Books

This monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies, debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts, and also to investigate salient features of context. This allows a broader discussion of the role of this language in Scotland, and how different ways of constructing a language can percolate through society, appearing in both important, elite texts and discussions among ordinary people. It thus contributes to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots, but also expands the range of possible applications for critical discourse analysis approaches.

This is a theoretically oriented study of the pragmatics of Vietnamese person reference (kinship terms, personal pronouns, naming set and status terms). Drawing upon linguistic data from a radically different non-Western society and the seminal insights of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Leach, it offers a critical analysis of the major theoretical premises of dominant approaches to denotation and connotation, to knowledge of language and to knowledge of the world. The study suggests that the pragmatic presuppositions of Vietnamese person-referring forms figure in the native definitions of linguistic meanings as prominently as any denotative features. It is argued that the significance of pragmatic implications should be analyzed in relation to the native speaker's conception of the world.

This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

La Egloga II propone el caos, lo diverso, el error, y también la posibilidad de orden. Sólo en el contexto de una especie literaria flexible y multiforme — la pastoral — y de una forma de expresión proteica — el discurso — esa vasta tarea de conciliación era posible. Discurso y pastoral constituyen el ámbito dialéctico de esa armonía discorde que la Egloga II consigue por medio de un enciclopédico esfuerzo humanístico.

This monograph presents an ecological perspective to the study of language maintenance and shift in immigrant contexts. The ecology incorporates past, present and future and treats spatial and temporal dimensions as the main organizing frames in which everyday language use and identity development can be explored. The methods combine a quantitative domain-based sociolinguistic survey with discourse analytic approaches. The novel approach is valuable for fellow researchers working in interdisciplinary fields of language maintenance, language shift, multilingualism andlanguage planning in migration contexts. The ecological perspective adds to sociolinguistic theories of globalization and responds to current dynamics of translocality in modern immigrant contexts. The research presents language use and language planning efforts in the Sudanese community of Australia. Language, culture, race and ethnic identity are explored in unique sociolinguistic contexts using an emic research lens and giving voice to the participants.

The Disputationes in libros De anima, contained in the Paris Codex B.N. lat. 16627, were recorded for centuries under the name Cesare Cremonini. This study shows the Disputationes to be a transcript of a lecture held by the Jesuit Nicolaus Baldelli (1573-1655) and so, on the basis of the only known manuscript, makes accessible a text instructive for the standard and method of the Aristoteles interpretation pursued at the Collegium Romanum during the early 17th century. The edition of the third Disputatio de anima rationali secundum substantiam that follows shows in exemplary fashion the position taken by the author to the three most important and controversial disputes in rational psychology: Is the rational soul of man only a forma assistens, as contended by Averroes, or, as canonically laid down since the Council of Vienna, a genuine forma informans? Is the soul mortal, as Alexander of Aphrodisias asserted, or, since the Fifth Lateran Council’s article of faith, immortal? Is the possible intellect, as assumed by Averroes, the same in all men, or is it individually different? The study categorizes Baldelli’s teachings on these issues into the Latin Aristotelianism doxographically. An index nominum completes the volume.Die in dem Pariser Codex B.N. lat. 16627 enthaltenen Disputationes in libros De anima wurden jahrhundertelang unter dem Namen Cesare Cremoninis geführt. Die vorliegende Studie erweist die Disputationes als Nachschrift einer Vorlesung des Jesuiten Nicolaus Baldelli (1573-1655) und macht damit einen für das Niveau und die Methode der Aristoteleserklärung am Collegium Romanum im frühen 17. Jahrhundert aufschluîreichen Text nach der einzigen Handschrift zugänglich. Die sich anschlieîende Edition der dritten Disputatio de anima rationali secundum substantiam zeigt exemplarisch die Stellung des Autors zu den drei wichtigsten Streitfragen der rationalen Psychologie: Ist die vernünftige Seele des Menschen mit Averroes nur eine forma assistens oder, wie seit dem Konzil von Vienne kanonisch, eine echte forma informans? Ist sie mit Alexander von Aphrodisias sterblich oder, wie seit dem fünften Laterankonzil Glaubenssatz, unsterblich? Ist der mögliche Intellekt, wie Averroes annimmt, einer in allen Menschen, oder ist er individuell in jedem verschieden? Die Studie ordnet Baldellis Lehrinhalte in diesen Fragen doxographisch in den lateinischen Aristotelismus ein. Der Band wird durch einen Index nominum erschlossen.

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed, multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically, it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its socio-cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke (in brain and word), and solving insight problems. Theoretically, the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First, it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third, this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth, it is argued that language, far from being organism-centred, gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment. The contributions to this volume expand on those originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:3 (2009).

Throughout the years the extent of the contributions by A. Dees to the renewal of philology, has become progressively more evident. In his Etudes sur l'evolution des demonstratifs en ancien et en moyen français (1971) Dees has developed a framework within which language evolution in the past can be reconstructed in detail. A comparison of the data of the two Atlases compiled by Dees with the manuals of Old French shows the extraordinary richness of these Atlases with respect to both the visual representation and the documentation not used previously. The first section of this volume is devoted to language variation and distribution. The renewal of the stemmatology started by Dees goes back to the early 1970s. Dees proves that there is a mathematical solution to the problem of reconstructing a genealogical tree for a text. The application of this theory to manuscripts in various languages forms the second theme of this volume.

This volume contains a selection of papers from the Fifth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, dealing with subjects ranging from the classical period till the 20th century.