Books

This book takes stock of current research into computer learner corpora conducted both by ELT and SLA specialists. It should be of particular interest to researchers looking to assess its relevance to SLA theory and ELT practice. Throughout the volume, emphasis is also placed on practical, methodological aspects of computer learner corpus research, in particular the contribution of technology to the research process. The advantages and disadvantages of automated and semi-automated approaches are analyzed, the capabilities of linguistic software tools investigated, the corpora (and compilation processes) described in detail. In this way, an important function of the volume is to give practical insight to researchers who may be considering compiling a corpus of learner data or embarking on learner corpus research.The volume is divided into three main sections:

• Section 1 gives a general overview of learner corpus research;

• Section 2 illustrates a range of corpus-based approaches to interlanguage analysis;

• Section 3 demonstrates the direct pedagogical relevance of learner corpus work.

This volume is about computers and translation. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer.

The editor and main contributor, Harold Somers, is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 years’ experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, Somers is editor of one of the field’s premier journals, and has written extensively on the subject, including the field’s most widely quoted textbook on MT, now out of print and somewhat out of date.

The current volume aims to provide an accessible yet not overwhelmingly technical book aimed primarily at translators and other users of CAT software.

What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics, a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences, for example:

• One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g.

Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer). • Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing.

• The mind cannot be understood in terms of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. belief, desire, intention).

• One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven.

• Thoughts are sentence-tokens, and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic, not the semantic, properties of those tokens.



In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind, John-Michael Kuczynski argues that these implausible but widely held views are direct consequences of a popular doctrine known as content-externalism, this being the view that the contents of one’s mental states are constitutively dependent on facts about the external world. Kuczynski shows that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between, on the one hand, what is literally meant by linguistic expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must work through to compute the literal meanings of such expressions.

The second half of the present work concerns the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Underlying CTM is an acceptance of conceptual atomism – the view that a creature can have a single concept without having any others – and also an acceptance of the view that concepts are not descriptive (i.e. that one can have a concept of a thing without knowing of any description that is satisfied by that thing). Kuczynski shows that both views are false, one reason being that they presuppose the truth of content-externalism, another being that they are incompatible with the epistemological anti-foundationalism proven correct by Wilfred Sellars and Laurence Bonjour. Kuczynski also shows that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as “computation”, “syntax”, “algorithm” and “formal truth”; and he provides novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms. (Series A)

In this book, the micro-modular approach known as Tiernet within Conceptual Semantics is introduced. Constructions make up an important part in the approach, but in this approach constructions are considered to be exceptions, licensed links between micro-modules, one of the kinds of symbolic modules in the approach. Similar to construction grammar approaches, the micro-modular approach takes a solid interest in the ‘periphery’ and thus also studies irregular linking principles like constructions.

The book details particulars in the development of generative grammar and the relation of Conceptual Semantics to this development, and then introduces the micro-modular approach and shows its usefulness for the description of language generally by not only using examples from English, but also, and in particular, by applying the micro-modular approach of Conceptual Semantics to data from Finnish.

As time cannot be observed directly, it must be analyzed in terms of mental categories, which manifest themselves on various linguistic levels. In this interdisciplinary volume, novel approaches to time are proposed that consider temporality without time, on the one hand, and the coding of time in language, including sign language, and gestures, on the other. The contributions of the volume demonstrate that time is conceptualized not only in terms of space but in terms of other domains of human experience as well.

Renowned specialists in the study of time, the authors of this volume investigate this fascinating topic from a variety of perspectives – philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, (neuro)psychological, and computational – demonstrating a familiarity with both classical and recent approaches to the study of time and including up-to-date corpus-based methods of study.

The volume will be of interest to philosophers, linguists (including specialists in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics), anthropologists, (neuro)psychologists, translators, language teachers, and graduate students.

A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon is a lexical research tool for persons interested in the Hopi language. An effort has been made to include the most frequent forms of basic roots. The work is designed to serve as wide-ranging an audience as possible: Hopi speakers as well as those not fluent in this language, the scholar as well as the general reader. The lexicon treats the Third Mesa dialect and the vocabulary items are limited to items of common usage. The work is presented in two sections: the first and main section is Hopi-English and the second is an English-Hopi index.

'Conference Interpreting: What do we know and how?' is the title of a round-table conference (Turku 1994) organised to assess the state of the art in conference interpreting research. The result is collected in this volume with fully coordinated reports on the round tables. The book presents an exciting coverage of the field, touching on methodology, communication, discourse, culture, neurolinguistic and cognitive aspects, quality assessment, training and developing skills.

This companion volume to Conference Interpreting – A Complete Course provides additional recommendations and theoretical and practical discussion for instructors, course designers and administrators. Chapters mirroring the Complete Course offer supplementary exercises, tips on materials selection, classroom practice, feedback and class morale, realistic case studies from professional practice, and a detailed rationale for each stage supported by critical reviews of the literature. Dedicated chapters address the role of theory and research in interpreter training, with outline syllabi for further qualification in interpreting studies at MA or PhD level; the current state of testing and professional certification, with proposals for an overhaul; the institutional and administrative challenges of running a high-quality training course; and designs and opportunities for further and teacher training, closing with a brief speculative look at future prospects for the profession.

That linguistics, L2 acquisition and speech pathology impinge on each other in areas of vital importance to each discipline seems to be almost undeniable. All three fields are concerned with the characterization of language in one form or another; and all deal with the acquisition of language by one segment of the population or another. But although these fields of inquiry share a general domain, the specific goals of the individual disciplines are distinct in that each approaches the problem of language description and acquisition from a different perspective. Each field has developed expertise in its respective area of the problem of language description and acquisition. It seems reasonable, then, that each field has something to contribute to, and something to gain from, the others. It is the goal of this volume to create a dialogue in this area that is both fruitful and ongoing.

Situated at the interface between corpus linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics, this volume focuses on conjunctive markers expressing contrast in English and French. The frequency and placement patterns of the markers are analysed using large corpora of texts from two written registers: newspaper editorials and research articles. The corpus study revisits the long-standing but largely unsubstantiated claim that French requires more explicit markers of cohesive conjunction than English and shows that the opposite is in fact the case. Novel insights into the placement preferences of English and French conjunctive markers are provided by a new approach to theme and rheme that attaches more importance to the rheme than previous studies. The study demonstrates the significant benefits of a combined corpus and Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to the cross-linguistic analysis of cohesion.

This monograph presents a view on grammaticalisation radically different from standard views centering around the cline of grammaticality. Grammar is seen as a complex sign system, and, as a consequence, grammatical change always comprises semantic change. What unites morphology, topology (word order), constructional syntax and other grammatical subsystems is their paradigmatic organisation. The traditional concept of an inflexional paradigm is generalised as the structuring principle of grammar. Grammatical change involves paradigmatic restructuring, and in the process of grammatical change morphological, topological and constructional paradigms often connect to form complex paradigms. The book introduces the concept of connecting grammaticalisation to describe the formation, restructuring and dismantling of such complex paradigms. Drawing primarily on data from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, the book offers both a broad general discussion of theoretical issues (part one) and three case studies (part two).

As of March 2017, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. It is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. 

Clausal connection is one of the key building blocks of language and thus a field where a wide range of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive phenomena meet. The availability of large databases as well as considerable advances in corpus-linguistic methods have strengthened the interest in the history of features linking clauses or larger chunks of text. The papers in this volume combine a thorough corpus-based analysis of the history of individual connectives, their co-occurrence patterns, and patterns of variation and change from both intra- and inter-systemic perspectives with a variety of methodological tools, ranging from sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis to pragmatics, text linguistics and discourse analysis. Drawing on quantitatively and qualitatively improved data, the studies reconstruct the history of a wide range of connectives in English from various new theoretical perspectives.

The papers in this volume of Consciousness & Emotion Book Series are organized around the theme of "enaction." Enactive emotional processes are not merely the recipients of information or the passive victims of input and learning. The organism first is engaged in an ongoing, complex pattern of self-organizational activity, for the purpose of maintaining a dynamical continuity of pattern across changes of subserving micro-constituents and environmental conditions, making use of multiple shunt mechanisms, feedback loops, and other complex dynamical features. Self-organizational structure is used to distinguish between action and mere reaction. Accordingly, the papers of this volume by leading students of emotion such as Jaak Panksepp, Luc Ciompi, Thomas Natsoulas, Farzaneh Pahlavan, Michela Balconi, Todd Lubart, Louise Sundararajan, Jordan Petersen and others address three main issues:

I. Emotional influences on perception and thought

II. Agency and choice

III. Agency and moral value

What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural.

This groundbreaking hypothesis is supported by recent empirical findings in both perception and neuroscience, and is herein tested against a series of objections of both conceptual and empirical nature: the traditional mind-brain identity arguments from illusion, hallucinations, dreams, and mental imagery. The theory is then compared with existing externalist approaches including disjunctivism, realism, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind. Can experience and objects be one and the same?

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal, the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition, the somewhat controversial claim that “consciousness entails self-consciousness” is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science, perception, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and psychopathology. However, the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and, in turn, sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness, behavior, memory, intentionality, and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work. (Series A)

A collection of stimulating studies on the past, the present, and the future of consciousness, Consciousness Evolving contributes to understanding some of the most important conceptual problems of our time. The advent of the modern synthesis together with the human genome project affords a platform for considering what it is that makes humans distinctive. Beginning with an essay that accents the nature of the problem within a behavioristic framework and concluding with reflections on the prospects for a form of immortality through serial cloning, the chapters are divided into three sections, which concern how and why consciousness may have evolved, special capacities involving language, creativity, and mentality as candidates for evolved adaptations, and the prospects for artificial evolution though the design of robots with specific forms of consciousness and mind. This volume should appeal to every reader who wants to better understand the human species, including its distinctive properties and its place in nature. (Series A)

This integrated approach to the psychology of consciousness arises out of Mandler’s 1975 paper that was seminal in starting the current flood of interest in consciousness. The book starts with this paper, followed by a novel psychological/evolutionary theoretical discussion of consciousness, and then a historically oriented presentation of relevant functions of consciousness, from memory to attention to emotion, drawing in part on Mandler’s publications between 1975 and 2000.

The manuscript is controversial; it is outspoken and often judgmental. The book does not address speculations about the neurophysiological/brain bases of consciousness, arguing that these are premature, and it is highly critical of philosophical speculations, often ungrounded in any empirical observations. In short it is a psychological approach — pure and simple.

This book is the result of intensive and continued discussions about the social role of language and its conceptualisations in societies other than Northern (European-American) ones. Language as a means of expressing as well as evoking both interiority and community has been in the focus of these discussions, led among linguists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists, and leading to a collection of essays that provide studies that transcend previously considered approaches. Its contributions are in particular interested in understanding how the attitude of the individual towards societal processes and strategies of norming is negotiated emotionally, and how individual interests and attitudes can be articulated. Discourses on public spaces are in the focus, in order to analyse those strategies that are employed to articulate dissent (for example, in the sense of face-threatening acts). This raises a number of questions on the spatial and public situatedness of emotions and language: How is the public space dealt with and reflected in language as property, heritage, and as a part of ascribed identities? Which role do emotions play in this space? How is emotion employed there as part of place making in relation to identity constructions? What is the connection between emotion, performance and emblematic spaces and places? Which opportunities of the violation of norms and transgression do such public spaces offer to actors and speakers? These questions intend to address the communicative representation of core cultural processes and concepts.

The present study examines the problem of fortis and lenis in approximately 150 dialects of southern Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Alsace, and the German-speaking minorities in Italy, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The Upper German dialects are of particular interest from this point of view, because voice and aspiration, the features traditionally associated with strength, are generally absent. Changes related to strength such as lenition, vowel lengthening, simplification of geminates, and sandhi phenomena receive special attention. The findings are put into their appropriate context by comparison to the results of research on the status of strength in standard German and the modern Germanic languages. Although the realization of strength is language-specific and varies according to word-position, it can be equated with consonant length in standard German and Upper German dialects.

Conspiracy Theory Discourses addresses a crucial phenomenon in the current political and communicative context: conspiracy theories. The social impact of conspiracy theories is wide-ranging and their influence on the political life of many nations is increasing. Conspiracy Theory Discourses bridges an important gap by bringing discourse-based insights to existing knowledge about conspiracy theories, which has so far developed in research areas other than Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The chapters in this volume call attention to conspiracist discourses as deeply ingrained ways to interpret reality and construct social identities. They are based on multiple, partly overlapping analytical frameworks, including Critical Discourse Analysis, rhetoric, metaphor studies, multimodality, and corpus-based, quali-quantitative approaches. These approaches are an entry point to further explore the environments which enable the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the paramount role of discourse in furthering conspiracist interpretations of reality.

Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry, attention, memory, affect, pain, dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity, supervenience, realization, emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness (AiCR 90), this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together, for the first time, scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic.

It is a commonplace to say that the meaning of text is more than the conjunction of the meaning of its constituents. But what are the rules governing its interpretation, and what are the constraints that define well-formed discourse? Answers to these questions can be given from various perspectives. In this edited volume, leading scientists in the field investigate these questions from structural, cognitive, and computational perspectives. The last decades have seen the development of numerous formal frameworks in which the structure of discourse can be analysed, the most important of them being the Linguistic Discourse Model, Rhetorical Structure Theory and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. This volume contains an introduction to these frameworks and the fundamental topics in research about discourse constraints. Thus it should be accessible to specialists in the field as well as advanced graduate students and researchers from neighbouring areas. The volume is of interest to discourse linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and computational linguists.

The analysis of discourse is probably one of the most complex problems of linguistics. It can be approached from many different directions, involving a large variety of different methods. This volume unites psycholinguistic studies, investigations of logical and computational models of discourse, corpus studies, and linguistic case studies of language-specific devices. This variety of approaches reflects the complexity of discourse production and understanding, and it also reflects the necessity of understanding the complex interplay of diverse parameters which influence these processes. The growing importance of corpus-based and experimental approaches to discourse analysis is duly reflected in this volume. Most of the chapters make use of them in one or the other form. This collection of articles grew out of the third installment of the Constraints in Discourse conferences, and will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

An in-depth investigation of constraints on error variables in grammar with special reference to bilingual misspelling orthographies. A corpus of errors is examined in minute detail. In the course of this analysis, received categories and standard assumptions about linguistic errors are critically scrutinized; some are sharpened, and others are abandoned. Many conceptual snarls having to do with the notion of error in linguistic performance are untangled in this book.

This books aims to open up new perspectives in the study of language proficiency by bringing together current research from different fields in psychology and linguistics. All contributions start out from empirical studies, which are then related to applications in language assessment. The book also serves as a survey of recent developments in psycholinguistic research in the Netherlands. The book starts out with a thorough introduction of international literature on models of language proficiency, language development and its assessment. Section 1 deals with first language proficiency and addresses such problems as grammar in early child language, grammatical proficiency and its (in)variance across a range of ages, reading abilities, and writing skills. Section 2 focuses on multilingual proficiency and deals with test bias in relation to the background of the second language learner, bilingual proficiency in ethnic minority children, the development of the second language learner lexicon, communicative competence of school-age children in the context of second language learning, the assessment of foreign language attrition and the dimensionality in oral foreign language proficiency.

This book is a description of the process of constructing a productive Other for the purpose of being admitted to Canada as a Convention refugee. The whole claiming procedure is analyzed with respect to two actual cases, and contextualized by reference to pertinent national and international jurisprudence. Since legal analysis is deemed insufficient for a complete understanding of the argumentative and discursive strategies involved in the claiming and “authoring” processes, the author makes constant reference to methodologies from the realm of literary studies, discourse analysis and interaction theory, with special emphasis upon the works of Marc Angenot, M.M. Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Jürgen Habermas and Teun van Dijk. In so doing, he illustrates a reductive movement that inevitably occurs in legal argumentation which results in the displacement the subject from the realm of “refugee claimant” to that of claimant as “diminished Other.”

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to first person non-singular reference (‘we’). Its aim is to explore the interplay between the grammatical means that a language offers for accomplishing collective self-reference and the socio-pragmatic – broadly speaking – functions of ‘we’. Besides an introduction, which offers an overview of the problems and issues associated with first person non-singular reference, the volume comprises fifteen chapters that cover languages as diverse as, e.g., Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Cha’palaa and Norf’k, and various interactional and genre-specific contexts of spoken and written discourse. It, thus, effectively demonstrates the complexity of collective self-reference and the diversity of phenomena that become relevant when ‘we’ is not examined in isolation but within the context of situated language use. The book will be of particular interest to researchers working on person deixis and reference, personal pronouns, collective identities, etc., but will also appeal to linguists whose work lies at the interface between grammar and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis.

As language historians we believe that the subject of our study is neither natural languages nor idiolects which speakers have always been able to develop individually (loosely what Chomsky calls L-i), but rather the social constructions of reference shared by all speakers (basically what Chomsky terms as L-e ). In this context the language historian essentially studies how a public L-e is built such that it can be understood as the language of all (i.e. hiding L-i variations) and also how L-e succeed in replacing the primary reality of idiolects, even if only in the imagination.

Writing represents a crucial turning point in language construction, because it made it possible to materialize the abstraction that, until then, related speakers could only guess and besides it comes into competition with individual languages.

In modern centuries, the provision of grammars, dictionaries and other such learning tools and systematizing instruments strengthens the idea that, because of their normative character, languages can be learned through study. Mythical stories encourage the achievement of prescriptive rules and lead speakers to link emotions to their language. Therefore, the topics of reflection that we want to discuss in this volume are: Norms, Myths and Emotions related to language construction.

Since its foundation in the 1980's, Construction Grammar has been crossing the traditionally imposed borders. From superimposed levels of analysis to the lexicon-grammar continuum, the constructionist approach to language has been built by, quoting Charles Fillmore, "the insistence on seeing specific grammatical patterns as serving given semantic (and often pragmatic) purposes, and in the effort to construct a uniform theory capable of presenting both the simplest and most general aspects of language and the large world of complex grammatical structures". In this volume, five chapters derived from the plenary talks at the 9th International Conference on Construction Grammar provide a sample of the bridges the insistence and effort of construction grammarians have built in the past three decades with other analytical models – namely Cognitive Grammar and Collostructional Analysis –, perspectives – Diachronic Construction Grammar – and applications – Language Pedagogy and Natural Language Understanding.

Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 12:1 (2020).

The present book provides an introduction to the linguistic model of Construction Grammar, offering a full analysis of the grammar of the English language. It covers all levels of morpho-syntactic form-meaning units: including sentence types, tense and aspect, argument structure, phrases, idioms, word and morphological constructions.

In line with its usage-based approach, all constructions are discussed using authentic corpus examples. In order to illustrate how constructions can be learnt, the book draws on authentic data from child language. Furthermore, corpus analysis is used to show which lexical items typically occur in the slots of constructions and make up their ‘collo-profile’.

A key feature of the book is that it develops a systematic method for showing how constructions combine to form actual utterances. For this purpose, so-called ‘construction grids’ are developed which contain all the constructions that make up even the most complex sentences and show points of overlap between them.

This edited volume showcases new work on discourse analysis by big names in the field and promising early-career researchers. Arising from the latest in the series of IWoDA workshops in Santiago de Compostela, it provides novel insights into both the explicit and the implicit characteristics of discourse as used in verbal interaction. Discourse markers, as their name indicates, are among the explicit signals of coherence, while discourse relations may be either explicit or implicit. Similarly, the discourse used for purposes of evaluation, stance-taking and interpersonal engagement is either overt or covert, as is also true of the expression of emotions and empathy. This, in general terms, is the challenging terrain into which the contributors to this volume have ventured. The book combines theoretical issues with a practical orientation, comparing languages, analysing different registers, studying the openings of Skype conversations, and much more besides; it will prove highly relevant for postgraduate and advanced practitioners of discourse analysis, interaction studies, semantics and pragmatics.

The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate, - en, - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective, the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint, the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions, and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives, from a constructional perspective.

The present volume consists of several novel and different applications of the Construction Grammar framework to areas such as language change, variation, and the internal organization of grammar. The book is a collection of articles which bring together the framework of Construction Grammar and the constantly changing language system. Thereby, two main questions are addressed which are of paramount interest to linguists working with the notion of grammatical construction: Where do constructions come from? And, how are the grammatical constructions in a given language organized to form the coherent whole which we refer to as “grammar”? The book connects the latest developments in grammatical theory and Construction Grammar with empirical findings and data, language-specific research traditions, and cross-language issues. It is aimed at linguists interested in Construction Grammar, constructional approaches to grammar more generally, language variation and change, and the internal architecture of grammar.

This volume contains selected papers from the 5th ICLC, Amsterdam 1997. The papers present cognitive analyses of a variety of constructions (phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, transitivity, accusative versus dative objects, possessives, gerunds, passives, causatives, conditionals), in a variety of languages (English, German, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Fijian). Besides analyses of ‘objective construal’, the volume reflects the increasing interest in subjectivity (grounding and speaker involvement). It also includes, lastly, contributions on the acquisition and agrammatic loss of constructions.

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in Contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First, it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans, American Sign Language, English, French, Malayalam, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second, it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category, such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third, it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural, social, and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.

The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics, and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches, focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics), including insights into new, nonstandard and little studied constructions.

Consumable Reading and Children's Literature explores how multisensory experiences enhance early childhood literacy practices through material and sensory interactions. Embodied engagements that focus on the gustatory experience and, in particular, the sense of taste are investigated by studying food-related narratives. Children’s literature and different reading scenarios involving consumable objects, packages, tableware and utensils are scrutinized. Surfaces, the underlying mechanisms that support children’s literature, are considered in connection to emerging media and groundbreaking technologies. The interdisciplinary nature of this work draws on material and surface science, human-computer interaction, arts and food studies. As innovation and everyday materials meet, the potential of hybrid narratives mimicking synesthesia emerges with discussions on cross-modal learning. This monograph will inspire the interest of not only students, teachers, scholars of children’s literature and child development but also researchers and practitioners across various artistic and scientific disciplines.

This book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma’a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors’ collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.

This collection of twenty articles, selected from the 33rd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at Indiana University in 2003, presents current theoretical approaches to a variety of issues in Romance linguistics. Invited speakers Luigi Burzio and José Ignacio Hualde contribute papers on the paradigmatics and syntagmatics of Italian verbal inflection and comparative/diachronic Romance intonation, respectively. The other papers, whose authors include both well-known researchers and younger scholars, represent such areas as French syntax (both synchronic and diachronic), second language acquisition (Spanish & English), Spanish intonation, phonology, syntax, and semantics, Italian semantics, Romanian morphology and syntax, Catalan phonology and morphology, and Galician phonology (two papers). The volume is rounded out by three explicitly comparative studies, one on proto-Romance phonology, one on microvariation in Romance syntax, and a third addressing syntactic microvariation among varieties of French and French-based creoles. Frameworks represented include Optimality Theory, Minimalism, and Construction Grammar.

Significant socio-political changes in China have had great impact on Chinese discourse. Changes to the discourse have become an increasing focus of scholarship. This book examines contemporary Chinese discourse and social practice in China with a focus on the role that language plays in the on-going transformation of Chinese society. With a view to producing new insights into the interdependence between discourse and social practice, this volume explores how discourse has been changing in a context-dependent way; how social practice can lead to shifts in the use of discourse; and how identities and attitudes are constructed through language use. Largely based on empirical studies, this book indicates that Chinese discourse has not only been an integral part of social change, but also Chinese discourse itself is changing, reflecting ideologies, values, attitudes, identities and social practice. The book is a great resource for scholars in diverse disciplinary studies including linguistics, communication, education, media and political studies concerning contemporary China.

Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change offers the first comprehensive description of Indian English and its emerging regional standard in a corpus-linguistic framework. Drawing on a wealth of authentic spoken and written data from India (including the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English), this book explores the dynamics of variation and change in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary Indian English. The aims are to document the extent of lexical and grammatical nativization at the beginning of the twenty-first century and compare contemporary Indian English to other varieties around the world (for example British and American English). The results are relevant to sociolinguists, variationists and lexicologists seeking to investigate ongoing language change in emerging standard varieties of English. With its strong empirical foundation and its comparative outlook, the book is also of interest to anyone looking for an introduction to the corpus-based description of varieties of English.

The "common core" of different sociolinguistic schools includes a number of general problems such as the social differentiation of language, the sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism and diglossia, the typology of linguistic situations, language engineering, national and standard languages and their social functions, etc. Still urgent to the sociolinguists of all countries and all trends is the problem of developing their own methodology and the application of research methods developed by other disciplines to sociolinguistics. The above-mentioned problems constitute the major thrust of this book. It is not merely a summary of studies by a certain sociolinguistic school or even several schools; the main goal of the author is to elucidate a number of major philosophical and theoretical questions, fundamental problems of sociolinguistics and methods of sociolinguistic analysis.

Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics offers a panorama of current research into multiple varieties of Spanish from several different regions (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Costa Rica, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras), Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, as well as varieties in contact with English and Purépecha. The first part of the volume focuses on the structural aspects and use of these languages in the areas of syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, diachrony, phonetics, phonology and morphology. The second part discusses the effect of interacting multiple grammars, namely, first language acquisition, second language acquisition, varieties in contact, and bilingualism. As a whole, the contributions in this volume provide a methodological balance between qualitative and quantitative approaches to Language and, in this way, represent contemporary trends in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

This is the first volume entirely dedicated to contested languages. While generally listed in international language atlases, contested languages usually fall through the cracks of research: excluded from the literature on minority languages and treated as mere ensembles of geographically defined varieties by traditional dialectology. This volume investigates the nature of contested languages, the role language ideologies play in the perception of these languages, the contribution of academic discourse to the formation and perpetuation of language contestedness, and the damage contestedness causes to linguistic communities and ultimately to linguistic diversity. Various situations and degrees of language contestedness are presented and analysed, along with theoretical considerations, exploring potential roads to recognition and issues in language planning that arise from language contestedness. Addressing the “language vs dialect” question head on, the volume opens up new perspectives that are relevant to all students and researchers interested in the maintenance of linguistic diversity.

This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

This collection of original articles focuses on the function, role, and structure of linguistic and extralinguistic “context(s)” in relation to the notion of “constructions” and in construction grammar. It thus takes up and brings together two equally complex concepts of linguistics, which both encompass structural as well as pragmatic and discourse-oriented aspects. Although both notions – contexts as well as constructions – have been under intense discussion in linguistics during the last decades with a wide span of research interests, integrative studies of these aspects have been largely missing.

The eight papers presented in this volume explore the possibilities and risks of integrating context(s) into particular constructions and construction grammar in general. Topics range from particular language and construction-specific problems such as the "polysemy" of modal verbs in relation to context-sensitive constructions, to general technical analyses and proposals, including proposals for formalizing contextual features in constructional representations.

The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced undergraduates interested in linguistic theory in general and in constructional, pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches in particular.

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language. In addition, the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English, Estonian, Finnish, and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.

This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of “belated modernity” and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region’s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies.

Contextualizing Pragma-Dialectics contains a selection of 18 article reporting on research conducted in the past decade in which the institutional context in which argumentative discourse takes place is systematically taken into account. Some articles provide relevant theoretical backgrounds, other articles make clear how the extended pragma-dialectical theory can be used to analyse and evaluate argumentative discourse in specific institutional contexts. Next to argumentative discourse in the legal domain and the medical context of health communication, a great deal of attention is paid to various argumentative practices in the political domain or dealing with specific social issues. A contribution on multimodal argumentation is also included. All contributing authors are actively engaged in the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS).