Books

Until recently, most linguistic theories as well as theories of cognition have avoided use of the notion of continuity. At the moment, however, several linguistic trends, sharing a preoccupation with semantico-cognitive problems (e.g. cognitive grammars, 'psychomechanics', 'enunciative theories'), are trying to go beyond the constraints imposed by discrete approaches. At the same time, mathematical (e.g. differential geometry and dynamical systems) and computer science tools (e.g. connectionism) have been proposed that can be used for modelling of continuous linguistic phenomena.In this volume, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians and computer scientists discuss which semantic phenomena (linked to the lexicon, to grammatical theories or to syntactic structures) call for continuous models and which formalisation tools can contribute to the development of such models. The first part of the book is devoted to linguistic issues, the second part deals with modelling issues.Many important questions are raised in the discussion, for instance: Is continuity just a convenient representation of gradual yet discrete facts, or is it an intrinsic characteristic of semantic phenomena? How can the introduction of continuity be reconciled with a methodology based on the falsifiability of theories? What is the link between continuity and Gestalt theory? Can linguistic continuity be accounted for by mathematical models? What about statistical models? How can continuity be implemented on a digital and therefore discrete machine?

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric.

Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.

This volume deals with a variety of pragmatic issues involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second-language acquisition and cross-cultural studies. Part I contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from contrastive work, for example, the question of tertium comparationis and its place in the development of contrastive studies as well as the applicability of generalizations proposed by speech-act theorists in contrasting concrete languages and cultures. The second part tackles a number of pragmatic issues involved in second-language learners' written productions, classroom discourse, as well as more general questions pertaining to pragmatic errors and learners' interlanguage. An Index of terms and an Index of names complete the volume.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations, while being adapted to target audience’s preferences to a large extent, are clearly susceptible to source language interference when it comes to more fine-grained differences. The book discusses which general factors determine the degree of impact of source language features on translations and also comments on the possibility of source language influence on target language norms via translations. The book is of interest to researchers and students in a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, translation studies, genre analysis and stylistics.

The papers in this volume provide a contrastive application of Construction Grammar. By referencing a well-described constructional phenomenon in English, each paper provides a solid foundation for describing and analyzing its constructional counterpart in another language. This approach shows that the semantic description (including discourse-pragmatic and functional factors) of an English construction can be regarded as a first step towards a "tertium comparationis" that can be employed for comparing and contrasting the formal properties of constructional counterparts in other languages. Thus, the meaning pole of constructions should be regarded as the primary basis for comparisons of constructions across languages – the form pole is only secondary. This volume shows that constructions are viable descriptive and analytical tools for cross-linguistic comparisons that make it possible to capture both language-specific (idiosyncratic) properties as well as cross-linguistic generalizations.

This volume presents a rather complete survey of the research activities of the Prague group of algebraic linguistics. Some of the papers included bear witness to the fact that algebraic linguistics, or the formal description of language, is not the only domain in which the Prague group is active. Typological and empirically oriented discussions are represented as well, and so are accounts of some of the experimental systems from the domains of computational linguistics and natural language comprehension. Most of the papers included here have been published (partly in Czech) in periodicals and miscellanies, some of which are not easily accessible; a smaller part consists of papers written specifically for the present volume. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which contains generally oriented papers. The second section consists of contributions devoted to the core of the empirical problems of sentence structure. The third section includes papers concerning specific questions of the syntax of Czech, and section four is oriented towards the experimental systems prepared by the Prague group.

The claim that “…pronominals have phonological features only where they must, for some reason”, is strongly supported by the occurrence of the null pronoun PRO as coined and introduced by Noam Chomsky. How reference of PRO is determined is the main subject of control theory, the subsystem of core grammar to which this study is dedicated. Chomsky has not followed up his “natural suggestion that choice of controller is determined by theta roles or other semantic properties of the verb, perhaps pragmatic conditions of some sort.”

But then, a great many students of control have engaged in exploring thematic roles as tools most suitable for investigating control.

Shifting analysis of control to the relationship between thematic features carried by PRO and its potential controller respectively, was a turning point in control theory. Control proved to be a by-product of satisfying matching conditions that exist between thematic properties of PRO and its licit controller. The constraints derived from them are not construction-specific.

If grammar and pragmatics seem to go hand in hand, their complicity in determining control behavior is elucidated by showing that pragmatic factors can be referred to by grammatical constraints. Data of nine languages are used in the study.

This collective volume focuses on two closely connected issues whose common denominator is the embattled notion of the subject. The first concerns the controversies on the nature of the subject and related notions, such as the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘self’. From both theoretical and historical viewpoints, several of the contributors show how different and incompatible perspectives on the subject can help us understand today’s world, its habits, style, power relations, and attitudes. For this purpose, use is made of insights in a broad range of disciplines, such as sociology, psychoanalysis, pragmatics, intellectual history, and anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach helps to clarify the multifaceted character of the subject and the role it plays nowadays as well as over the centuries.

The second issue concerns the subject in inter-personal as well as in intra-personal controversies. The enquiry here focuses on the ways in which different aspects of the subject and subjective differences affect the conduct, content, and rationality of controversies with others as well as within oneself on a variety of topics. Among such aspects, the contributors analyse the subject’s emotions, cognitive states, argumentative practices, and individual and collective identity. The interaction between the two issues, the controversies on the subject and the subject of controversies, sheds new light on the debate on modernity and its alleged crisis.

Inspired by Marcelo Dascal’s theory of controversies, this volume includes studies in the theory of controversies, studies of the history of controversy forms and their evolution, and case-studies of particular historical and current controversies.

The purpose of this volume is to identify a taxonomy of controversies and also to sense a line of development for the phenomenon of controversies itself.

At the same time, we want to ask ourselves about the impact and the spread of controversies in the contemporary world, eminently intended as a heuristic element facilitating knowledge.

For all these reasons, the fundamental aim of the volume is to provide the reader with a selection of current theoretical and practical perspectives on controversies, and to offer a broad picture of the complex range of definitions, meanings and practices connected to them.

The essays that are collected in Controversy and Confrontation provide a closer insight into the relationship between controversy and confrontation that deepens our understanding of the functioning of argumentative discourse in managing differences of opinion. Their authors stem from two backgrounds. First, the controversy scholars Dascal, Marras, Euli, Regner, Ferreira, and Lessl discuss historical controversies in science, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective; Saim concentrates on a historical controversy; Fritz provides a historical perspective on controversies by analyzing communication principles. Second the argumentation scholars Johnson, van Laar, van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels address theoretical or empirical aspects of argumentative confrontation; Aakhus and Vasilyeva examine argumentative discourse from the perspective of conversation analysis; Jackson analyzes argumentative confrontation in a recent debate between scientists and politicians. Last but not least, two contributors, Kutrovátz and Zemplén, make an attempt to bridge the study of historical controversy and the study of argumentation.

This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.

The volume argues for the use of multi-methodological strategies in linguistic research. In its lead chapter, in addition, the thorny issue of phenomenological pluralism is explored in detail. From a usage-based perspective, the individual chapters demonstrate methodological pluralism in the investigation of meaning, language acquisition, and discourse. The chapters report on studies in which the use of corpus data is combined with other methodological tools, e.g. experimentally elicited findings, showing how introspection and the analysis of performance data go hand in hand to provide empirical support for researchers’ hypotheses. Some of the authors inspire the discussion in usage-based linguistics, proposing innovative methods of analysis. Others adopt such methods and combine them in original ways. The cutting-edge studies presented in this volume should be of great interest to scholars and students of cognitive and corpus linguistics who want to familiarize themselves with recent methodological advances and their applications in the field.

This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.

Today, computer-mediated communication spans a range of activities from interactive messages to word processing. Researchers interested in this new technology have concentrated on its effects in the workplace for knowledge production and dissemination or on its word processing function. The study reported here examines communication events in which the computer is the medium and views such computer-mediated communication from the perspective of language use. Its goal is to understand, through data collected from an anthropological perspective, the ways of communicating used by members of an established community of computer users. In particular, it answers the questions: (i) How do computer communicators choose among the available media and modes of communication? (ii) What are the basic and recurring discourse patterns across media and modes through which this community achieves its institutional goals of innovation and product development? (iii) How do the answers to the previous two questions inform our understanding of language use in general?

This book investigates the notion of conversational dominance in depth, and seeks to establish a systematic method of analysing it. It also offers a new insight into the role of gender and the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms in the first and second language conversations among native speakers of Japanese.

Drawing upon a critical synthesis of insights from several different fields, including Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis, the author proposes an innovative analytical framework for operationalising the concept of dominance in conversation. She then applies this framework to the empirical analysis of Japanese speakers’ L1 and L2 conversations, finding direct evidence for the important role of gender and pragmatic transfer in conversational dominance.

By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to discourse analysis, the author offers a new perspective into the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms. She does so by demonstrating how the notion of self-oriented and other-oriented conversational styles and strategies can affect the level of transfer of interactional behaviour differently for male and female speakers.

This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversational storytelling and to test the analytical techniques proposed.

Using transcriptions of stories from everyday talk, Norrick explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama, namely Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and Beckett’s “Endgame”.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the research community, the book is a focused exploration of discourse patterns of Alto Perené Arawak, with emphasis on conversational structures. The book’s methodological scaffold is based on proposals and insights from multiple research fields, such as comparative conversation analysis, sociology, interactional linguistics, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and prosodic typology. The interactional patterns of a small Arawak language of Peru are shown to share the common infrastructure reported in the organization of conversation across other languages and cultures. Yet the analysis demonstrates a variety of unique nuances in the organization of interactional behavior of Alto Perené Arawak participants. The peculiarities observed are attributed to the language-specific semiotic resources and participants’ orientation to the local cultural norms. The book’s structured examination of conversational data of a small indigenous language of South America is anticipated to be of utility to linguistic research on understudied non-Western languages.

This is the first book on coordinating constructions that adopts a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Coordination has been studied intensively in English and other major European languages, but we are only beginning to understand the range of variation that is found world-wide. This volume consists of a number of general studies, as well as fourteen case studies of coordinating constructions in languages or groups of languages: Africa (Iraqw, Fongbe, Hausa), the Caucasus (Daghestanian, Tsakhur, Chechen), the Middle East (Persian and other Western Iranian languages), Southeast Asia (Lai, Karen, Indonesian), the Pacific (Lavukaleve, Oceanic, Nêlêmwa), and the Americas (Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan). A detailed introductory chapter summarizes the main results of the volume and situates them in the context of other relevant current research.

This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.

This volume brings together papers which address issues regarding the copy theory of movement. According to this theory, a trace is a copy of the moved element that is deleted in the phonological component but is available for interpretation at L(ogical) F(orm). Thus far, the bulk of the research on the copy theory has mainly focused on interpretation issues at LF. The consequences of the copy theory for syntactic computation per se and for the syntax–phonology mapping, in particular, have received much less attention in the literature, despite its crucial relevance for the whole architecture of the model. As a contribution to fill this gap, this volume congregates recent work that deals with empirical and conceptual consequences of the copy theory of movement for the inner working of syntactic computations within the Minimalist Program, with special emphasis on the syntax–phonology mapping.

This book brings together contributions from a diverse collection of scholars who explore different ways of combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, studying discourse at the prosodic, lexical, and textual levels. Both spoken and written discourse are investigated in a variety of settings, including academia, the workplace, news, and entertainment. Not only does the volume offer a rich sample of English-language discourse from around the world­, including international, learner, and non-standard varieties of English, ­but it also covers a range of topics and methods. This book will be of particular interest to researchers and students specializing in discourse studies, English linguistics, and corpus linguistics.

The articles in this edited volume represent a broad coverage of areas. They discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled. A number of concrete examples are given of how authentic corpus material can be used for different learning activities in the classroom. It is also shown how specific learner problems for example in the area of phraseology can be studied on the basis of learner corpora and textbook corpora. On the basis of learner corpora of speech and writing it is further shown that even advanced learners of English are uncertain about stylistic and text type differences.

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.

Corpus-based contrastive and translation research are areas that keep evolving in the digital age, as the range of new corpus resources and tools expands, opening up to different approaches and application contexts. The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some recent advances and explorations. After an introductory chapter which outlines language technologies applied to translation and interpreting with a view to identifying challenges and research opportunities, the first part of the book is devoted to current advances in the creation of new parallel corpora for under-researched areas, the development of tools to manage parallel corpora or as an alternative to parallel corpora, and new methodologies to improve existing translation memory systems.

The contributions in the second part of the book address a number of cutting-edge linguistic issues in the area of contrastive discourse studies and translation analysis on the basis of comparable and parallel corpora in several languages such as English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish, thus showcasing the richness of the linguistic diversity carried out in these recent investigations.

Given the multiplicity of topics, methodologies and languages studied in the different chapters, the book will be of interest to a wide audience working in the fields of translation studies, contrastive linguistics and the automatic processing of language.

Corpus linguistics has had a revolutionary impact on grammar and discourse research. Not only has it opened up entirely new theoretical perspectives and methodological possibilities for both fields, but it has also to a considerable extent erased the boundaries that have traditionally been drawn between them. This book showcases a variety of current corpus-based approaches to the study of grammar and discourse, and makes a case for seeing grammar and discourse as fundamentally inter-related phenomena. The book features contributions from leading experts in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, critical discourse studies, genre and register analysis, phraseology, language learning and teaching, languages for specific purposes, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, systemic functional linguistics and text linguistics. An essential reference point for future research, Corpora, Grammar and Discourse has been edited in honour of Susan Hunston, whose own work has consistently pushed at the boundaries of corpus-based research on grammar and discourse for over three decades.

The Corporate Terminologist is the first monograph that addresses the principles and methods for managing terminology in content production environments that are both demanding and multilingual, such as those found in global companies and institutions. It describes the needs of large corporations and how those needs demand a new, pragmatic approach to terminology management. The repurposability of terminology resources is a fundamental criterion that motivates the design, selection, and use of terminology management tools, and has a bearing on the definition of termhood itself. The Corporate Terminologist describes and critiques the theories and methods informing terminology management today, and practical considerations such as preparing an executive proposal, designing a termbase, and extracting terms from corpora are also covered. This book is intended for readers tasked with managing terminology in today’s challenging production environments, for those studying translation and business communication, and indeed for anyone interested in terminology as a discipline and practice.

Corpus and Context explores the relationship between corpus linguistics and pragmatics by discussing possible frameworks for analysing utterance function on the basis of spoken corpora. The book articulates the challenges and opportunities associated with a change of focus in corpus research, from lexical to functional units, from concordance lines to extended stretches of discourse, and from the purely textual to multi-modal analysis of spoken corpus data. Drawing on a number of spoken corpora including the five million word Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE, funded by CUP (c)), a specific speech act function is being explored using different approaches and different levels of analysis. This involves a close analysis of contextual variables in relation to lexico-grammatical and discoursal patterns that emerge from the corpus data, as well as a wider discussion of the role of context in spoken corpus research.

Grammaticalization is an important concept in general and typological linguistics and a prominent type of explanation in historical linguistics. For historical corpus linguists, grammaticalization theory provides a frame of orientation in their effort to analyze and systematize a fast-accumulating mass of data. Students of grammaticalization have become increasingly aware of the potential of existing corpora and established corpus-linguistic methodology for their work. This book continues and develops the dialogue between the two fields. All the contributions are based on extensive use of various electronic corpora. Relating corpus practices to recent theoretical concerns of grammaticalization studies they deal with grammaticalization and historical sociolinguistics, lexicalization and grammaticalization, layering, frequency, grammaticalization and dialects, degrammaticalization and grammaticalization in a contrastive perspective. The papers show that a synthesis of corpus methodology and grammaticalization studies leads to new and interesting insights about the mechanisms of language change and the communicative functions of language.

From Twitter to Reddit, Facebook, and WhatsApp – social media is a part of modern everyday life. Studying the language used on social media platforms presents great opportunities as well as challenges to corpus linguists. The contributions in Corpus Approaches to Social Media address technical, ethical, and methodological issues by showcasing in-depth social media studies as conducted by corpus scholars. The chapters are based on a variety of social media platforms and include corpus perspectives on the language of online communities, linguistic variation in short media texts, and the role of images in computer-mediated communication. A particularly strong point of the collection are the detailed accounts of the methodological aspects of working with social media corpora. The volume features research applying traditional corpus linguistic methods to social media data as well as novel and innovative research methods for the analysis of multimodal material and atypical corpus texts.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover, it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book), corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III), and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

With an ever-growing body of corpus linguistic tools, resources and applications, it becomes increasingly important to reflect critically on the underlying assumptions that corpus linguistics is based on. Focusing on meaning and methods, this book tackles fundamental concepts and approaches that define the discourse of the field. Internationally renowned contributors address topics that range from the history of corpus linguistics to contrastive perspectives between languages, to interpreting patterns in corpora as evidence of both mainstream discourses and individual voices within them. This collection not only adds to our understanding of the fundamentals of corpus linguistics, it also brings innovative meanings to the corpus linguistics discourse. It has been edited in honour of Wolfgang Teubert, who for decades has been a significant voice in this discourse.

This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies.

Focusing on the growing trend of employing the present tense in storytelling, this book explores present-tense narrative in contemporary fiction. Using a corpus approach, speech, writing, and thought presentation in 21st-century present-tense narrative is compared with 20th-century past-tense narrative. An in-depth comparative analysis reveals previously undiscovered innovative features specific to how character discourse is presented in modern narratives. Notably, narrative tenses have an impact on thought presentation; in present-tense narrative, Free Direct Thought (FDT) emerges as frequently as Free Indirect Thought (FIT), a departure from the dominance of FIT in modern past-tense narrative. This book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and those who have found themselves absorbed in a 21st-century work of present-tense fiction.

Professional translators are increasingly dependent on electronic resources, and trainee translators need to develop skills that allow them to make the best use of these resources. The aim of this book is to show how CULT (Corpus Use for Learning to Translate) methodologies can be used to prepare learning materials, and how novice translators can become autonomous users of corpora. Readers interested in translation studies, translator training and corpus linguistics will find the book particularly useful. Not only does it include practical, technical advice for using and learning to use corpora, but it also addresses important issues such as the balance between training and education and how CULT methodologies reinforce student autonomy and responsibility. Not only is this a good introduction to CULT, but it also incorporates the latest developments in this field, showing the advantages of using these methodologies in competence-based learning.

English causative constructions with cause, get, have and make are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics, which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach). From a methodological point of view, the study illustrates the complementarity of corpus and elicitation data, and offers tools and methods that could be used to investigate other syntactic structures. Finally, the book also has a pedagogical dimension in that it examines how the research findings can be applied to foreign language teaching.

Nowadays, linguists do not question the existence of synchronic variation, and the dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony. They recognize that synchrony can be motivated regionally (diatopic variation), sociolinguistically (diastratic variation), or stylistically (diaphasic variation). But, further, they can also recognize the hybrid nature of synchrony, which is referred to as "dynamic synchrony." This conception of synchrony assumes that similar patterns of usage can coexist in a community during a certain period and that their mutual relations are not static but conflicting enough to result in a future systematic change through symptomatic synchronic variation. Emergence of a large corpus of written texts for some languages has enabled quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of the synchronic conditions for diachronic changes, over both long and short spans of time. Most of the 14 papers in this volume represent studies on synchronic and diachronic variations based on such corpus data. For sale in all countries except Japan. For customers in Japan: please contact Yushodo Co.

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch, old English, Italian, and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches, some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots, and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

This is the second volume of the series "Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics", a product of the 21st century COE program held at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). The project has an objective to realize an integration of theoretical and applied linguistics on the basis of computer sciences. With a view to practically applying the results of linguistic analysis to language education, the promotion of individual language research has become a high-priority issue. A new field of linguistic research is intended to be developed by elucidating the state of linguistic usage based on the analysis of large amounts of linguistic data. The volume, thus, consists mainly of language-specific corpus-based analyses on sentence structures in ten different languages such as Nuuchahnulth, Korean, Chinese, Malay, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, French, English and Spanish. It also includes papers that deal with various theoretical issues in contrastive linguistics and typology.

This volume comprises nine contributions that were written by up-and-coming corpus-based researchers with varied areas of expertise, who were all disciples of Douglas Biber sometime in the past two decades. These papers cover a wide variety of linguistic analyses and describe the principles of the Flagstaff school: a careful procedure for language corpora collection with special consideration for corpus size, representativeness, sampling and systematic analysis; the use of computer programming abilities that allow the posing of corpus-based research questions never asked before; and a strong emphasis on the combination of quantitative methods based on sound and innovative statistical procedures complemented with comprehensive qualitative functional analyses of the language. This volume has been edited in honor of Douglas Biber, a pioneer of the American school of corpus-based research.

This volume presents new findings based on the analysis of spoken corpora in thirteen different Afro-Asiatic languages – a unique endeavor in the domain of lesser-described languages. It will be of interest to corpus linguists, general linguists, typologists, and linguists specializing in Afro-Asiatic languages. In addition to the rarity of corpus studies based on endangered and lesser-described languages, the volume is remarkable due to its focus on the role of prosody in interaction with several other phenomena, including code-switching and borrowing. Phonology, syntax, and information structure are explored, and the issue of the elaboration of strategies for the typological comparison of corpora is addressed in several papers. The volume also contains a presentation of software development conducted within the scope of the CorpAfroAs project and based upon the widely used ELAN. The sound-indexed, and morphosyntactically-annotated corpora, with their OLAC metadata and several other deliverables can be accessed and searched at http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/scl.68.website.

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 volume brings together recent work in generative syntax on correlative relative constructions. Greatly expanding on the Hindi-oriented scope of previous studies, it describes and analyzes correlative constructions in a range of languages, such as Basque, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian and Tibetan, in comparison to correlativization in Hindi. The articles zoom in on three areas of interest: firstly, the similarities and differences between correlatives and other wh- and relative constructions; secondly, the derivation of correlative constructions and the position correlative clauses occupy in the host clause and thirdly, the matching effects that characterize the pairings between relative phrases and demonstrative phrases. The studies presented here will appeal to researchers and students with an interest in syntax in general and relativization strategies in particular.

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a maelstrom of social, cultural, and political changes—as well as some surprising linguistic ones. This volume explores these dramatic changes through the lens of Cognitive Linguistics, analysing noteworthy examples of pandemic discourse to reveal correspondences and contrasts between different cultures’ conceptions of the illness and its aftermath. The contributions examine a variety of genres, including newspaper articles, storefront signs, artistic creations, personal interviews, social media comments, and political speeches. They look at communication in various domains—business, media, politics, economics, art, and psychiatry. And they compare past and present, showing how the modern pandemic both continued and interrupted previous patterns of discourse around illness and disease. These diverse analyses show how Cognitive Linguistics, on the cutting edge of quantitative, sociocultural, and interdisciplinary turns in linguistics, can be a powerful theoretical tool in uncovering parallels and variations in how different cultures communicate in times of crisis.

This monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way, the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other, which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners.

To illustrate the theory, the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves.

This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover, it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour, business communication, and computer-mediated communication.

Creative Confluence is a highly original work, building bridges between physics, biology, technology, economy, organizations, neuropsychology, literature, arts, and cultural history. It is an attempt to explain the process of creativity as a universal principle of nature, cutting through the composition of atoms as well as human design of novel combinations. Creative Confluence is yet another impressive book and a sequel to Epistemics of the Virtual, indicating that perception and imagination operate in close contact. In a clear and light tone, the work holds that rational problem-solving strategies are most relevant in deterministic problem spaces whereas creativity is pertinent in more probabilistic situations. Theories of creativity and innovation are explored by means of computer simulations. Conditionals that favor creativity such as diversity, tolerance, and openness are discussed, forwarding a compelling vision of creative leadership.

Situated among fields (applied linguistics, creative writing studies, writing studies), this book empirically explores the language of writers in contexts of learning externalized in literary genres. At its core, this book features linguistic and thematic analysis of the writing and reflections of adults who experienced what they usually described as meaningful CW in university coursework, sometimes in science and research-focused courses where they might not have expected to compose a literary genre. In addition to synthesizing empirical studies that in total included more than 3,500 participants, chapters present new research involving about 400 more. This book is meant to be substantial in its goal of systematically organizing what is known about CW’s relationship to writers: in terms of feelings of engagement, gains in content knowledge, and revelations about oneself and others.

Although there is a substantial amount of linguistic research on standard language acquisition, little attention has been given to the mechanisms underlying second dialect acquisition. Using a combination of function-based grammar and sociolinguistic methodology to analyze topic marking strategies, the unguided acquisition of a standard by speakers of nonstandard varieties is examined in two distinct linguistic and geographical situations: in a Caribbean creole situation (Belize), with special attention to the acquisition of acrolects by native speakers of basilects, and in a noncreole situation (PRC), documenting the acquisition of standard Chinese (Putonghua) by speakers of nonstandard varieties represented in Cultural Revolution literature, Wuhan Chinese, and Suzhou Wu story-telling style. In both cases psychosocial factors, linguistic bias toward nonnative renderings of the standard varieties, the social status of their speakers, and related political and educational consequences play an important role in the development of second dialects. The broad-ranging analysis of a single feature of oral discourse leads to the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations in acquisition studies and results in an evaluation of the putative uniqueness of creole languages. Related issues addressed include the effect of linguistic bias on the development and use of language varieties by marginalized groups; the interaction of three major language components — semantics, syntax, and pragmatics — in spontaneous communication; and the development of methods to identify discourse units. The ultimate goal underlying the comparison of specific discourse variables in Belizean and Chinese standard acquisition is to evaluate the relative merits of substratal, superstratal, and universal explanations in language development.