Books

This volume is concerned with one of the few thorough-going Labovian studies carried out in Britain. Based on a survey of over hundred randomly selected informants from the towns of Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield, it deals first with the methodology employed, and then sketches some aspects of the ‘traditional’ dialects of the area before describing a large number of variables. Other non-standard features encountered during the survey are described, since these too are part of the changing patterns of speech in West Yorkshire. The final chapter draws a distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘accent’ which is slightly different from that generally employed, and suggests that while ‘dialect’ features seem to have declined under the pressure of the standard language, ‘accent’ still persists as a social differentiator.

This book provides a critical edition, translation and commentary of the British Museum Incunabulum C.21.C.52 and the Cambridge Incunabulum 5.J.3.7. of the Quaestiones Alberti. Although the British Museum catalogue ascribes the incunabulum to Albertus Magnus, the authorship is debated.The format of the twenty-one questions of this text follows the standard pattern of the time: after stating the question, the author cites as argumenta opinions with which he does not agree, gives his own answer, and then refutes the argumenta.

For the author of these questions, three issues are paramount: the scientific status of grammar, the problem of universals, and the 'structure of the device' through which language was generated.

The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination – or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization – at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure, involving at least two of the languages English, German, Dutch, French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific – predominantly semantic – topics relating to German, English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination, coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related, within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.

Lo Somni (The Dream) is a dream allegory divided into four chapters or books. It was written ca. 1399 and is considered Bernat Metge’s best work. It is extremely innovative within the context of Catalan (and Iberian Peninsular) literature of the 1300’s. It consists of a dialogue between Metge-the-character and several participants (in fact the book is a dialogue between Metge and the Classical and Biblical tradition) on the topics of the immortality of the soul, the essence of religion and the dignity and moral essence of the human being. In addition to using many Classical and medieval literary sources, Lo Somni can be considered one of the first (if not the first) Humanist books to be ever written in the Iberian Peninsula. Metge wrote Lo Somni supposedly while in prison (house arrest?) following a dubious accusation about his involvement in the death of King Joan I. Metge wrote this work as a personal defense to exonerate himself and as an attempt to gain the confidence of the new King Martí l’Humà and his wife Queen María de Luna. Lo Somni ends when Metge-the-character is awaken from his dream. This foundational work also touches upon political themes pertaining to the Crown of Aragon, literary fashion and reception of Italian humanist works at the court, as well as on matters of fashion, cultural customs, taste and style.

Über den Umlaut (1843) and Über den Ablaut (1844) grew out of a review of Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik by Holtzmann, in which he also made an excursus into Bopp’s theory of vowel gradation in Sanskrit. Holtzmann was the first to observe the correlation of guṇa and accent. At the same time he noted that loss (or absence) of the accent could mean loss or shortening of a vowel. Observations which, be it in a different form, eventually found their way into a unified theory of Indo-European vowel gradation.

The two German texts are presented here in fac simile format, together with an introductory article.

This book focuses on binomials (word pairs such as heart and soul, rich and poor, or if and when), and in particular on the degree of reversibility that English binomials demonstrate. Detailed and innovative corpus linguistic analyses investigate the correlates of the degree of reversibility, linguistic constraints that influence the ordering and reversibility of binomials and the diachronic development of reversibility. In addition, judgment data are analyzed for their convergence and divergence with corpus data regarding degrees of reversibility. The book thus establishes reversibility as a complex characteristic of the binomial construction, at the same time throwing light on general questions in phraseology, lexicalization, language structure and language processing.

The globalisation of communication networks has increased the domains of translation and is challenging ever more the translator’s role. This volume is a collection of contributions from two different conferences (Misano, 1997 and Berlin, 1998). (Multi)Media translation, especially screen translation (TV, cinema, video), has made more explicit the complexities of any communication and has led us to take a fresh look at the translator’s strategies and behaviours.Several papers ponder the concepts of media and multimedia, the necessity of interdisciplinarity, the polysemiotic dimension of audiovisual media. Quite a few discuss the current transformations in audiovisual media policy. A great many deal with practices, mainly in subtitling but also in interpreting for TV and surtitling: what are the quality parameters and the conditions to meet audience’s expectations?

Finally some show the cultural and linguistic implications of screen translation. Digitalisation is changing production and broadcasting and speeding up convergence between media, telecommunications and information and communication technology.

Is (multi)media translation a new field of study or an umbrella framework for scholars from various disciplines? Is it a trick to overcome the absence of prestige in Translation Studies? Or is it just a buzz word which gives rise to confusion? These questions remain open: the 26 contributions are partial answers.

This edited volume proposes key contributions addressing the connections between two important themes: dialogue and representation. These connections were approached or interpreted in three possible ways: 1. Dialogue as representation, 2. Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues, and 3. Representations of dialogue. The first interpretation -- Dialogue as representation -- consists of exploring dialogue as an activity where many things, beings or voices can be made present, whether we think in terms of ideologies, cultures, situations, collectives, roles, etc. The second interpretation – Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues – leads scholars to explore questions of normativity, which are often associated with the notion of dialogue, when conceived as a morally stronger form of conversation. Finally, the third interpretation – Representations of dialogue – invites us to address methodological questions related to the representation of this type of conversation. Echoing Bakhtin, contributors were invited to explore the polyphonic, heteroglot, or dialogic character of any text, discourse or interaction.