Books

A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula is the second comparative history of a new subseries with a regional focus, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association. As its predecessor for East-Central Europe, this two-volume history distances itself from traditional histories built around periods and movements, and explores, from a comparative viewpoint, a space considered to be a powerful symbol of inter-literary relations. Both the geographical pertinence and its symbolic condition are obviously discussed, when not even contested.Written by an international team of researchers who are specialists in the field, this history is the first attempt at applying a comparative approach to the plurilingual and multicultural literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. The aim of comprehensiveness is abandoned in favor of a diverse and extensive array of key issues for a comparative agenda.A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula undermines the primacy claimed for national and linguistic boundaries, and provides a geo-cultural account of literary inter-systems which cannot otherwise be explained.

The book is the first to apply David Brazil’s Discourse Intonation systems (prominence, tone, key and termination) to the study of a corpus of authentic, naturally-occurring spoken discourses. The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic) is made up of approximately one million words consisting of four sub-corpora of equal size, namely academic, conversation, business and public. The participants are all adults and typically have either Cantonese or English as their first language. The four Discourse Intonation systems are described in terms of how the system works and how they are manifested in the corpus, both across the sub-corpora and also across speakers in the corpus. The book is accompanied with a CD containing the prosodically transcribed corpus together with iConc which is the software designed and written specifically to interrogate the HKCSE (prosodic). The issues raised and discussed are all of importance in Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Discourse Intonation, Pragmatics, and Intercultural Communication.

This essay is an attempt to build up a plausible model of the cognitive processes behind the behavior exhibited by speaker-hearers in a specific discourse situation.

In this contrastive French-English grammar, the comparisons between French structures and their English equivalents are formulated as rules which associate a French schema (of a particular grammatical structure) with its translation into an equivalent English schema. The grammar contains all the rules giving the English equivalents under translation of the principal grammatical structures of French: the verb phrase, the noun phrase and the adjuncts (modifiers). In addition to its intrinsic linguistic interest, this comparative grammar has two important applications. The translation equivalences it contains can provide a firm foundation for the teaching of the techniques of translation. Furthermore, such a comparative grammar is a necessary preliminary to any program of machine translation, which needs a set of formal rules, like those given here for the French-to-English case, for translating into a target language the syntactic structures encountered in the source language.

This volume presents a translation into English of Holger Pedersen’s Et Blik på Sprogvidenskabens Historie (Copenhagen 1916). In addition, it provides an introductory article by E.F.K. Koerner on Pedersen’s life and work, and a bibliography of his writings.

This guide provides brief descriptions and evaluations of the best reference grammars and comprehensive works on the syntax of contemporary Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Frisian, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish.

This monograph aims to close the gap in our knowledge of the nature and pace of grammatical change during the formative period of today’s Indo-Aryan languages. During the 6th-12th c. the gradual erosion of the synthetic morphology of Old Indo-Aryan resulted ultimately in the remodelling of its syntax in the direction of the New Indo-Aryan analytic type.
This study concentrates on the emergence and development of the ergative construction in terms of the passive-to-ergative reanalysis and the co-existence of the ergative construction with the old and new analytic passive constructions. Special attention is paid to the actuation problem seen as the tug of war between conservative and eliminative forces during their development. Other chapters deal with the evolution of grammatical and lexical aspect, causativization, modality, absolute constructions and subordination.
This study is based on a wealth of new data gleaned from original poetic works in Apabhraṃśa (by Svayaṃbhādeva, Puṣpadanta, Haribhadra, Somaprabha et al.). It contains sections dealing with descriptive techniques of Medieval Indian grammarians (esp. Hemacandra). All the Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa examples are consistently parsed and translated.
The opus is cast in the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar of the Prague and Amsterdam Schools. It should be of particular interest to scholars and students of Indo-Aryan and general historical linguistics, especially those interested in the issues of morphosyntactic change and typology in their sociohistorical setting.

Theory and history combine in this book to form a coherent narrative of the debates on language and languages in the Western world, from ancient classic philosophy to the present, with a final glance at on-going discussions on language as a cognitive tool, on its bodily roots and philogenetic role.
An introductory chapter reviews the epistemological areas that converge into, or contribute to, language philosophy, and discusses their methods, relations, and goals. In this context, the status of language philosophy is discussed in its relation to the sciences and the arts of language. Each chapter is followed by a list of suggested readings that refer the reader to the final bibliography.
About the author: Lia Formigari, Professor Emeritus at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Her publications include: Language and Experience in XVIIth-century British Philosophy. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1988; Signs, Science and Politics. Philosophies of Language in Europe 1700–1830. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1993; La sémiotique empiriste face au kantisme. Liège: Mardaga, 1994.

Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy.
Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors.
Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts.
Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio Benítez-Rojo and +douard Glissant, receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Benítez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice.
Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed, Cross-Cultural Studies will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars, teachers, and advanced students of the Caribbean region.

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century. He devoted his entire life to a thorough-going study of language, its structure and its use, summed up in masterly fashion in his book Language (1933). After his premature death at the age of 62, his work was at first acclaimed as an exemplary application of the scientific method to linguistics, but then fell into unjustified neglect. Now that the centenary of his birth has passed, the time has come for the story of Bloomfield's life and work to be recounted in a biography. Accordingly, basing his discussion on all available materials (including some information not accessible until recently), Professor Hall has presented Bloomfield's life history in its intellectual and cultural setting. This book is not only a biography, but also a personal memoir, in which Hall draws on his contacts with Bloomfield, who was his teacher at Chicago and a senior colleague at Yale. There emerges from this study a fuller picture than we have had heretofore, presenting both Bloomfield's recognized achievement in establishing the study of language as a scientific discipline, and the less-known aspects of his character and of his personal life, which in certain respects was very tragic and sad.

This volume is the outcome of 25 years of research into the neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. In addition to reviewing the world literature and providing a state-of-the-art account, including a critical assessment of the bilingual neuroimaging studies, it proposes a set of hypotheses about the representation, organization and processing of two or more languages in one brain. It investigates the impact of the various manners of acquisition and use of each language on the extent of involvement of basic cerebral functional mechanisms. The effects of pathology as a means to understanding the normal functioning of verbal communication processes in the bilingual and multilingual brain are explored and compared with data from neuroimaging studies. In addition to its obvious research benefits, the clinical and social reasons for assessment of bilingual aphasia with a measuring instrument that is linguistically and culturally equivalent in each of a patient’s languages are stressed. The relationship between language and thought in bilinguals is examined in the light of evidence from pathology. The proposed linguistic theory of bilingualism integrates a neurofunctional model (the components of verbal communication and their relationships: implicit linguistic competence, metalinguistic knowledge, pragmatics, and motivation) and a set of hypotheses about language processing (neurofunctional modularity, the activation threshold, the language/cognition distinction, and the direct access hypothesis).

Since the advent of the computer, terminology management can be carried out by almost anyone who has learnt to use a computer. Terminology management has proved to be an efficient tool in international communications in industry, education and international organisations. Software packages are readily available and international corporations often have their own terminology database. Following these developments, translators and terminologists are confronted with a specialised form of information management involving compilation and standardisation of vocabulary, storage, retrieval and updating.A Practical Course in Terminology Processing provides the key to methods of terminology management for the English language, for general and specific purposes. This unique course has been developed on the basis of years of teaching experience and research at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST, UK) and is particularly suitable for translation courses, freelance translators, technical writers, as well as for non-linguists who are confronted with terminology processing as part of their profession.
The 1996 reprint of the paperback edition includes an index.

A Practical Guide to Localization was written for technical translators, localization engineers, testing engineers, desktop publishers, project managers, and anyone else who may be involved in the release of multilingual products.In this second edition, translators can learn more about localizing software, online help and documentation files, and the latest translation technology tools. Localization engineers can learn all about developing, engineering, and testing multilingual software and online help projects. For project managers, there is all the information needed for planning translation and localization projects, finding resources, and ensuring product quality. New to this second, fully updated and revised edition are chapters on internationalization, multilingual desktop publishing, and software quality assurance. The book has been designed both as a reference work and a teaching tool. Visit the www.locguide.com web site for additions and updates to the book, as well as references and links relevant to technical translation and localization. The web site also contains extracts from the book, reviews, and ordering information.
Bert Esselink has been active in localization for over a decade. After graduating in technical translation and taking university classes in programming and computational linguistics he worked for several years as software localizer, localization engineer, and technical project manager at International Software Products. In 1996 he joined ALPNET in Amsterdam as localization manager before taking on the role of globalization manager, developing internal production quality standards. In January 2000 Bert joined Lionbridge to head up their European globalization consulting services.

In recent years the language of Shakespearean drama has been described in a number of publications intended mainly for the undergraduate student or general reader, but the studies in academic journals to which they refer are not always easily accessible even though they are of great interest to the general reader and essential for the specialist. The purpose of this collection is therefore to bring together some of the most valuable of these studies which, in discussing various aspects of the language of the early 17th century as exemplified in Shakespearean drama, provide the reader with deeper insights into the meaning of Shakespearean text, often by reference to the social, literary and linguistic context of the time.

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

This collection presents a balanced yet vivid picture of many of the domains of activity of lexicography. Ten contributors from eight countries discuss monolingual dictionaries (for learners and native speakers), bilingual dictionaries, an original approach to computer-aided lexicography, and the use of lexical material in language teaching. The collection of data; the inclusion, exclusion and ordering of material; definition and translation; and the provision of adequate information about grammatical valency, these are among the special topics treated, with many examples of the problems encountered and suggestions as to how they may be solved. A general introduction highlights the shared concerns that characterize the international discipline of contemporary dictionary-making.

The eleven contributions to this volume, written by expert corpus linguists, tackle corpora from a wide range of perspectives and aim to shed light on the numerous linguistic and pedagogical uses to which corpora can be put. They present cutting-edge research in the authors’ respective domain of expertise and suggest directions for future research. The main focus of the book is on learner corpora, but it also includes reflections on the role of other types of corpora, such as native corpora, expert users corpora, parallel corpora or corpora of New Englishes. For readers who are already familiar with corpora, this volume offers an informed account of the key role that corpus data play in applied linguistics today. As for readers who are new to corpus linguistics, the overview of approaches, methods and domains of applications presented will undoubtedly help them develop their own taste for corpora. This volume has been edited in honour of Sylviane Granger, who has been one of the pioneers of learner corpus research.

Language is always generated and interpreted in a certain context, and the semantic, syntactic, and lexical properties of linguistic expressions reflect this. Interactive language understanding systems, such as language-based dialogue systems, therefore have to apply contextual information to interpret their inputs and to generate appropriate outputs, but are in practice very poor at this. This book contains a number of studies in Computational Pragmatics, the newly emerging field of study of how contextual information can be effectively brought to bear in language understanding and generation. The various chapters center around the conceptual, formal and computational modeling of context in general, of the relevant beliefs of dialogue participants in particular, and of the reasoning that may be applied to relate linguistic phenomena to aspects of the dialogue context.
These issues are discussed both from a theoretical point of view and in relation to their roles in prototypical language understanding systems.

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics.
Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch, English, Greek, Danish, and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China, Russia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world.
This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.

This volume offers a description and a deep examination of discourse genres across four disciplines (Psychology, Social Work, Industrial Chemistry, and Construction Engineering), in academic and professional settings. The study is based on one of the largest available corpus on disciplinary written discourse in Spanish (PUCV-2006 Corpus of Spanish containing almost 60 million words). Twelve chapters range from the theoretical guiding principles of the research in terms of genre conception, the detailed description of each corpus (academic and professional), computational analysis from multi-dimensional perspectives, and the qualitative analysis of two specialized genres (University Textbook and Disciplinary Text) in terms of their rhetorical macro-moves and moves. Theoretically speaking, a multi-dimensional perspective (social, linguistic and cognitive) is emphasized and special attention to the cognitive nature of discourse genres is supported.

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.

According to Heidegger, naturalistic thinking is naive and unable to deal with its own essence and limitations. It can only serve the veiled interests of modern Western technology in its inherent inclination to attain global dominance. But these eight thematically intertwined essays face Heidegger’s critique of naturalistic thinking habits. The author develops a holistic and antirealistic version of naturalism. This ‘holistic naturalism’ does not approach nature as a set of entities or things which can be used for technological purposes. Instead, nature is approached as human experience which originally lacks conceptual structure and which can therefore not be fully controlled by a rational subject. (Series A)

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.

Within the field of second language acquisition, interest in the acquisition of French as a second language has a long-standing tradition, especially in the European context. The aim of this book is to offer a synthesis of current research within this area. It contains contributions from different researchers in the field, including studies on the acquisition of grammar, formulaic language, lexis and pragmatic devices, and covering interlanguage development from beginner level up to very advanced, presumably near-native levels of proficiency. The learners in the studies reported in the volume represent different L1 backgrounds and age groups. The chapters shed light on current issues in research on second language acquisition from different theoretical perspectives, and contribute to a better understanding of L2 French and SLA in general. The volume should be of interest for students, teachers and researchers of L2 French and SLA.
Originally published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition 3:1 (2012)

A major contribution to the study of language acquisition and language development inspired by theoretical linguistics has been made by research on the acquisition of Italian syntax. This book offers an updated overview of results from theory-driven experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual, early and late L2, SLI, etc.), as well as exploring possible developments for future research. The book focuses on experimental studies which address research questions generated by linguistic theory, providing a detailed illustration of the fruitful interaction between linguistic theorizing and developmental studies. The authors are leading figures in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition; their own work is featured in the research presented here. Students and advanced researchers will benefit from the systematic review offered by this book and the critical assessment of the field that it provides.

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

This is the first edited volume that tackles the acquisition of the present (tense, aspect, temporality), an under-researched area, particularly compared to the acquisition of past temporality. The first two chapters focus on the L1 acquisition of English from the perspective of the Aspect hypothesis and the Verb-Island hypothesis Wang & Shirai) and the L1 acquisition of French from the perspective of the zero-tense hypothesis (Demirdache & Lungu). The remaining chapters tackle the L2 acquisition of English (Liszka, Al-Thubaiti, Vraciu), French (Ayoun, Saillard), Spanish (Gabriele et al.), Russian (Martelle) and Japanese (Shirai & Li) by learners of different L1s (French, English, Arabic, Chinese and Korean), testing various semantic and syntactic hypotheses. The last chapter presents a summary of the findings, and offers a few conclusions as well as broad directions for future research.

This volume explores a relational pattern that occurs during one type of speech event — classroom “participant examples.” A participant example describes, as an example of something, an event that includes at least one person also participating in the conversation. Participants with a role in the example have two relevant identities — as a student or teacher in the classroom, and as a character in whatever event is described as the example. This study reports that in some cases speakers not only discuss, but also act out the roles assigned to them in participant examples. That is, speakers do, with each other, what they are talking about as the content of the example. Participants act as if events described as the example provide a script for their interaction. Drawing on linguistic pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics, the author describes the linguistic mechanisms that speakers use to act out participant examples. He focuses on the role of deictics, and personal pronouns in particular, in establishing and organizing relationships. The volume also presents a new methodological technique — “deictic mapping” — that can be used to uncover interactional organization in all sorts of speech events. Drawing on the philosophy and sociology of education, the volume discusses the social and educational implications of enacted participant examples. Educational theorists generally find participant examples to be cognitively useful, as devices to help students understand pedagogical content. But enacted participant examples have systematic relational consequences as well. The volume presents and discusses enacted participant examples that have clear, and sometimes undesirable, social consequences. It also discusses how we might adjust educational theory and practice, given the relational implications of classroom participant examples.

Supported bilaterally by Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavian Action Research Development Program (ACRES — Action Research in Scandinavia) emphasized conceptualizing research questions and self-conscious writing processes for experienced action researchers. Participants came from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States.
A learning experiment in the tradition of Scandinavian industrial democracy, ACRES had both intellectual and organizational tensions common to action research projects. This book includes theoretical and historical overviews of action research, reflections on the writing process, narratives about the design and difficult internal processes of ACRES, and a selection of the participants’ writings. A particularly unique feature of the book is the discussion of the problematic relationship between action research and conventional modes of research writing and an analysis of the complex social processes collaboratively managed projects create, in combination with a set of participant cases.

This collection of papers consolidates the observation that linguistic change typically is actualized step by step: any structural innovation being introduced, accepted, and generalized, over time, in one grammatical environment after another, in a progression that can be understood by reference to the markedness values and the ranking of the conditioning features. The Introduction to the volume and a chapter by Henning Andersen clarify the theoretical bases for this observation, which is exemplified and discussed in separate chapters by Kristin Bakken, Alexander Bergs and Dieter Stein, Vit Bubenik, Ulrich Busse, Marianne Mithun, Lene Schøsler, and John Charles Smith in the light of data from the histories of Norwegian, English, Hindi, Northern Iroquoian, and Romance. A final chapter by Michael Shapiro adds a philosophical perspective. The papers were first presented in a workshop on “Actualization Patterns in Linguistic Change” at the XIV International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. in 1999.

Within the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.

Adjectives are comparatively less well studied than the lexical categories of nouns and verbs. The present volume brings together studies in the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Four of the contributions investigate the syntax of adjectives in a variety of languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Serbocroatian). The theoretical issues explored include: the syntax of attributive and predicative adjectives, the syntax of nominalized adjectives and the identification of adjectives as a distinct lexical category in Mandarin Chinese. A further four contributions examine different aspects in the semantics of adjectives in English, French, and Spanish, dealing with superlatives, comparatives, and aspect in adjectives. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.

This work aims to constitute an objective analysis of a German World War I naval combat commander within his proper context, by closely defining both the military-technical and military-political milieux in which Franz Hipper operated. The description of Hipper’s actions in the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland and his handling of communications, airships, and the new technologies of war demonstrate the importance of the military environment. The volume also provides a glimpse into the decision-making process involved in the construction of German battle cruisers and the impact these decisions had in combat.

This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 21st and 22nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Stuttgart. The contributions provide insightful discussions of several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of contemporary and historical Germanic languages. The theoretical issues explored include: the left periphery, with a number of contributions touching on the pros and contras of cartographic accounts; different aspects of word order and how it arises from movement and clause structure; the interplay of thematic relations and case theory with the realization of DPs; and the treatment of finiteness and modal structures. This book is of interest to syntacticians working in a comparative perspective and to advanced undergraduates.

This volume presents some of the latest research in Frame Semantics, including work in computational lexicography as developed within the FrameNet project. Using varied material from English, Italian, and Japanese, the contributions collectively expand the theoretical, conceptual, and computational apparatus of Frame semantics, by studying a range of issues concerning not only lexical structure, associated with cognitive frames, but also the less studied interactional frames and their relationship to grammatical organization. While addressing a number of linguistic phenomena, such as verbs of visual perception, metaphoric language, subordinating connectives, paraphrasing, honorifics, certain pragmatic particles, basic speech acts, and the semantic structuring of legal texts, the analyses also highlight the broader question of integrating frames within rich lexical and grammatical descriptions, whether in the context of lexicon-building resources, models for knowledge representation, experimental modeling of language acquisition and processing, conceptual metaphor theory, paraphrase research, or the communicative grounding of linguistic structure.
Originally published in Constructions and Frames Vol. 3:1 (2011) and Vol. 2:2 (2010).

This collection of original research focuses on various lesser studied aspects of Greek syntax. The articles combine a sound empirical coverage within current developments of generative theory and cover a wide spectrum of areas. The syntax of sentential structure is dealt with by two articles, one is an extensive analysis of the distribution of goal and beneficiary dative DPs in Greek (and cross-linguistically) and the other addresses the relation agree in small clauses (and between adjectives and nouns). Two articles study the acquisition of the left periphery and of eventivity and one focuses on the historical evolution of participles in Greek, out of which gerunds emerged. The syntax and semantics of wh-clauses in DP positions and of the non-volitional verb θelo are the focus of two articles situated in the syntax–semantics interface. The DP domain is approached by two theoretical articles, one on a Greek possessive adjective and another on determiner heads. The final contribution studies the acquisition of the Greek definite article.

This volume on nonverbal communication studies, the most multi- and interdisciplinary contribution to this field in almost twenty years, offers numerous suggestions for further research in many hitherto unexplored areas. The twenty contributions include the most recent theoretical and empirical crosscultural studies of gestures from historical, communicative and sociopsychological perspectives. In addition the volume presents novel psychological and clinical studies of nonverbal behaviors in connection with, for instance, aphasias and children's experience of artificial limbs. A whole section is devoted to nonverbal communication in literature and literary translation, and a discussion of art and literature, which opens new avenues for literary analysis and a better understanding of reading as a recreational experience. A unique feature is a discussion of Nonverbal Communication Studies as an academic area (including detailed outlines of three current courses), complemented by an extensive bibliography.

This volume presents research on major issues in syntactic theory within Role and Reference Grammar. This theory was first presented in detail in Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar [FSUG], and these papers represent both expansions and applications of the theory to a wide range of phenomena. The first section contains an introduction to the theory which is the most thorough statement of it since FSUG, summarizing the features of Role and Reference Grammar established there and developing new theoretical components and analyses of syntactic phenomena not discussed in the earlier work. Throughout the discussion features of RRG are compared and contrasted with comparable features of other syntactic theories. The remainder of the volume is devoted to detailed analyses of specific problems, e.g. control, case marking, in a wide variety of languages, e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Nootka, Mparntwe Arrernte and Turkish. Thus the works presented here illustrate well the strong cross-linguistic approach to syntactic theory and description in Role and Reference Grammar.

Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis – both phonetic and statistical – it is possible to extrapolate the role of individual factors (socio-cultural, physiological, communicative-interactional, etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.
This book investigates the fundamental relationship between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory, acoustic, dialectological, and conversational perspectives, thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to language variation. Although presuming some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics, the book is addressed to all readers with an interest in speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction.

Any behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

This monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.

Adverbials have become an important testing ground for research on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The articles selected for this volume present recent research on this topic. Among the issues addressed are the occurrence of adverbials in various domains of the sentence Mittelfeld, left and right periphery, adverbials in front of gaps, and the influence of the discourse context on the interpretation and position of adverbials. Particular classes of adverbials that are discussed include domain, locative, temporal, manner, transparent, and degree adverbials. Beyond the exploration of these topics, the volume reflects the current debate between proponents of semantic-driven approaches to the positioning of adverbials which assume adverbials to be adjuncts and approaches that claim a primacy of syntax in conceiving of adverbials as specifiers in a universally valid hierarchy of functional projections.

Adverbs as a word class are notoriously difficult to define. The volume deals with the delimitation of this category, its internal structure, the morphological make-up of adverbs and their positions in syntactic structures. A closer look at diachronic developments sheds light on the characteristics of adverbial word-formation. Taking into account adverbs in German, English, Dutch, French and Italian, the contributions to this volume provide new insights into the characteristics of this heterogeneous and multi-faceted category and will be of interest to linguists working in the fields of morphology, syntax and language change.

Adverbs of degree form an intriguing part of the lexicon: numerous, multiform and everchanging. They also show a great variety in distribution. In this study, the characteristics of adverbs of degree are investigated from a semantic point of view. The main focus is on Dutch, but previous studies about English and German adverbs of degree are used to compare with and to build on.
The book starts with an introduction on grading and gradability, and a classification of the adverbs according to the degree they express. Next, the different lexical sources from which the adverbs emerge and the process of grammaticalization are discussed. The main part of the book is devoted to semantic restrictions on the use of adverbs of degree, on the one hand restrictions concerning the modified elements, on the other hand those concerning the environment. Topics include absoluteness versus gradability, positive versus negative evaluation, the strengthening of negation, polarity sensitivity, the logical properties of the adverbs themselves, and restrictions to reduplication and stacking.
Besides the main text, three case studies are presented in which the pecularities of some of the adverbs are investigated in depth, to show more in detail to complexities of their distribution. The appendix gives an overview of Dutch adverbs of degree.

Advice Online presents a comprehensive study of advice-giving in one particular American Internet advice column, referred to as ‘Lucy Answers’. The discursive practice investigated is part of a professional and educational health program managed by an American university. The study provides insights into the linguistic realization of both asking for and giving advice in a written form and thus adds to the literature on advice columns as a specific text genre, on advice in health care contexts, and on Internet communication. The book offers a comprehensive literature review of advice in health encounters and other contexts, and uses this knowledge as a basis for comparison. Advice Online demonstrates how qualitative and quantitative research methods can be successfully combined to arrive at a comprehensive analysis of a discursive practice. It provides essential information on advice-giving for researchers, academics and students in the fields of (Internet) communication, media studies, pragmatics, social psychology and counseling. Health educators who work for advice columns or use similar forms of communication will also benefit from the insights gained in this study.

How do participants display affectivity in social interaction? Based on recordings of authentic everyday conversations and radio phone-ins, this study offers a fine-grained analysis of how recipients of affect-laden informings deploy sound objects, i.e. interjections (oh, ooh and ah) and paralinguistic signals (whistle and clicks), for responsive displays of affectivity. Examining the use of such sound objects across a number of interactional activities including news telling, troubles talk, complaining, assessments and repair, the study provides evidence that the sound pattern and sequential placement of sound objects systematically contribute to their specific meaning-making in interaction, i.e. the management of sequence organisation and interactional relevancies (e.g. affiliation). Presenting an in-depth analysis of a little researched area of language use from an interactional linguistic perspective, the book will be of theoretical and methodological interest to an audience with a background in linguistics, sociology and conversational studies.

The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.