil rights protections in legislation and court decisions. A particularly robust literature has engaged with the implementation and enforcement of various provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as its impact on subsequent related legislation, such as the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. The legacy of the movement is also evident in its influence on subsequent civil rights movements, both tactically and through their ability to advance “civil rights” claims in familiar and resonant ways. The unique and familiar character of the civil rights movement, then, has ensured that conceptions of civil rights remain prevalent within a variety of sociological literatures––from social movements, to organizations, gender, race and ethnicity, and the sociology of law––while perhaps paradoxically discouraging focused research on the definitional and political contours of the term itself.
Social Epidemiology
Authors: Galer-Unti Regina A.
Published: June 2013

The term social epidemiology refers to the branch of epidemiology that investigates how social interactions and social conditions impact the public’s health. Researchers in this area have the perspective that health and disease are multicausative and impact the host on a variety of levels. Social factors are part of this multicausative explanation, as they play a role in the individual’s exposure to disease. Social epidemiologists study socioeconomic status (at one point in time and across the life course), race, gender, workplace, impact of neighborhood, social networks and support, and a variety of other social factors in an attempt to understand how social conditions affect population health. Social epidemiologists also study the impact of such determinants as social capital, income inequality, and social policies on health. Social epidemiology has broadened greatly in the last decade, and the following bibliography provides a collection of works designed to emphasize the history of this branch of epidemiology, define terminology, examine the work of noted authors in the field, and provide an introduction to the main concepts in social epidemiology.
History of Education in the United States
Authors: Span Christopher M.
Published: June 2013

This annotated bibliography concentrates on the history of education in the United States. This history can be divided into two distinct areas: teacher training, and scholarship and research. Well before 1860, history of education, as a course of study, was associated with the professional education training of American teachers. To date, nearly all teacher education programs in the United States still incorporate the history of American education—even if only as part of a social foundations course—as a course requirement in its preservice teacher education programs. The assumption is that providing teachers with a general overview or survey of the most important developments in the history of education in the United States allows them to be self-reflective about the past and better understand the society in which they will teach. As a field of research, history of education has its earliest beginnings in the late 19th century, but by the mid-20th century it was a well-established field of study.
College Admissions in the United States
Authors: McDonough Patricia , Calderone Shannon
Published: June 2013

By the simplest of definitions, college admissions represents a process of entry leading to enrollment in some form of postsecondary education—a process that ensures an institution is identified, paperwork is completed, qualifications are confirmed, and the student chooses an institution in which to enroll. This definitional simplicity, however, belies the complex and highly contestable nature of the college admissions process and the role it plays in ongoing debates over social status mobility, merit, and the equitable nature of K–12 schooling opportunities. How college admissions has evolved into a touchstone for such heady debate is in large part the result of a confluence of factors: a well-established correlation between a college degree and lifetime income earnings, a dramatic increase over the past fifty years in the number of students who both aspire and ultimately enroll in some form of postsecondary education, and a desire by colleges to gain greater market advantage through improving their comparative standing, which relies heavily on admissions selectivity, reputation, and alumni giving as well as success in the job market. These demographic and economic shifts have resulted in similar shifts in public sentiment over the value of higher education to future life chances and the conversion of a four-year degree to income earnings over the lifespan. A great body of research has provided insight into the macro- and micro-level forces that mediate postsecondary opportunity. The brief essays and citation lists provided in this article capture some of this complexity by conceptualizing the college admissions process as a field of activity that, as educational researchers have so often argued, contributes to a form of social sorting vis-à-vis the interactions of institutions, individuals, and marketplace forces. This article begins by suggesting that the college admissions process is best characterized as a series of choices related to college going as mediated by race, class, and gender. Also considered in this discussion is the influence of K–12 settings on sustaining (and derailing) educational aspirations. Highlighted research also focuses on the influence of outreach and families on individual college aspirations, institutional strategic decision making that drives the admissions marketplace, as well as the often confounding ways in which business and public policy interests test the standards of fairness via special admissions considerations. Finally, this article offers some key resource options for further study on college admissions and related topics.
Historical Evolution of Higher Education in the United States
Authors: Loss Christopher , Hinz Serena , Ryan Christopher J. , Dickason Christine
Published: June 2013

In this article, the historical evolution of higher education refers to higher learning in the United States from the colonial era to the present day. A radically pluralistic system of public, private, and for-profit two- and four-year training institutes and colleges and professional and graduate schools, the American system is generally regarded as the best in the world. A by-product of the American commitment to liberty and to the belief that academic life should exist outside the grasp of direct government control, US higher education’s independence has gradually decreased since World War II and with the dramatic growth of federal funding for research and student aid. Consisting of 4,700 institutions that enroll upward of twenty million students from the United States and abroad, the sector has become a critical governmental intermediary that relies on heavy state-level and federal subsidies and tax expenditures in order to fulfill its core mission of teaching, research, and service. The higher education system also faces a number of pressing challenges: rising costs, declining public support, high student attrition, and long time-to-degree that often results in no degree at all, especially at two-year colleges where the majority of poor and underrepresented minority students enroll. The US higher education system, existing as it does at the intersection of state/society relations, is a fascinating site to study American history. The citations included in this article are intended to provide a point of embarkation for further inquiry. They have been selected because they offer a thematic overview of the history of American higher education intended to provoke additional reading and investigation.
Response to Intervention
Authors: Eppolito Amy , White Kathryn , Klingner Janette
Published: June 2013

Response to intervention (RTI) is a comprehensive, systematic approach to teaching and learning designed to monitor academic and behavioral progress for all students, provide early interventions of increasing intensity to struggling learners, and potentially identify learners with more significant learning disabilities. The model is implemented with multitiered instruction, intervention, and assessment. The key components of the RTI model include (1) high-quality instruction matched to the needs of students, (2) evidence-based interventions of increasing intensity, (3) ongoing progress monitoring, and (4) data-driven decision making. Components of the model, such as data-driven decision making and multitiered instruction, have been studied for the past few decades, but the model as an integrated whole has been developed more recently. One catalyst for increased research and interest in RTI has been a change in federal legislation in the United States. The most recent reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) in 2004 permits the RTI model to be implemented as an alternative means to identify students with learning disabilities (LDs). These amendments to IDEA stipulate that the RTI process may be used to determine if a child is responding to research-based instruction and intervention as part of the special education evaluation process. Although driven by special education policy, RTI has been lauded as an instructional model that can improve general education overall and for special populations. However, critiques of the model argue that it has been implemented with limited research, resources, and funding and may not be valid for identifying LDs. Some experts question the psychometric validity of the model and promote using multiple forms of assessment, including more traditional standardized psycho-educational tests, in combination with RTI when evaluating students for possible LDs.
Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices
Authors: Berry Amanda , Hamilton Mary Lynn
Published: June 2013

This article provides an overview and discussion of self-study of teacher education practices. Self-study is a genre of research concerned with examining the role of the educator within professional practice settings. In teacher education, self-study is used as a form of practitioner research by higher education faculty to study their teaching and their students’ learning. Self-study functions as a means of better understanding the complex nature of teaching and learning and of stimulating educational change. In self-study, researchers focus on the nature and development of personal, practical knowledge through examining, in situ, their own learning beliefs, practices, processes, contexts, and relationships. Outcomes of self-study research focus both on the personal, in terms of improved self-understanding and enhanced understanding of teaching and learning processes, and the public, in terms of the production and advancement of formal, collective knowledge about teaching and teacher education practices, programs, and contexts that form an important part of the research literature on teacher education. Both personal and public purposes are concerned with the reform of teaching and teacher education that works from a social change and social justice perspective. The sources included in this article present works that have significantly influenced the research and practice of self-study in teacher education, comprehensive examinations of major issues in the field, and works that are breaking new ground. A variety of meanings has been associated with the term “self-study,” including self-directed learning, psychological studies of the growth of individuals, and institutional self-evaluations. These definitions are concerned with understandings of “self” that are different from self-study of teacher education practices and are not included in this article. Also, while self-studies are conducted in contexts outside teacher education by academics in other faculties of higher education, by teachers in schools, and by administrators, these contexts are not covered in this article.
A Pedagogy of Teacher Education
Authors: Loughran John
Published: June 2013

A pedagogy of teacher education is based on the view that the teaching of teaching requires specialist skills, knowledge, and abilities that need to be recognized, developed, and refined by teacher educators as they become more expert at teaching about teaching. Central to conceptualizing a pedagogy of teacher education is the notion that teaching about teaching must encompass much more than the delivery of teaching “tips and tricks.” Teaching about teaching must make the pedagogical reasoning that underpins quality practice clear, explicit, and meaningful for learners of teaching. That means then that the learning of teaching revolves around teacher educators’ ability to create pedagogical experiences and conditions that illustrate the importance of moving beyond technicist views of teaching, thus making the tacit dimensions of knowledge of practice explicit and meaningful in learning about teaching. In essence then, a pedagogy of teacher education comprises the processes and practices of teaching and learning about teaching, and is captured through an articulation of the knowledge (and practice) of teaching and learning about teaching.
Social Media
Authors: Zúñiga Homero Gil de , Coddington Mark
Published: June 2013

Social Media (SM) research is a relatively new area of academic inquiry; thus, it finds itself in constant flux. Researchers have primarily centered their efforts on learning more about what SM is as a phenomenon. Researchers have also aimed to understand the specific features and characteristics SM users may have, such as their socioeconomic status or the link between individual personality traits and SM use. A growing section of the literature addresses the historic background and definitions of social network sites, as well as the specific features of microblogging (i.e., Twitter) as a media platform. This article also addresses particular differences found in the literature dealing with blogs and citizen journalism, SM and various communication theories, and finally SM and its relationship with modern democracies. Overall, there is a paucity of SM literature explaining all its potential and plausible effects. Nevertheless, the proportion of papers published revolving around these issues in the last few years is a fair reflection of their growing importance, as it indicates how well received this type of research has been among academics from different disciplines. Likewise, the growth of literature in this area should be expected to remain steady for quite some time. SM has emerged as a prolific and important area of research that affects many aspects of citizens’ daily lives, ranging from citizen-to-citizen communication to the ways people consume products and information and to larger media effects over citizens (i.e., political and civic behaviors).
Community Structure Approach
Authors: Pollock John C.
Published: June 2013

Any annotated bibliography on community structure scholarship must pay homage to an early US founder of both sociology and communication studies disciplines, the University of Chicago’s Robert Park, who in The Immigrant Press and its Control (Park 1922, cited under Core Texts) argued that scholars should pay attention not only to the impact of media on public opinion, but also to the impact of public opinion on media. Although most scholars working in the community structure tradition turn from the traditional perspective of examining the impact of media on society to a reverse perspective of exploring the impact of society on media, all appear convinced that reporting on critical social and political issues mirrors “macro” constructs (such as community characteristics) more closely than “micro” constructs, such as psychological differences among journalists or newsroom organizational differences. Several features of community structure scholarship deserve special attention. First, very few books have been written on community structure theory and empirics. Second, a considerable amount of community structure scholarship has been generated by relatively few scholars and their graduate student progeny at the universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington State, with additional contributions from the universities of Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio State. As a result, many names repeat themselves in any annotated bibliography, not because of omissions, but rather because most active scholars are deeply committed and productive. Third, a noticeable shift has occurred in the community structure field, from an initial emphasis on media functioning within a broader social system as a mechanism of “social control” reinforcing the interests of elites as social system “guard dogs,” to a view of media functioning as an agent of “social change,” reinforcing community “ties,” participation, and civic engagement, often interacting with vibrant volunteer efforts organized collectively under the umbrella concept “social capital.” Although substantial numbers of researchers traditionally explored community structure at the “institutional” level, focusing on the pluralism or diversity of institutions and organizations, many modern scholars drill into demographic and aggregate indicators to inquire how much media are shaped by the interests of emerging groups, whether African Americans, Latinos, or “vulnerable” groups generally (e.g., those with a significant percentage unemployed or below the poverty level), or “protest” groups such as activists for gay rights. Today’s community structure scholars also pursue myriad methodologies and statistical techniques, reaching beyond a few cities to nationwide, even cross-national, samples of newspapers, creating sophisticated indices measuring “structure” (including, for example, a “gay market index”) as well as multiple media channels, including modern, new media public affairs place blogging.
Media Policy and Governance
Authors: Price Monroe E. , Puppis Manuel , Verhulst Stefaan G.
Published: June 2013

One of the most important institutions of modern society, the media, has witnessed a dramatic transformation over the last few decades. The advent of the Internet, the rapid growth of mobile and other platforms, and the move toward digital convergence have transformed the sector practically beyond recognition. Inevitably, these changes have had important ramifications for media policy, too. As technology has evolved (and as the way people use and consume media has similarly evolved) several cornerstones of the media policy field have come into question. Regulators and policymakers have had to revisit—and question—the meaning of long-standing media policy principles such as free speech, fair use, universal access, diversity, public interest, and the marketplace of ideas. And, perhaps most important, the boundaries separating other policy fields, such as telecommunications policy, communications policy, information technology policy, and even cultural policy, are becoming increasingly porous as the digitization, convergence, and globalization of communications technologies blur traditional technological and regulatory distinctions.
Televised Political Advertisements
Authors: Benoit William L.
Published: June 2013

The first political television advertisement was run by Senator Benton of Connecticut in 1950. The first presidential TV spots were broadcast two years later, when Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson. These messages have become an extremely important means of communication with voters, particularly for higher-level offices. Billions of dollars are spent on political advertising in America. Obama became the first candidate ever to decline federal funding for the general election campaign, which meant he could spend all he could raise; McCain accepted federal funding, which imposed limits on his spending. Television spots are important for several reasons. The candidate has complete control over the content of these messages; the news selects and often interprets information from candidates. Unlike ads, debates include opponents and candidates may face questions they would rather avoid. TV spots also allow targeting of messages by selecting which markets ads are broadcast in and which programs they are broadcast on. In presidential campaigns this is extremely important because candidates in recent campaigns focus advertising on the states which are “in play” (“battleground states”), states with electoral votes that could be won by either candidate. Although it is increasingly easy for citizens with little interest in the campaign to avoid exposure to political advertising (DVDs, the Internet, and most of cable and satellite TV, for example, do not include such messages), TV spots have the greatest chance of reaching voters who do not seek out information on the campaign. Furthermore, with today’s constantly increasing population, candidates running for offices such as senator and governor—and, in the early 21st century, increasingly for lower offices as well—cannot hope to reach a large proportion of constituents without using TV spots. Political groups, such as PACs (Political Action Committees) or 527s (named after a provision of a campaign finance law) also broadcast political advertisements in the United States. Although some countries have laws regulating the use of political television advertising, this message form is also becoming important in other countries besides the United States. Finally, as we will see below, there is no question that televised political advertising has effects on viewers.
Environmental Communication
Authors: Shanahan James
Published: June 2013

The study of environmental communication, as a subfield of the study of communication, is a relatively recent endeavor. Roughly speaking, the field of environmental communication involves the study of existing communication about environmental issues and the identification of methods for improved communication about environmental issues. The field has its roots in a variety of disciplines, and it now includes subdisciplines such as environmental rhetoric, environmental journalism, and environmental media effects, among others. The earliest articles in the core literature emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s, partly as a response to the obvious increases in environmental awareness that had taken place since the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. In the 1980s, more universities began offering courses in environmental communication, and some departments even offered graduate specializations. The field was often, though not always, linked with science and health communication, and some scholars profess specialization in “environmental, science, and health communication” as a single unified subdiscipline. The major communication associations have developed divisions for environmental communication (first, the National Communication Association, and, then, the International Communication Association) though both followed the lead initially of the Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE). Now the International Environmental Communication Association is the latest group unifying environmental communication scholars. The association publishes the journal Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. A variety of activities take place today under the banner of environmental communication. Approximately equal contributions are made by scholars using humanistic or social science methods. Some researchers focus on the study of environmental communication from a critical or analytic standpoint, whereas others develop teaching tools and instructional methods to improve environmental practice. Thus, the typical divisions within communication are present (rhetoric versus mass communication approaches, for instance), but scholars from diverse fields are also engaged in examining ways to improve communication within their own environmental subdomains (wildlife management practitioners, for instance, have been especially interested in communication). Another way to segment environmental communication research is by topic domain. Recently, major studies have focused primarily on climate, but earlier research concentrated on topics such as nuclear power, pollution, endangered species, acid rain, etc.
The New Conquest History and the New Philology in Colonial Mesoamerica
Authors: Restall Matthew , Wiehe Micaela
Published: June 2013

The New Philology and the New Conquest History are labels commonly used to describe two interrelated developments in the study of Colonial Latin America (primarily colonial Mesoamerica, which is our main focus here). Historians have primarily driven both with important contributions made by anthropologists, art historians, and geographers. The New Philology (NP) originated in the late 1970s and the 1980s with groundbreaking studies of early colonial Central Mexico based on the reading of alphabetic sources in Nahuatl, primarily mundane, notarial, archival documents. The work of historian James Lockhart of UCLA is recognized as foundational to this historiographical development. Building upon his work on Central Mexico, interest in analyzing notarial documents in Indigenous languages evolved to include all of Mesoamerica, and to a lesser extent yet increasingly into the Andean region of Latin America. Nevertheless, New Philology remains largely, but not exclusively, rooted in the analysis of primary archival sources—typically notarial—written in Indigenous languages. The New Conquest History (NCH) emerged in the 1990s, partially, but by no means entirely, out of the New Philology. A few earlier studies that mark the beginning of scholarly efforts to revisit traditional narratives of the Spanish evasion of the Americas include James Lockhart’s book Men of Cajamarca (Lockhart 1972, cited under the Andes and Other Counterpoints) and Inga Clendinnen’s book Ambivalent Conquests (Clendinnen 2003, cited under Guatemala, Yucatán, and Belize). One way to think of the two developments is as the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram, although there is not a consensus among specialists regarding which studies would definitively go inside which circle. Broadly speaking, the NCH and NP have a common emphasis on Mesoamerica and indigenous Mesoamericans, but the NCH is focused more specifically on the sixteenth century, as opposed to the colonial period. The NCH has tended to be more broadly focused regionally, often including other regions of Mesoamerica outside of just Central Mexico, and it characterizes non-European actors, typically Indigenous and African, as conscious actors or even protagonists in the colonial narrative. Like the NP, the NCH gives Indigenous-language sources particular attention, but the NCH tendency has been to stress newly found sources or the reinterpretation of familiar ones—be they written in Spanish or an Indigenous tongue, or a nontextual visual source—to reveal multiple protagonists in, and perspectives on, contact phenomena and conquest moments. This bibliography primarily contains studies written in English with a few significant exceptions; however, the reader should be aware that there is an important parallel literature in other languages, most obviously in Spanish.
Horror in Literature and Film in Latin America
Authors: Suppia Alfredo Luiz
Published: June 2013

Latin American horror literature and film is manifold, a heterogeneous landscape with perhaps more differences and peculiarities from country to country than a non–Latin American observer might perceive at first glance. Very often, Latin American horror resides on the borderlines between different genres, permeating a number of nonnaturalistic types of narrative—such as science fiction, fantasy, or crime thriller—and a great deal of horror literature and film embraces parody by means of comedy or experimental works. So, in order to identify and draw a line delineating the so-called Latin American horror genre in both literature and film, one should be significantly open-minded to concepts such as hybridity, multiculturalism, transculturalism, syncretism, non-Western narrative strategies and approaches, and so forth. If the ideal of a pure genre has rarely or perhaps never truly been identified in classical contexts, Latin American horror demonstrates that impurity might be one—that is, if there even is one—distinctive trait of the production of this genre on the Latin American continent. In fact, there is still no crystalized “genre culture” in Latin American literature and film. To attain full-fledged commercial and critical success, a Latin American writer/filmmaker must write/direct mainstream fiction, and this means “realist” fiction in most cases. The reasons for this phenomenon are varied. The infrastructural context (i.e., editorial market, editorial policies, audience, and reader demands) may partially contribute to the situation. Critical and academic orientations, which involve the valorization of the realist novel and authorship (auterism) to the detriment of “industrial” or “escapist” genres, can also be included in this context.
Early Colonial Forms of Native Expression in Mexico and Peru
Authors: Diel Lori Boornazian
Published: June 2013

The Aztecs and Inca were the dominant cultural groups in Mexico and Peru, respectively, upon the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. After the conquest, Spain imposed distinctive forms of colonial rule over Mexico and Peru in response to the Native traditions they encountered. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas continued to express themselves in a variety of media after the conquest, and traces of an Indigenous mindset or worldview can be found in these forms; however, the Native and European worlds were quickly entangled and the Native worlds fundamentally changed. Though Native forms survived, they did so in changed circumstances and conditions, often in response to colonialism and as a form of negotiation and survival in a new world order. For example, many Native artists were influenced by European styles and techniques, as revealed by the more representational motifs appearing in 16th-century Andean art and greater illusionism in Mexican art. Moreover, many Natives learned to write alphabetically, so past oral traditions once preserved in songs, poems, pictorial books, and khipus were soon converted into alphabetic script. Other traditional forms of expression, such as the feather works of the Nahuas or the queros of the Inca, continued to be created by the Indigenous peoples after the conquest, but their styles, functions, and subject matter changed due to their new colonial contexts. Indeed, one of the greatest dialogues between the Native worlds and that of Europe took place in the religious realm. The imposition of Christianity and its attendant material culture created new opportunities for Native expression to flourish. Though the architecture, painting, and sculpture of the churches now served Christian ends, their Native authorship and preconquest influences are often clear. Religious dramas, too, preserved traces of Native expression, though again with a Christian visage. Here, then, this article takes a broad view, focusing on traditional forms of expression and those imposed by Spain but focusing on the Indigenous side of this dialogue, when known, and as it became manifest in expressive forms. Mexico and Peru are treated separately because many of their forms of expression differ. So too did the colonial projects of each continent, owing to their different cultural traditions. Because some of the key sources for Native expression date to the early seventeenth century (and beyond), this article takes a broad view chronologically, focusing largely on the early colonial period and more recently published texts, when available, while directing students to the bibliographies of these sources for fuller historiographical information.
Typology
Authors: Henderson Robert , Wing Cheyenne
Published: June 2013

Typology is used to cover two related types of investigations: (1) classifying languages based on shared grammatical properties that are not attributable to genealogical inheritance, and (2) identifying patterns in the distribution of grammatical properties across languages. Georg von der Gabelentz was the first to use the word “typology” to describe a discipline in this first sense, though typological thinking goes back hundreds of years before. Typology in the second sense, which is what dominates the modern typological literature, grows out of work by Joseph H. Greenberg on word order correlations (or universals). Universals are important because they allow for classifications of languages, but they are facts about human languages that need explanation. For this reason, typology has played an important part in linguistic theory, which aims to explain the range of possible human languages and why human languages are the way they are. Given its theoretical importance and the fact that almost any aspect of human language can be studied typologically, typology is a broad discipline that is of importance to every subfield of linguistics.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Authors: Bhatia Tej K.
Published: June 2013

Bilingualism and multilingualism is an interdisciplinary and complex field. As is self-evident from the prefixes (bi- and multi-), bilingualism and multilingualism phenomena are devoted to the study of production, processing, and comprehension of two (and more than two) languages, respectively. However, in colloquial usage the term bilingualism is used as a cover term to embody both bilingualism and multilingualism. Although this use of “bilingualism” has been objected to strictly on etymological grounds, it is a common practice since the inception of the field (see Weinreich 1953, cited under General Overviews) to apply to the term for multilingualism as well as to the dialects of the same language. For reasons of convention, concision, and convenience, the term bilingualism is used as a cover term to include both bilingualism and multilingualism in this article. Still in its primary stages of exploration, bilingualism is a rapidly growing area of linguistics, which is grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and a variety of conceptual frameworks. In linguistics, bilingualism owes its origin largely to diachronic and sociolinguistics, which deal with linguistic variation, language contact, and language change. However, on theoretical and methodological grounds, bilingualism was/is viewed as a problematic area of linguistics prior to and after the emergence of Chomskyan linguistic revolution (see Issues and Conceptualization). Outside linguistics, bilingualism is also intimately tied with immigrant and marginalized groups and their educational and economic problems. A case in point is the bilingualism and intelligence debate during the first half of the twentieth century (see under Effects and Education). The pioneering phase of bilingualism research in linguistics began with the works of Weinreich 1953, Haugen 1953, Mackey 1967 (all cited under General Overviews) and Jakobson, et al. 1953 (cited under Issues and Conceptualization) in the latter half of the twentieth century (see also Description and Typology). Since then, research in multiple fields of bilingualism has taken interdisciplinary dimensions. The key research areas represented by the field include: the representation and processing of languages in the bilingual mind/brain, childhood and adult language acquisition, bilingual speech disorders, bilingualism and mixed linguistic systems, effects of bilingualism on individuals and societies, bilingualism and educational challenges, language endangerment, and extinction, among others. The oldest accounts of bilingualism can be traced back to Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit, religious texts, such as the Bible, and the accounts of classical languages, such as Greek and Latin, in the context of linguistic prescriptivism, language contact, and spread.
Lexical Semantics
Authors: Geeraerts Dirk
Published: June 2013

Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning. Two issues of demarcation are relevant in this respect. First, although the definition of lexical semantics may suggest otherwise, morphological semantics (the study of the meaning of complex words as a function of the meaning of their parts and the way they are constructed) is usually considered a separate field from lexical semantics proper. Morphological semantics is not envisaged by the present article. Second, the study of the meaning of words does not exhaust the linguistic study of words: topics including lexical variation across language varieties, borrowing, phraseology, or the origin of words are distinct from the study of word meaning, but, like lexical semantics, they form part of the broader field of lexicology. Again, lexicology at large lies beyond the scope of the present chapter, although this article occasionally refers to publications that are situated at the level of lexicology rather than that of lexical semantics in the strict sense. Apart from an overview of general resources, the chapter looks at three aspects of lexical semantics: the theoretical approaches that have dominated the discipline throughout its development, the research topics that are high on the agenda of lexical semantics, and a few connections with other fields of inquiry.
Syntactic Change
Authors: Pires Acrisio , Lightfoot David
Published: June 2013

Linguistics began in the 19th century as a historical science, asking how languages came to be the way they are. Almost all of the work dealt with the changing pronunciation of words and “sound change” more broadly. Much attention was paid to explaining why sounds changed the way they did, and that involved developing ideas about directionality. Work on syntax was limited to compiling how different languages expressed clause types differently, notably Vergleichende Syntax der Indogermanischen Sprachen, by Berthold Delbrück. With the greatly increased attention to syntax in the latter half of the 20th century, approaches to syntactic change were enriched significantly. Most of the work on change, both generative and nongenerative, continued the 19th-century search for an inherent directionality to language change, now in the domain of syntax, but other approaches were developed seeking to understand new syntactic systems arising through the contingent conditions of language acquisition.
Argument Structure
Authors: Levin Beth
Published: June 2013

The term “argument structure” is used to refer to the lexical representation of argument-taking lexical items—typically verbs, but also nouns (especially nominalizations), adjectives, and even prepositions—that specifies sufficient information about these items’ arguments to allow their syntactic realization to be determined. An argument structure typically indicates the number of arguments a lexical item takes (e.g., the core participants in the eventuality a verb denotes), their syntactic expression, and their semantic relation to this lexical item. The notion of argument structure, which was first adopted by researchers working in the government-binding framework around 1980, is a descendant of the subcategorization frame of 1960s transformational grammar, which acknowledges that a lexical item’s argument-taking properties may be driven in part by its meaning. Although its purpose might seem straightforward, there is no single conception of argument structure. The understanding of the notion as a theoretical construct varies with a researcher’s theoretical predispositions, especially with respect to how semantics and syntax interface with each other. Such variation in usage is reflected in controversies over the nature of argument structure. Furthermore, certain approaches, particularly lexicalist approaches, assume morphosyntactic processes that affect a predicate’s argument-taking potential operate over argument structure, while other approaches take such processes to operate on syntactic configurations, and still others propose that both the syntax and the lexicon can be domains for such processes. Finally, certain researchers now suggest that the empirical domain subsumed under the label “argument structure” derives from other facets of the syntactic context that lexical items are found in, and some of them even question whether lexical items have an argument structure. Despite these controversies, “argument structure” is now adopted as a pretheoretical cover term to refer to those linguistic phenomena that involve the realization of a lexical item’s arguments, including morphosyntactic phenomena that affect the morphosyntactic realization of arguments. This use has become widespread and is not limited to researchers sharing the theoretical orientation of those who first introduced the term. This article emphasizes research on the notion of argument structure as a theoretical construct referring to a lexical representation that captures a lexical item’s argument-taking potential; thus, much of the work cited here is from the 1980s and early 1990s. The article also includes discussion of some major morphosyntactic phenomena discussed under the label “argument structure.”
Experimental Linguistics
Authors: Hemforth Barbara
Published: June 2013

Experimental linguistics is about studying theories of linguistic representations based on quantitative evidence. This evidence can be experimental in its strict sense or derived from text corpora. In any case, the validity of the hypotheses has to be tested using inferential statistics in order to draw general conclusions from a random sample of participants or linguistic expressions, or both. While an experimental approach has been more or less standard in phonetics, and a little more recently in phonology, it is now proving to be more and more useful in morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Experimental linguistics evidently overlaps strongly with psycholinguistics in approaching linguistic phenomena with experimental methods, and a considerable amount of the research that has been published in psycholinguistics is central to the research questions expressed in experimental linguistics. There is however a difference with respect to the major research perspective: psycholinguistics focuses on general principles of processing, and general cognitive mechanisms such as working memory constraints or executive functions play an important role. Experimental linguistics is mostly concerned with linguistic representation and with the constraints, which license variations of linguistic expressions. Whether or not this is a useful distinction is the basis for some debate in the framework of performance grammars. A substantial relation to quantitative linguistics can also be observed, in that testing of mathematically precise models with large-scale corpora or psychological experiments both are central to experimental linguistics. While quantitative work has been at the heart of experimental phonetics for more than seventy years, it took at least twenty more years to start thinking of experimental confirmation of linguistic hypotheses in Experimental Syntax. Experimental linguistics finds some of its roots in research on the “psychological reality of grammar,” which started in the 1960s. Important background for experimental linguistics can also be found in the development of performance-oriented grammars based on variants of the strong competence hypothesis. Research methods specially adapted to experimental linguistics have been developed and refined in recent years, thus overcoming some of the obstacles for using data-intensive approaches to complex linguistic questions. There is evidently some debate on the question of in how far empirical evidence beyond the intuition of well-trained linguists is necessary and useful for the development of linguistic theories. In the end, the debate amounts to a question posed by Jerry Fodor in 1981: What is it for a linguistic theory to be true of the speakers of a language? Or more concretely: Do experiments or large-scale corpus analyses enhance the reliability of linguistic theories?
Agreement
Authors: Preminger Omer
Published: June 2013

Agreement is a phenomenon in natural language in which the form of one word or morpheme covaries with the form of another word or phrase in the sentence. For example, in the English sentence John walks Fido every morning, the form of “walks” is conditioned by features of the subject, “John.” This can be seen by replacing “John” with an element whose relevant features are different, as in We walk Fido every morning, which results in a change in the form of “walks” to “walk” (or alternatively, a change of “-s” to an empty morpheme, Ø). Agreement is perhaps the quintessential morphosyntactic phenomenon, since it involves the morphological expression of a relation that most researchers take to be a syntactic one (though not entirely without dissent; see Morphologically Oriented Approaches). In contemporary linguistic literature, the term agreement is (somewhat unfortunately) used to refer alternately to the phenomenon itself, and to the hypothesized grammatical mechanism that gives rise to it. Unless otherwise noted, the term will be used here in the theory-neutral, descriptive sense only. Another point of terminological variability concerns the identity of the grammatical elements that enter into agreement. Canonically, the term is used to describe morphological covariance between some verbal element in a clause (typically, the bearer of tense/mood/aspect morphology) and a nominal argument in the same clause; but the term has also been used to describe many other pairings of covarying elements (e.g., nominals and their adjectival modifiers, nouns and their possessors, pre-/postpositions and their complements, etc.; and more recently, sequence-of-tense effects, pronouns and their antecedents, and even the relationship between multiple negative elements in a single clause; see Recruiting Agreement as an Explanation of Other Phenomena). Agreement is cross-linguistically very common; at the same time, languages of the world can differ quite dramatically in the amount of agreement morphology they exhibit. On one end of the scale, a language like Mandarin has nary any canonical agreement to speak of; while languages like Abkhaz, Basque, Icelandic, and others exhibit robust patterns of agreement between verbs and their arguments, nouns and their modifiers, and so forth.