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Benjamins Current Topics
Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special issues of various journals have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim of finding new audiences for topically interesting material, bringing such material to a wider readership in book format.
61 - 80 of 124 results
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Language Aggression in Public Debates on Immigration
Editor(s): Andreas MusolffPublication Date April 2019More LessThe global rise in the number, size and complexity of migration flows has not only resulted in an unprecedented flurry of debates and negotiations about how to deal with it through economic, social, and military policies but also in a huge increase in racist and xenophobic language use and discriminatory discourse. The expression of aggression and hatred in (anti-)immigration debates and its relationship to racism and its pseudo-justification lie at the center of this volume.
Its seven main contributions provide exemplary analyses of European and US debates that instrumentalize anti-immigrant attitudes: on the one hand among far-right populists in Cyprus, in Serbian and Croatian nationalism, and in the Hungarian government’s attempts at legitimizing immigration exclusion, and on the other hand in discourses associated with US-president Trump and his followers, including racists’ tactical denial of racism. Methodologically, all studies pursue corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis, with foci on lexical, figurative, argumentative and discourse-historical patterns. Together, they show the convergence of populist polemic strategies. Originally published as special issue of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, issue 5:2 (2017).
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Language and Citizenship
Editor(s): Tommaso M. MilaniPublication Date June 2017More LessThis volume offers fresh, cutting-edge perspectives on issues of language and citizenship by casting a critical light on a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts – Flanders, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, the UK - and discourse data – policy documents, newspaper articles, ethnographic notes and interviews, skits, bodies in protests. The main aims of the book are to investigate institutional discourses about the relationship between nationality and citizenship, and relate such discourses to more ethnographically grounded interactions; tease out the multiple and often conflicting meanings of citizenship; and explore the different linguistic/semiotic guises that citizenship might take on in different contexts. The book argues that the linguistic/discursive study of citizenship should not only include critical investigations of political proposals about language testing, but should also encompass the diverse, more or less mundane, ways in which various social actors enact citizenship with the help of an array of multivocal, material, and affective semiotic resources. Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics 14:3 (2015).
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Language Change in Contact Languages
Editor(s): J. Clancy Clements and Shelome GoodenPublication Date December 2011More LessThe studies in Language Change in Contact Languages showcase the contributions that the study of contact language varieties make to the understanding of phenomena such as relexification, transfer, reanalysis, grammaticalization, prosodic variation and the development of prosodic systems. Four of the studies deal with morphosyntactic issues while the other three address questions of prosody. The studies include data from the Atlantic creoles (Saramaccan, Sranan, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Trinidadian Creole, Papiamentu), as well as Singapore English. This volume, originally published as special issue of Studies in Language 33:2 (2009), aims to make the work of several language contact experts available to a wider audience. The studies will be of use to any student or scholar interested in different approaches to contact-induced language processes, particularly as they relate to morphosyntax and prosody.
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Letter Writing
Editor(s): Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa TanskanenPublication Date March 2007More LessThe contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective.
The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.
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Lexical Cohesion and Corpus Linguistics
Editor(s): John Flowerdew and Michaela MahlbergPublication Date January 2009More LessLexical cohesion is about meaning in text. It concerns the ways in which lexical items relate to each other and to other cohesive devices so that textual continuity is created. Traditionally, lexical cohesion (along with other types of cohesion) has been investigated in individual texts. With the advent of corpus techniques, however, there is potential to investigate lexical cohesion with reference to large corpora. This collection of papers illustrates a variety of corpus approaches to lexical cohesion. Contributions deal with lexical cohesion in relation to rhetorical structure, lexical bundles and discourse signalling, discourse intonation, semantic prosody, use of signalling nouns, and corpus linguistic theory. The volume also considers implications that innovative approaches to lexical cohesion can have for language teaching. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics volume 11:3 (2006).
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The Locus of Linguistic Variation
Editor(s): Constantine Lignos, Laurel MacKenzie and Meredith TammingaPublication Date September 2018More LessThis volume explores how the patterning of surface variation can shed light on the grammatical representation of variable phenomena. The authors explore variation in several domains, addressing intra- and inter-dialectal patterns, using diverse sources of data including corpora of naturally-occurring speech and judgment studies, and drawing on lesser-studied varieties of familiar languages, such as Northwest British Englishes and varieties of Canadian French. Ultimately, the contributions serve to expand our understanding of the nature of the mental representations and abstract processes required to support variation in language. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Variation 16:2 (2016)
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Making Minds
Editor(s): Petra Hauf and Friedrich FörsterlingPublication Date March 2007More LessSocial stimuli are important proximate determinants of human thought, action, and behaviour. But does the social environment also have deeper, profounder, and possibly more distal impact on more lasting psychological structures and forms, generalizing across time and domains, such as traits, self-consciousness, abilities, and talents? This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of if, how, and how far the mind is socially fabricated: Philosophical contributions address conceptual tools for analyses of how person perceivers shape the psychological structures of the person perceived. Social psychologists consider some of the more local mechanisms of “mind making”, including self fulfilling prophecies, attributions, and self-verification. Moreover, they address the dramatic consequences of being ostracised. From a clinical perspective it is investigated how patients’ immediate social environment (e.g., the family) impacts on schizophrenic relapse. In addition, developmental psychologists report on investigations of the role of social factors, e.g., imitative learning, for the development of the social self. Finally an ethological perspective demonstrates the susceptibility of animals to social stimuli. These papers were previously published as Interaction Studies 6:1 and 6:3 (2005).
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Media Intertextualities
Editor(s): Mie HiramotoPublication Date May 2012More LessThis collection of critical essays, originally published in Pragmatics and Society 1:2 (2010), discusses how normative biases that shape our relation to the world are constructed through discursive practice in media discourse. The intertextual perspective it adopts is crucial for our understanding of how media representations of speakers and languages shape many of our preconceptions of others. Mediatization is inherently intertextual; the very nature of this process involves extracting the speech behavior of particular speakers or groups from a highly specific context and refracting and reshaping it to be inserted in another stream of representation. The notion of intertextuality becomes a useful concept for the linguistic anthropological study of media discourse in the context of modernity, as it provides us with a tool for exploring the semiotic processes that underlie the way in which the media negotiate and reinscribe the complex relationships of identity that characterize late modern subjecthood.
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The Metalanguage of Translation
Editor(s): Yves Gambier and Luc van DoorslaerPublication Date October 2009More Less“Let the meta-discussion begin,” James Holmes urged in 1972. Coming almost forty years later – years filled with fascinating and often unexpected developments in the interdiscipline of Translation Studies – this volume offers the reader a multiplicity of meta-perspectives, while also moving the discussion forward. Indeed, the (re)production and (re)use of metalinguistic metaphors frame and partly determine our views on research, so such a discussion is vital as it is in any scholarly discipline. Among other questions, the eleven contributors draw the reader’s attention to the often puzzling variations of usage and conceptualization in both the theory and the practice of translation.
First published as a special issue of Target 19:2 (2007), the volume runs the gamut of metalinguistic topics, ranging from terminology, localization and epistemological questions, through the Chinese perspective, to the conceptual mapping of the online Translation Studies Bibliography.
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MetaNet
Editor(s): Miriam R.L. PetruckPublication Date September 2018More LessThe papers in this collection document the work of the first research project on metaphor that incorporates the findings of Frame Semantics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and Construction Grammar with Corpus Linguistics techniques for the analysis of linguistic expressions of metaphor in very large natural language corpora. Under severe constraints, the MetaNet project, based at the International Computer Science Institute designed and populated a sophisticated and accessible repository of conceptual metaphors, developed a formalization for Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and created tools and techniques for the automatic identification and analysis of the linguistic expression of metaphor. For those interested in metaphor, be that from a linguistic, literary, poetic, cognitive, or computational perspective, this book is a must-read. Originally published in Constructions and Frames 8:2 (2016).
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Metaphor and Metonymy revisited beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor
Editor(s): Francisco Gonzálvez-García, María Sandra Peña-Cervel and Lorena Pérez-HernándezPublication Date October 2013More LessThe contributions in this volume go beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor complementing it in a number of relevant ways. Some of the papers argue for a more dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to metaphor looking into it from semiotic, psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Other contributions focus on the crucial role played by metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction at a discourse/textual level. Finally, the volume also includes proposals which revolve around the alleged universal nature of metaphorical mappings and their suitability to account for grammatical phenomena.
The contributions in this volume display an ample gamut of theoretical approaches pointing to the viability of taking a functional-cognitive stance on the analysis of metaphor and metonymy in contrast to a purely cognitive one.
This book is structured into three major sections: i) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: revisions and recent developments; ii) metaphor and/or metonymy across different discourse/genre types; and iii) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: current applications. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:1 (2011).
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Methodological and Analytic Frontiers in Lexical Research
Editor(s): Gary Libben, Gonia Jarema and Chris WestburyPublication Date December 2012More LessThe study of how words are represented and processed in the mind has served as a meeting ground for research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Right now, this domain of study is in the midst of astonishing developments. At the core of these developments are the methodological and analytic advancements that have enabled researchers to address new phenomena and to ask new questions. These new methodologies have also raised fundamental questions concerning the nature of words in the mind, the nature of language processing, and the ways in which data can be understood.
This book provides a timely resource written by international leaders in methodological innovation. It offers fundamental insights into how innovative methodological approaches advance lexical research. It also offers the technical knowledge that is essential to that advancement, but which is rarely found in journal reports. This is a methodologically oriented volume designed to be informative, thought provoking, innovative, and perhaps also revolutionary. The contributions in this volume that originally appeared in The Mental Lexicon 5:3 (2010) and 6:1 (2011) are supplemented with several new chapters, as well as with a new and timely introductory chapter titled "Embracing Complexity".
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Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
Editor(s): Dirk Delabastita and Ton HoenselaarsPublication Date June 2015More LessNo literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants, or with ‘foreign’ languages and the phenomenon of ‘translation’, as English Renaissance drama. Originally published as a themed issue of English Text Construction 6:1 (2013), this carefully balanced collection of essays, now enhanced with a new Afterword, decisively demonstrates that Shakespeare and his colleagues were far more than just ‘English’ authors and that their very ‘Englishness’ can only be properly understood in a broader international and multilingual context. Showing a healthy disrespect for customary disciplinary borderlines, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries brings together a wide range of scholarly traditions and vastly different types of expertise. While several papers venture into previously uncharted territory, others critically revisit some of the loci classici of early modern theatrical multilingualism such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.
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Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics
Editor(s): María Jesús Pinar SanzPublication Date October 2015More LessThe aim of this volume is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between Multimodality and Cognitive Linguistics. The innovative nature of the volume in relation to those existing in the field lies in the fact that it brings together contributions from three of the main approaches dealing with Multimodality – Cognitive Linguistics and multimodal metaphors (Forceville & Urios Aparisi, 2009), social semiotics and systemic functional grammar and multimodal interactional analysis (Jewitt, 2009) –highlighting the importance of multimodal resources, and showing the close relationship between this field of study and Cognitive Linguistics applied to a variety of genres –ranging from comics, films, cartoons, picturebooks or visuals in tapestry to name a few. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics Vol. 11:2 (2013).
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Named Entities
Editor(s): Satoshi Sekine and Elisabete RanchhodPublication Date July 2009More LessNamed Entities provides critical information for many NLP applications. Named Entity recognition and classification (NERC) in text is recognized as one of the important sub-tasks of Information Extraction (IE). The seven papers in this volume cover various interesting and informative aspects of NERC research. Nadeau & Sekine provide an extensive survey of past NERC technologies, which should be a very useful resource for new researchers in this field. Smith & Osborne describe a machine learning model which tries to solve the over-fitting problem. Mazur & Dale tackle a common problem of NE and conjunction; as conjunctions are often a part of NEs or appear close to NEs, this is an important practical problem. A further three papers describe analyses and implementations of NERC for different languages: Spanish (Galicia-Haro & Gelbukh), Bengali (Ekbal, Naskar & Bandyopadhyay), and Serbian (Vitas, Krstev & Maurel). Finally, Steinberger & Pouliquen report on a real WEB application where multilingual NERC technology is used to identify occurrences of people, locations and organizations in newspapers in different languages.
The contributions to this volume were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes 30:1 (2007).
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Narrative – State of the Art
Editor(s): Michael BambergPublication Date March 2007More LessNarrative – State of the Art which was originally published as a Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006) is edited by Michael Bamberg and contains 24 chapters (with a brief introduction by the editor) that look back and take stock of developments in narrative theorizing and empirical work with narratives. The attempt has been made to bring together researchers from different disciplines, with very different concerns, and have them express their conceptions of the current state of the art from their perspectives. Looking back and taking stock, this volume further attempts to begin to deliver answers to the questions (i) What was it that made the original turn to narrative so successful? (ii) What has been accomplished over the last 40 years of narrative inquiry? (iii) What are the future directions for narrative inquiry? The contributions to this volume are deliberately kept short so that the readers can browse through them and get a feel about the diversity of current narrative theorizing and emerging new trends in narrative research. It is the ultimate aim of this edited volume to stir up discussions and dialogue among narrative researchers across these disciplines and to widen and open up the territory of narrative inquiry to new and innovative work.
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Nonmanuals in Sign Language
Editor(s): Annika Herrmann and Markus SteinbachPublication Date June 2013More LessIn addition to the hands, sign languages make extensive use of nonmanual articulators such as the body, head, and face to convey linguistic information. This collected volume focuses on the forms and functions of nonmanuals in sign languages. The articles discuss various aspects of specific nonmanual markers in different sign languages and enhance the fact that nonmanuals are an essential part of sign language grammar. Approaching the topic from empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives, the book is of special interest to sign language researchers, typologists, and theoretical as well as computational linguists that are curious about language and modality. The articles investigate phenomena such as mouth gestures, agreement, negation, topicalization, and semantic operators, and discuss general topics such as language and modality, simultaneity, computer animation, and the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and prosody.
Originally published in Sign Language & Linguistics 14:1 (2011).
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Occupy
Editor(s): Luisa Martín RojoPublication Date May 2016More LessLarge-scale protest movements have recently transformed urban common spaces into sites of resistance. The Arab Spring, the European Summer, the American Fall in 2011, the revolts in India and South Africa and, more recently, in Istanbul, in several cities in Brazil, and in Hong Kong, are part of a common wave of protests which reclaims squares and urban places, monumentally designed as political and economic centres, as places for discussion and decision-making, for increasing participation and intervention in the governance of the community. Through banners and signs, open assemblies, and other communicative practices in the encampments and interconnecting physical and virtual spaces, participants permanently reconfigure their lived spaces discursively. The attempt to account for on-going social phenomena from the moment they first happen, and with an international perspective, undoubtedly represents a theoretical and methodological challenge. This book is a successful and innovative attempt to address this challenge, capturing the complex interplay between social, spatial, and communicative practices, drawing on complementary and alternative methods. Originally published in Journal of Language and Politics issue 13:4 (2014).
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On Multiple Source Constructions in Language Change
Editor(s): Hendrik De Smet, Lobke Ghesquière and Freek Van de VeldePublication Date November 2015More LessIn much writing on language change, there is a tacit assumption that change operates on a single source construction to produce an innovative target construction. This volume challenges this assumption, by showing that many changes involve interactions between multiple source constructions. In fact, the involvement of multiple source constructions is unexceptional. The phenomenon is observed in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is seen in language-internal change as well as in contact-induced change. Interactions may obtain between independent but historically related constructions as well as between historically unrelated constructions. The contributions to this volume, on the one hand, present specific case studies on changes involving multiple source constructions, in various domains of grammar and in a variety of languages. On the other hand, they discuss how such changes can be accommodated in current theoretical models of language.
Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 37:3 (2013).
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Parts of Speech
Editor(s): Umberto Ansaldo, Jan Don and Roland PfauPublication Date September 2010More LessParts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets.
These articles were originally published in Studies in Language 32:3 (2008).
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