Books

This volume brings together seven eminently original attempts to answer a sorely neglected question: What are adjectives? Although the positioning of adjectives as well as aspects of their semantics have been investigated in depth, their actual status as a lexical category has generally been treated superficially in the linguistic literature.

In this volume, the different approaches to the categorial identity of adjectives put forward include their position in the inventory of lexical categories, the elusive noun-adjective link, the functional entourage of adjectives and their relational character, the role of concord and possession – and so on. The contributors bring different viewpoints as well as a variety of language data into the discussion, from Chinese to Indo-European, and on to Niger-Congo languages.

Der lange dem Duns Scotus zugeschriebene Traktat des Thomas von Erfurt wird hier erstmals in einer deutschen Übersetzung vorgestellt. Er gilt als der abschließende Höhepunkt der spekulativen Grammatik, einer der gewichtigsten Ausformungen der spätmittelalterlichen Sprachtheorie. Von Bedeutung dürfte dieser Text aber nicht nur für Mediävisten sein. Daî der Traktat auch in neueren sprachtheoretischen Ansätzen eine zentrale Rolle spielt, zeigt seine Wiederentdeckung durch Charles S. Peirce, Martin Heidegger oder den Strukturalisten Roman Jakobson. Übersetzung und Einleitung verstehen sich deshalb nicht nur als eine Verständnishilfe für den Traktat, sondern auch als ein Hinweis auf seinen historischen wie systematischen Grundlagencharakter.

Grundlagencharakter hat hier vor allem Thomas’ Theorie von einer grammatischen Bedeutsamkeit der Sprache. Danach finden sich in allen Sprachen dieselben grammatischen Formen und Funktionen und können insofern universal als die bedeutsamen Verhaltensweisen »der« Sprache (modi significandi) beschrieben werden. Freilich ist dies die Sicht eines mittelalterlichen Universalismus, der einem heutigen Sprachverständnis kaum mehr Stand hält. Von daher liegt die wirkliche Herausforderung des Traktats, die nicht nur bei den Zeitgenossen für heftige Abwehrreaktionen sorgte, sondern die auch heute nichts von ihrer Provokanz eingebüßt hat, in seiner Einsicht, daß die grammatischen Formen eine prinzipiell andere Bedeutungsstruktur besitzen als das lexikalische Inventar einer Sprache. Mit der Herausarbeitung einer solchen grammatischen Signifikationsstruktur bietet der Traktat einen äußerst lehrreichen Einblick in die Genese dessen, was mittlerweile unter dem Schlagwort der »Semantik von Formen« eine facttenreiche Wirkung entfaltet hat.

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify – and relate – the often confusing meanings of the word ‘abstract’ that one may encounter even within the same discipline. The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership – anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (series A)

This volume examines rhetorical conventions employed in mechanical engineering research to understand the knowledge-making principles of the discipline, as well as their expression within the research article. In particular, the study analyses the organisational patterns of mechanical engineering research articles using Swales’s conceptualisation of moves and steps. In addition, the research identifies the phraseology associated with specific moves and steps. The study draws on a corpus of 120 mechanical engineering research articles, equally distributed across two sub-disciplines (mechanical systems and thermal-fluids engineering), three research traditions (experimental, theoretical and mixed methods), and two publication periods (2002–2006 and 2012–2016). It adopts an integrated methodology, intertwining various approaches and perspectives including corpus linguistics, move analysis, discourse analysis and interviews to address two main strands of research enquiry: (i) What are the properties of the rhetorical structures in terms of range, frequency, and length for each section of mechanical engineering research articles? (ii) What effect does sub-discipline, research tradition and publication date have on the rhetorical structure of research articles?

Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers’ and non-native writers’ problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.

Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals is written for an audience with a general interest in readability studies, linguistics and technical writing. With the main emphasis on technical manuals the book is primarily targeted at those who have a special interest in the design and use of utility texts and how these texts are received and understood by a multifaceted audience. Accessibility is not a new research area and many explanations have been offered over the past years as to why non-experts often have difficulties in comprehending texts written by technological experts. This book offers a new approach to accessibility studies by exploring not only style, but also attitudes to style, by asking text consumers which style they prefer for different parts of the manual. A key role is played by the Systemic Functional Linguistics' notion of grammatical metaphor, a stylistic choice that is commonly used in technical literature. Grammatical metaphor — although apparently obstructing the comprehension process of some readers — is a common element in the preferred style that separates the ‘insiders’ from the ‘outsiders’. An explanation of this rather surprising result is offered by resorting to Critical Discourse Analysis.

The study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.

Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics provides readers with a much-needed insight into the development of pragmatic competence, an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics. The longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments. The analysis focuses on developments in these learners’ knowledge of discourse structure, pragmatic routines and internal modification. Findings present valuable information pertaining to the process of acquisition of pragmatic competence. They also point to the favourable but imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. A comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, an in-depth analysis and an extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, German as a foreign language and study abroad research.

This book offers the first systematic study of the early phases in the acquisition of derivational morphology from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective.

It presents ten empirical longitudinal studies in genealogically and typologically diverse languages (Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Altaic) with different degrees of derivational complexity. Data collection, analysis and systematic comparison between child speech and parental child-directed speech are strictly parallel across the chapters. In order to identify the productivity of a derivational pattern, signalling the crucial developmental stage in its acquisition, the concept of the mini-paradigm criterion was applied.

Similar developmental processes can be observed in all children, independent of the language they acquire, but the children’s courses of development also show obvious typological differences. This points towards an important impact of the structural properties of the specific language on emergence, use and the early course of development of derivational patterns.

This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection.