This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns. Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and description of the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever framework the reader chooses to employ. The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.

The Phonology of Italian (The ^APhonology of the World's Languages)

Reference

Krämer, Martin

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

Islam Assembled

History

Middle East

Columbia University Press

The recent revival of interest in the Muslim world has generated numerous studies of modern Islam, most of them focusing on the Sunni majority. Shi'ism, an often stigmatized minority branch of Islam, has been discussed mainly in connection with Iran. Yet Shi'i movements have been extraordinarily effective in creating political strategies that have

Shi'ism, Resistance, And Revolution

Bakhash, Shaul

Bailey, Clinton

J Fischer, Michael M

Routledge

Underlying Representations (Key Topics in Phonology)

At the heart of generative phonology lies the assumption that the sounds of every language have abstract underlying representations, which undergo various changes in order to generate the 'surface' representations; that is, the sounds we actually pronounce. The existence, status and form of underlying representations have been hotly debated in phonological research since the introduction of the phoneme in the nineteenth century. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theories of the mental representation of the sounds of language. How does the mind store and process phonological representations? Krämer surveys the development of the concept of underlying representation over the last 100 years or so within the field of generative phonology. He considers phonological patterns, psycholinguistic experiments, statistical generalisations over data corpora and phenomena such as hypercorrection. The book offers a new understanding of contrastive features and proposes a modification of the optimality-theoretic approach to the generation of underlying representations.

Cambridge University Press

Norton, Augustus R.

Fischer, Michael M. J.

Westview Press

The War on Error: Israel, Islam and the Middle East

In The War on Error, historian and political analyst Martin Kramer presents a series of case studies, some based on pathfinding research and others on provocative analysis, that correct misinformation clouding the public’s understanding of the Middle East. He also offers a forensic exploration of how misinformation arises and becomes “fact.” The book is divided into five themes: Orientalism and Middle Eastern studies, a prime casualty of the culture wars; Islamism, massively misrepresented by apologists; Arab politics, a generator of disappointing surprises; Israeli history, manipulated by reckless revisionists; and American Jews and Israel, the subject of irrational fantasies. Kramer shows how error permeates the debate over each of these themes, creating distorted images that cause policy failures. Kramer approaches questions in the spirit of a relentless fact-checker. Did Israeli troops massacre Palestinian Arabs in Lydda in July 1948? Was the bestseller Exodus hatched by an advertising executive? Did Martin Luther King, Jr., describe anti-Zionism as antisemitism? Did a major post-9/11 documentary film deliberately distort the history of Islam? Did Israel push the United States into the Iraq War? Kramer also questions paradigms—the “Arab Spring,” the map of the Middle East, and linkage. Along the way, he amasses new evidence, exposes carelessness, and provides definitive answers.

Over the past decade, the political ground beneath the Middle East has shifted. Arab nationalism the political orthodoxy for most of this century has lost its grip on the imagination and allegiance of a new generation. At the same time, Islam as an ideology has spread across the region, and "Islamists" bid to capture the center of politics. Most Western scholars and experts once hailed the redemptive power of Arabism. Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival is a critical assessment of the contradictions of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the misrepresentation of both in the West. The first part of the book argues that Arab nationalism--the so-called Arab awakening--bore within it the seeds of its own failure. Arabism as an idea drew upon foreign sources and resources. Even as it claimed to liberate the Arabs from imperialism it deepened intellectual dependence upon the West's own romanticism and radicalism. Ultimately, Arab nationalism became a force of oppression rather than liberation, and a mirror image of the imperialism it defied. Kramer's essays together form the only chronological telling and the at fully documented postmortem of Arabism. The second part of the book examines the similar failings of Islamism, whose ideas are Islamic reworkings of Western ideological radicalism. Its effect has been to give new life to old rationales for oppression, authoritarianism, and sectarian division. Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival provides an alternative view of a century of Middle Eastern history. As the region moves fitfully past ideology, Kramer's perspective is more compelling than at any time in the past-in Western academe no less than among many in the Middle. This book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, economists, and Middle East specialists.

Arab Awakening & Islamic Revival: The Politics of Ideas in the Middle East

Religion & Spirituality

Transaction Pub

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Books by Krämer, Martin