2016 collection (147 titles)

Reembedding Translation Process Research is a rich collection of empirical research papers investigating important new facets of the relationship between translation and cognition. The common thread running through the collection is the notion of “re-embedding” the acts of translating and interpreting—and the ways we understand them. That is, they all aim to re-situate these acts within what we now know about the brain, the powerful relationship of brain and body, and the complex interaction between cognition and the environment in which it is embedded. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the overall notion of re-embedding, thereby expanding the breadth of empirical research about translating. This book refuses Descartes' distinction between mind and brain, and reaffirms the highly dynamic, emergent, and interactive nature of cognitive processes in translation. The overarching conclusion is that translation studies should reconsider, re-embed, any model of translation processes that arises without properly accommodating the interdependence of brain, body, and environment in the emergence of cognition.

Becoming and Being an Applied Linguist contains narrative accounts of the lives of thirteen well-established applied linguists. Their professional autobiographies document the development of some of the key areas of applied linguistics – second, language acquisition, motivation, grammar, vocabulary, testing, second language writing, second language classroom research, practitioner research, English as a lingua franca, teacher cognition, and computer-assisted language learning. The book tells how these applied linguists grew into their areas of specialization. It will be of interest to any would-be applied linguist. The book also provides a readable overview of the whole field that will be of value to students of applied linguistics.

This book deals with how to ask questions in the languages of China. The syntactic, morphological, and lexical forms for distinguishing interrogatives take centre stage; intonation is also dealt with, but more peripherally than question particles, disjunctive and negative constructions, and word order. 140 languages spoken in China are covered coming from four major families: Sino-Tibetan, Altaic, Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic, accompanied by a few mixed languages. The approach is areal-typological, i.e. these focal languages are compared to the languages of the world as represented in typological samples, and within China areal patterns of the structural variables are examined.

The book will be an indispensable reference for future work on interrogatives in a typological context and for areal studies of the language situation in China and more generally East Asia.

For the first time, the works on stylistics by one of the most brilliant linguists of our times are collected in a single volume. This book highlights the evolution of John Sinclair’s theories and insights from studies on language teaching through detailed analyses of text and discourse, and into his later works on corpus stylistics. More specifically, Part I focuses on how theory can inform teaching practice. Part II is more directed towards linguistic analyses of specific texts and provides practical bases for stylistic approaches. In Part III, Sinclair’s contributions to discourse analysis shed light on ways of looking and understanding literature. Written in his crisp clear, straightforward style, this book demonstrates Sinclair’s explicit concern for more systematic approaches to the integration of language and literature and shows why his works on stylistics have been both reference and inspiration to students, language and literature teachers and researchers over many decades.

This work is the first book-length treatment on translation policy. Nearly everywhere in the world, populations are multilingual and mobile; consequently, language policies developed by the authorities must include choices about the use or non-use of translation. This book recognizes that these choices (or the absence thereof) become policies of their own in terms of translation. It builds upon the work of scholars in the fields of translation studies and language planning and policy in order to develop a new theoretical perspective on translation policy. In essence, the book proposes that translation policy can be understood as the management, practice, and beliefs surrounding the use of translation. The book deals with these issues under European and international law and then explores such management, practice, and beliefs in the UK, as a case study. Ultimately, the reader can find a fuller appreciation of both the importance and complexity of translation policy.

This book is an endeavor to present and analyze some standard topics in the grammar of Basque from a micro-comparative perspective. From case and agreement to word order and the left periphery, and including an incursion into determiners, the book combines fine-grained theoretical analyses with empirically detailed descriptions. Working from a micro-parametric perspective, the contributions to the volume address in depth some of the exuberant variation attested in the different dialects and subdialects of Basque. At the same time, although the contributions focus mainly on Basque data, cross-linguistic evidence is also presented and discussed. After all, the goal pursued in this book is to attempt to explain variation in Basque as a particular instantiation of variation in human language at large. The volume presents and analyzes a wide range of empirical phenomena, many typologically marked among European languages, and will therefore be a welcome resource to linguists looking for detailed description and/or theoretical discussion.

Word lists lie at the heart of good vocabulary course design, the development of graded materials for extensive listening and extensive reading, research on vocabulary load, and vocabulary test development. This book has been written for vocabulary researchers and curriculum designers to describe the factors they need to consider when they create frequency-based word lists. These include the purpose for which the word list is to be used, the design of the corpus from which the list will be made, the unit of counting, and what should and should not be counted as words. The book draws on research to show the current state of knowledge of these factors and provides very practical guidelines for making word lists for language teaching and testing. The writer is well known for his work in the teaching and learning of vocabulary and in the creation of word lists and vocabulary size tests based on word lists.

Bridging the gap between the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition, this volume offers an in-depth comparative analysis of two postcolonial varieties of English (Singapore and Malaysian English) and neighbouring Indonesian learner English in order to examine the Outer/Expanding Circle distinction and shed light on the genesis of postcolonial varieties of English. The study identifies and analyses more than thirty linguistic features in the categories phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse, concluding that in spite of clear syntactic differences, the distinction between the Outer and Expanding Circles is gradual rather than strictly categorical, and should rely on current sociolinguistic realities rather than on historical criteria. The volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in the dynamics of Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes, the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of English in Southeast Asia, or the integration of the paradigms of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition.

For a good orientation into the history of English grammar, several books are indispensable. One of those is Mustanoja’s A Middle English Syntax. However, for a long time this work was not readily available; the present edition changes that. This is a fac simile reprint from the 1960 publication which appeared as volume XXIII in ‘Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki’, with a new Introduction by Elly van Gelderen.

Compared to Old English, Middle English has fewer grammars and textbooks devoted to it. This book provides an interesting supplement by going deeper into certain questions and, especially, into exceptions. The book points out differences with Old English and certain peculiarities of the Middle English system. It was originally written for students of Middle English literature but serves a linguist well in detailed descriptions of the parts of speech, the use of the various cases, gender, and number. Word order, complex sentences, and conjunctions were meant to be dealt with in a second volume, which was never published.

The volume addresses developing knowledge and use of Hebrew from the dual perspective of typologically specific factors and of shared cross-linguistic trends, aimed at providing an overview of acquisition in a single language from infancy to adolescence while also shedding light on key issues in the field as a whole. Essentially non-partisan in approach, the collection includes distinct approaches to language and language acquisition (formal-universalist, pragmatic-usage based, cognitive-constructivist) and deals with a range of topics not often addressed within a single volume (phonological perception and production, inflectional and derivational morphology, simple-clause structure and complex syntax, early and later literacy, writing systems), with data deriving from varied research methodologies (interactive conversations and extended discourse, adult input and child output, longitudinal and cross-sectional corpora, structured elicitations). Each chapter provides background information on Hebrew-specific facets of the topic of concern, but typically avoids ethno-centricity by relating to more general issues in the domain. The book should thus prove interesting and instructive for linguists, psychologists, and educators, and for members of the child language research community both within and beyond the confines of Hebrew-language expertise.