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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.
81 - 100 of 124 results
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Patterns, Meaningful Units and Specialized Discourses
Editor(s): Ute Römer and Rainer SchulzePublication Date June 2010More LessThis collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks. The series of reflections and specialized meanings uncovered in these texts are closely tied to particular sequences of patterned chunks in language and offer exciting insights into the inseparability of lexis and grammar.
The contributions to this volume were previously published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13:3 (2008).
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Perspectives on Grammar Writing
Editor(s): Thomas E. Payne and David J. WeberPublication Date October 2007More LessWith over half the languages of the world currently in danger of extinction within a century, the need for high quality grammatical descriptions is more urgent than ever. Potential grammar writers, however, often find themselves paralyzed by the daunting task of describing a language. The papers in the present volume (originally published in Studies in Language 30:2 (2006)) provide suggestions and encouragement – from experienced grammar writers and users – regarding concrete methods for approaching the task of writing a descriptive grammar of a language. Salient "themes" emerging from the papers in this volume include: The necessity of community involvement in grammatical descriptions; The link between a grammar and the other products of a program of language documentation (a dictionary and collection of texts); The complementary functions of elicited vs. naturally occurring data; and grammatical description as 'art' as well as 'science'.
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Phonological and Phonetic Considerations of Lexical Processing
Editor(s): Gonia Jarema and Gary LibbenPublication Date October 2015More LessThe human ability to understand and produce spoken words is fascinating in its complexity. People often vary in how they pronounce a word. They may need to recognize words spoken with an accent quite different from their own. And, in order to understand a word of a second or foreign language, they may need to identify words on the basis of sounds that are difficult to differentiate. This book brings together psycholinguistic research that addresses these topics and highlights how the study of spoken word processing can shed light on fundamental dynamics of language processing. It demonstrates how spoken word processing is affected by the specific characteristics of individual languages and their writing systems and how it grows and changes across the lifespan. The book offers new cutting-edge research on spoken word processing. It will benefit researchers and students interested in language processing as well as readers who wish to broaden their understanding of language in the mind. In particular, this book underlines the value of conducting psycholinguistic research across languages and across the lifespan. Originally published in The Mental Lexicon Vol. 8:3 (2013).
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Pidgins and Creoles in Asia
Editor(s): Umberto AnsaldoPublication Date June 2012More LessThis book shifts the focus of Pidgin and Creole Studies from the better-known Atlantic/Caribbean contexts to the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and Mongolia. By looking at Asian contexts before and after Western colonial expansion, we offer readers insights into language contact in historical settings and with empirical features substantially different from those that have shaped the theory of the field. Two pidgin varieties of the Far East are described in detail, namely Chinese-Pidgin Russian and China Coast Pidgin. The former offers a unique opportunity to observe the typological dynamics of contact between Slavic, Tungusic and Sinitic, while the latter presents one of the better-documented studies of any pidgin so far. The third contribution is an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese India slave trade in relation to contact phenomena. The remaining two chapters look at Southeast Asia and discuss Malayo-Portuguese Creoles and the ubiquitous Malay-Sinitic lingua franca respectively. From a linguistic perspective the diversity of language families, the historical time depth, the complex patterns of population movements, and the wealth of contact phenomena that define Asia are so many and at times still so little understood that no single volume could ever pretend to shed sufficient light on all these aspects of the region. Despite providing what can be seen as a sample platter of the field of contact linguistics in this part of the world, the in-depth analysis of exotic socio-historical settings, the typologically diverse and rich data sets, and the notions of pidgins and Creoles as applied here will nonetheless stretch the limits and limitations of current theories in the field, and are a must read for anyone interested in arriving at solid theoretical generalizations.
Published earlier as Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 25:1, 2010.
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Police Interviews
Editor(s): Luna FilipovićPublication Date July 2021More LessThis collection breaks new ground in police communication research. It involves the first instance of the same dataset being analysed from different theoretical and methodological perspectives as well as providing original and detailed insights into both monolingual and bilingual UK police interviews and US police interrogations of suspects. The topics include the role of metacommunication and its appropriate vs. inappropriate use in evidence elicitation, assessment of mitigation vs. aggravation strategies in questioning, identification of right vs. wrong empathy and the importance of getting it right, effects on complexity in police speak on quantity and quality of information obtained, and the multiple challenges that affect interpreter-mediated exchanges in this highly sensitive communicative context. All levels of linguistic meaning are covered, words, constructions, sentences, discourse, and contextualised within psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge about inferencing, emotion, and social interaction. This holistic approach helps us explain where, when and why communicative conflicts arise in this sensitive context and propose concrete practical solutions to resolve them. This volume will be useful and relevant to both academics, students and researchers, and to professionals in the domains of language and the law. Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 10:1 (2019).
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Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization
Editor(s): Peter Lauwers, Gudrun Vanderbauwhede and Stijn VerleyenPublication Date October 2012More LessThis volume brings together five papers offering cross-linguistic analyses of pragmatic markers involving modality, supplemented by three book reviews on the same topic. The contrastive method, based on monolingual or translation corpora, does not only provide interesting insights about differences with respect to the semantics and the formal encoding of semantics between cognate elements in different languages, but also appears to be a very useful tool to refine the semantic analysis of markers within a given language. The reader will also discover among the results of the original empirical research collected in this volume insights that contribute to typological and theoretical issues surrounding pragmatic markers, such as the bottom-up identification of cross-linguistic pragmatic or discourse functions, the establishment of semantic maps and the formulation of hypotheses about implicational hierarchies in the diachronic development of pragmatic markers on the basis of synchronic evidence, especially in the framework of grammaticalization/pragmaticalization theory. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of Languages in Contrast 10:2 (2010).
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The Pragmatics of Making it Explicit
Editor(s): Pirmin Stekeler-WeithoferPublication Date October 2008More LessRobert Brandom’s Making it Explicit (1994) marks a Copernican turn in the philosophy of mind and language, as this collection of critical essays together with Brandom’s enlightening answers convincingly shows. Though faithful to Wittgenstein’s pragmatic turn in spirit, Brandom gives a systematic account of human sapience as a whole – by grounding our relation to the world by words on our discursive practice, assessing its normative basis, which is instituted by scorekeeping activities and sanctioning attitudes, and thus trying to avoid mystifying mentalism as well as dogmatic naturalism in our account of the human spirit. The topics emphasized in this volume concern the place of Brandom’s inferentialist and normative semantics in 20th century philosophy of language (Frege, Carnap, Quine), also in comparison to cognitive linguistics (Chomsky), instrumentalist pragmatism and functionalist understanding of the use of signs (Sellars), deflation of intentionality (Brentano), the logical analysis of predicative structures (Kant), the role of constructions for understanding, the constitution of objectivity by de-re-ascriptions and the problem of anti-representationalism, or how to treat malapropisms (Davidson).This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (13:1, 2005)
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The Pragmatics of Internet Memes
Editor(s): Chaoqun XiePublication Date May 2022More LessWhat is a meme? What is in a meme? What does ‘living in/with memes’ actually mean? What do memes mean to human beings dwelling in a life-world at once connected and fragmented by the internet and social media? Answers to and ways of answering these and other meme questions that arise in social events represent human assistance in or resistance to meaning making. A pragmatic perspective on internet memes as a way of seeing in social life experience offers a unique window on how meme matters in mediated (inter)actions turn out to be inextricably intertwined with human beings’ presencing and essencing in the life-world. Ultimately, this volume seeks to reveal what and how serious if not unsayable concerns can be concealed behind the seemingly humorous, carefree and colorful carnival of internet memes across cultures, contexts, genres and modalities. This book will be of some value to anyone keen on the dynamics of memes and internet pragmatics and on critical insights that can be garnered in kaleidoscopic multimodal communication. Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 3:2 (2020).
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The Pragmatics of Sensitive Activities in Institutional Discourse
Editor(s): Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez ReiterPublication Date June 2018More LessThis volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other’s face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions.
The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these, an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected, such as citizens’ encounters with traffic police officers, negotiations with a line manager, political news interviews, or public inquiries. Other types of activity, such as service calls or guided tours, involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases, the situated vulnerabilities studied here, whether expected or not, lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event, with implications for goal achievement.
The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis. The diversity of languages and institutional environments examined will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in face-to-face interaction and serve to stimulate debate in the field of pragmatics and beyond.
Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 7:4 (2016).
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Probing Semantic Relations
Editor(s): Alain Auger and Caroline BarrièrePublication Date August 2010More LessSemantic relations are at the core of any representational system, and are keys to enable the next generation of information processing systems with semantic and reasoning capabilities. Acquisition, description, and formalization of semantic relations are fundamentals in computer-based systems where natural language processing is required. Probing Semantic Relations provides a state of the art of current research trends in the area of knowledge extraction from text using linguistic patterns. First published as a Special Issue of Terminology 14:1 (2008), the current book emphasizes how definitional knowledge is conveyed by conceptual and semantic relations such as synonymy, causality, hypernymy (generic–specific), and meronymy (part–whole). Showing the difficulties and successes of pattern-based approaches, the book illustrates current and future challenges in knowledge acquisition from text. This book provides new perspectives to researchers and practitioners in terminology, knowledge engineering, natural language processing, and semantics.
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Prosody and Humor
Editor(s): Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Maria Wagner and Eduardo Urios-AparisiPublication Date December 2013More LessThis is the first-ever book-length collection of articles on the subject of prosody and humor. The chapters are written by the recognized leaders in the field and present the cutting edge of the research in this new interdisciplinary field of study. The book covers a broad range of languages, using several theoretical approaches, ranging from cognitive semantic theories, to discourse analysis, and anthropology. All the contributions are anchored in instrumental empirical data analysis. The topics covered range from humor in conversation, to sitcom scripts, from riddles to intonation jokes, from irony in a laboratory setting to irony occurring in conversation, from friends’ conversations in France, to business meetings in rural Brazil. The unifying theme is the search for markers of the humorous or ironical intentions of the speakers or of the genre of interaction. Originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 19:2 (2011) and 19:3 (2011).
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Proto-Indo-European Syntax and its Development
Editor(s): Leonid Kulikov and Nikolaos LavidasPublication Date July 2015More LessAlthough for some scholars the very possibility of syntactic reconstruction remains dubious, numerous studies have appeared reconstructing a variety of basic elements of Proto-Indo-European syntax based on evidence available particularly from ancient and/or archaic Indo-European languages. The papers in this volume originate from the Workshop “PIE Syntax and its Development” (Thessaloniki 2011), which aimed to bring together scholars interested in these problems and to shine new light on current research into ancient Indo-European syntax. Special attention was paid to the development of the hypothetical reconstructed features within the documented history of Indo-European languages.
The articles in this volume were originally published in the Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 3:1 (2013).
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Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
Editor(s): Leigh Fernandez, Kalliopi Katsika, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz and Shanley E.M. AllenPublication Date July 2021More LessHow do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and language development, this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches, as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing, neurolinguistics, and experimental linguistics, this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).
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Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity
Editor(s): Søren Wichmann and Anthony P. GrantPublication Date September 2012More LessQuantitative methods in linguistics, which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s, have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists, but also statisticians, physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale, providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies, rates of birth and extinction of languages, lexical borrowability, the identification of language family homelands, the assessment of genealogical relationships, and the development of new phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).
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Queering Borders
Editor(s): David A.B. MurrayPublication Date May 2016More LessIn recent years, migration has moved to the forefront of national and global debates, intensifying discussions about borders, security, identity and citizenship. In this volume we ask how language and sexuality impact these discussions: how do sexuality and language contribute toward the construction and maintenance of varying scales of borders? How do sexuality and language figure in border crossings across time, space, embodied differences, and culture? The contributors to this volume, all anthropologists, demonstrate how anthropological theories, concepts and methods uniquely address the operations of sexuality and language in the making, unmaking and remaking of these borders. In this volume, terminology, discourse, language choice, and other forms of linguistic practice are at the forefront of research on transnational queer im/migrant populations, allowing us to better understand how language shapes and is shaped by queer peoples’ movements across borders.
Originally published in Journal of Language and Sexuality Vol. 3:1 (2014).
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Rethinking Linguistic Creativity in Non-native Englishes
Editor(s): Sandra C. Deshors, Sandra Götz and Samantha LaportePublication Date July 2018More LessAt a time when the paradigm gap (Sridhar & Sridhar 1986) between the EFL and ESL research areas is attracting much scholarly attention, the contributions in the current volume explore this gap from the perspective of linguistic innovations across the two different types of non-native Englishes. In this endeavour, this volume unveils the many facets of linguistic innovations in non-native English varieties and explores the fine line between learners’ erroneous versus creative use of a target language. Adopting empirical, corpus-based approaches to portray linguistic innovations characteristic of EFL and ESL varieties, the contributions show how the interaction of linguistic and social forces influences the development of novel linguistic forms in both endonormative ESL contexts and exonormative EFL contexts. This volume is of relevance to linguists who are interested in the features of non-native English and who wish to gain a better understanding of the nature of innovations along the EFL – ESL continuum.Originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Learner Corpora Research 2:2 (2016).
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Sign Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Anne E. Baker and Bencie WollPublication Date January 2009More LessHow children acquire a sign language and the stages of sign language development are extremely important topics in sign linguistics and deaf education, with studies in this field enabling assessment of an individual child’s communicative skills in comparison to others. In order to do research in this area it is important to use the right methodological tools. The contributions to this volume address issues covering the basics of doing sign acquisition research, the use of assessment tools, problems of transcription, analyzing narratives and carrying out interaction studies. It serves as an ideal reference source for any researcher or student of sign languages who is planning to do such work. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 8:1/2 (2005)
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Signs and Structures
Editor(s): Paweł RutkowskiPublication Date September 2015More LessAs sign language linguistics has become an important and prodigious field of research in the last few decades, it comes as no surprise that the repertoire of methodological approaches to the study of the communication of the Deaf has also expanded considerably. While earlier work on sign languages was often focused on providing arguments for them being full-fledged linguistic systems, current debates do no longer center on whether visual-spatial grammars are worth being researched, but on how this type of research should be conducted. This book contains a selection of papers that could be thought of as a good representative sample of current trends in formal approaches to the study of sign language syntax. It illustrates how generative research on the communication of the Deaf may contribute to our understanding of the syntax of natural languages in general and indicates to what extent it is possible to integrate advances in the analysis of visual-spatial grammar with current spoken language research.
Originally published in Sign Language & Linguistics 16:2 (2013).
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Skyping the Family
Editor(s): Richard Harper, Rod Watson and Christian LicoppePublication Date August 2019More LessThis collection is one of the first in-depth studies of video calling in family and domestic life. It explores the reasons that people themselves provide to explain their video calling, investigates how these reasons make that calling accountable and how, in turn, these reasons come to be things talked about in the calls themselves. The research shows how video calling is part of the currency of contemporary family affection: such calls are not just about keeping in touch, they are a way of loving too; and they are sometimes a way of fighting as well. 'Skyping' or 'Facetiming' might be frequent and can seem mundane – just a question of routine – but what they entail is a measure of important things to families. This makes this collection of interest to anyone concerned with family life and the evolving ways in which technology has a role in it.
Originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics 27:3 (2017).
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SMS Communication
Editor(s): Louise-Amélie Cougnon and Cédrick FaironPublication Date July 2014More LessThe media often point an accusatory finger at new technologies; they suggest that there is always a loss of information or quality, or even that computer-mediated communication is destroying language. Most linguists, on the contrary, are firmly convinced that it is better to consider language as an evolving and changing entity. From this point of view, language is a social tool that has to be studied in-depth through the prism of objectivity, as a process in motion which is influenced by new social and technological stakes, rather than as a fading organism. In this volume we study and describe the societal phenomenon of SMS writing in its full complexity. The aim of this volume is threefold: to present recent linguistic research in the field of SMS communication; to inform the reader about existing large SMS corpora and processing tools and, finally, to display the many linguistic aspects that can be studied via a corpus of text messages.
These articles were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes Vol. 35:2 (2012).
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