The didactic poems of Niketas of Herakleia chiefly concern grammar and are written in various metres, all of them accentual, even including hymnographic metres. Rather than being mere reformulations of existing grammatical knowledge, the poems urge us to consider questions related to contemporary teaching practices. How does verse help to transmit knowledge, and which roles do accentual rhythm and musical heirmos play in this process? Issues of performance, audience and patronage are of undeniable importance for this question. The poems reflect a lively (sometimes unruly) classroom situation and an equally lively competition between teachers in Constantinople. Especially Niketas’ remarks on schedography reflect this competitive teaching field. Thus, the poems of this versatile author may explain why grammar became in the twelfth century an object to be reflected upon, reformulated, debated and even aestheticized. The chapter also situates Niketas in the literary tradition of didactic poetry. How does he, as a poet, at the same time represent himself as an able teacher and expert? And how does he combine poetic form and avowedly dry subject matter?

This chapter explores the topics and didactic strategies involved in teaching grammar through poetry in twelfth-century Byzantium by taking the prolific grammarian John Tzetzes and his Homerizing Carmina Iliaca as its case study. Tzetzes furnished his poem with numerous explanatory scholia, which give us a glimpse into Tzetzes’ teaching practice and illustrate how works of poetry served as model texts in the classroom of a grammarian. The chapter studies Tzetzes’ scholia against the background of the Art of Grammar by Dionysius Thrax, which was central to the Byzantine study of grammar and as such provides a relevant framework for analysing the grammatical material in Tzetzes’ scholia. By considering Tzetzes’ grammar lessons in the context of the various technical resources at his disposal and placing his scholia into dialogue with the scholarly and didactic works of his contemporaries Eustathios of Thessalonike and Gregory of Corinth, the chapter augments our understanding of Byzantine linguistic and literary thought.

This chapter defines heritage languages and motivates their study to understand linguistic diversity, language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics. It outlines the goals of Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC), the first project investigating variation in many heritage languages, unifying methods to describe the languages and push variationist sociolinguistic research beyond its monolingually oriented core and majority-language focus. It shows how this promotes heritage language vitality through research, training, and dissemination. It lays out overarching research questions that motivate the project:

• Do variation and change operate the same way in heritage and majority languages?

• How do we distinguish contact-induced variation, identity-related variation, and internal change?

• Do heritage varieties continue to evolve? Do they evolve in parallel with their homeland variety?

• When does a heritage variety acquire its own name?

• What features and structures are malleable?

• How consistent are patterns across languages?

• Are some speakers more innovative?

• Can attitudes affect ethnolinguistic vitality?

• How can we compare language usage rates among communities and among speakers?

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.

This chapter summarizes the contents and arguments of the preceding chapters, drawing together the major observations and implications of the work, in particular in relation to the influence and continuing relevance of Pāṇini and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition for modern Western linguistics.

Bede worte a number of educational writings, on grammar and literary skills, as well as history and science. Here excerpts are taken from handbooks on spelling, on rhetorical figures and on the subject of the measuring of time, including the names of the months in different languages including Old English and facts about the tides in the sea around Britain.

Alcuin’s dialogue on grammar shows two teenage students discussing the basics of Latin grammar with their teacher. The work survives in a manuscript written at Tours in the early ninth century, now in St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a number of important educational works which are excerpted here: his Grammar, Glossary and amusing Colloquy with Old English gloss, showing the schoolboys lively interaction with their teacher and their desire to learn Latin. Ælfric Bata also wrote a series of Latin colloquies, one of which is given here, with an account of the cheeky schoolboys pretending to their teacher that they have been working hard in his absence.

The myth that only one kind of writing is correct is the foundation for all the myths that follow. It starts with early spelling standardization and continues with early usage guides. Its consequences include making enemies of formal and informal writing, and making people think correct writing means one thing – and means a capable and good person. Closer to the truth? Terrible writers can be good people, good writers can be terrible people, and all shared writing includes some fundamental similarities, and some differences. Formal writing fancies nouns more than verbs, for instance, and it likes informational subjects. Informal writing has more equal affection for nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adverbs, and it favors interpersonal subjects.

The book opens with an odd fact of our time: we grow up having our writing corrected at every turn, and yet the actual writing most people do goes far beyond what is considered “correct English.” If we imagine a basic continuum of writing in English, it ranges from informal to formal, personal to impersonal, and interpersonal to informational writing. That range allows us to do all kinds of different things with writing. But only a small part of it is considered “correct,” because of what the book calls Language Regulation Mode. The introduction explains Language Regulation Mode, how it fixates on errors, and how it makes it hard to think about writing any other way. We learn to see writing only through the lens of writing myths, which tell us only some writing counts, and only some writers are smart and will succeed. Then, the introduction offers an alternative: Language Exploration Mode, which focuses on patterns instead of errors, and learning more about the diverse language of our world today--a continuum of informal digital writing, workplace writing, formal school writing, and otherwise, all correct for its purpose.

Myth 6, writing should be mastered in secondary school, starts the same time as the myth that most students cannot write, in the 20th century. This myth limits how we think about writing development, including who we think is responsible for it. Other consequences include that we ignore important differences between secondary and college writing, like the fact that secondary writing tasks tend to be brief, persuasive, and rigidly organized, while college writing tends to be multi-step, explanatory, and organized according to topic and genre. Closer to the truth is that writing development is a spiral rather than a line: it is ongoing, and not everything comes together at once. Also closer to the truth is that we can support the move from secondary to college writing by exploring their writing continuum patterns.

Chapter 2 contains a detailed overview of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Special attention is given to identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regard to questions about the semantics–pragmatics interface. This will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand and pave the way for a genuine integration of the two theories.

This chapter explores how late ancient institutions ordered the knowledge and ways of knowing that were associated with one of the central artefacts of the Christian community: its collection of sacred writings. I spotlight Origen, who was affiliated with a number of such institutions over his lifetime in Alexandria and later in Caesarea Maritima. I will examine how his philosophical schools gave shape and style to his exegetical project. I will also briefly reflect on the other institution with which he was affiliated: the church in Caesarea, where he was ordained as a priest. In a number of ways, I argue, philosophical schools left their imprint on Origen’s scriptural exegesis.

This chapter discusses the importance of rhetoric to the rise of the Sophists and the way that an attention to language as such conduces to a novel and controversial understanding of reality. Language, for the Sophists, is more than a medium for conveying meaning; it is itself creative of meaning, making the education that they offer uniquely powerful. This is the fuller sense of their professing to make their students “clever at speaking” (deinos legein). The chapter traces three specific areas on which the Sophists brought to bear their interest in logos: grammar and the issue of the correct names; the criticism of and engagement with poetry; and rhetoric and the effectiveness of argumentative techniques. We see that these explorations cannot be said to aim at a systematic theory. But they helped to inaugurate the study of language for its own sake, a topic that would play an important role in the philosophical debates of the following centuries.