Books
To browse by subfields of a subject, please start on the Subjects tab in the navigation bar/menu, then filter by subject-subcategory and by content type.
Information on Forthcoming Books can be found on the benjamins.com website.
241 - 248 of 248 results
-
-
The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience
More LessA face strikes us immediately as sad, and so, too, do a mourner, a willow tree, a house on a prairie, and a group of onlookers. The spontaneous emergence of affective and other qualities of people, things, places, and events falls under the heading of physiognomy, a phenomenon discussed since at least Aristotle, and a key feature of evolutionary theory, psychology, and perception as well as professional practice (“profiling”) and popular talk. However, physiognomy is a controversial topic because of a suspect history, and is often renamed as non-verbal communication.
The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered examines this venerable, attractive, and contentious topic within the unique perspective of research-oriented psychology. Included are the processes involved, primarily perceptual; origins, mainly evolutionary; and social-cultural factors as supplements. Discussed within a holistic-experiential (phenomenological)-aesthetic framework are physiognomy’s ties to the arts as well as emotions, synesthesia, learning, development, and personality. Empirical investigations are summarized, including the author’s.
-
-
-
External Possession
More LessExternal Possession Constructions (EPCs) are found in nearly all parts of the world and across widely divergent language families. The data-rich papers in this first-ever volume on EPCs document their typological variability, explore diachronic reasons for variations, and investigate their functions and theoretical ramifications. EPCs code the possessor as a core grammatical relation of the verb and in a constituent separate from that which contains the possessed item. Though EPCs express possession, they do so without the necessary involvement of a possessive predicate such as “have” or “own”. In many cases, EPCs appear to “break the rules” about how many arguments a verb of a given valence can have. They thus constitute an important limiting case for evaluating theories of the relationship between verbal argument structure and syntactic clause structure. They also raise core questions about intersections among verbal valence, cognitive event construal, voice, and language processing.
-
-
-
Extraction Asymmetries
More LessThis monograph addresses divergent views in the linguistic literature on whether German displays the that-trace effect and other subject/object asymmetries commonly found for long extractions in English and other languages. Using newly developed rating methodologies, the author exposes consistent and robust subject/object asymmetries in German – a surprisingly unequivocal result given that the existence of these effects is controversial. This finding raises important questions: how can one account for the discrepancy between the clear experimental evidence on the one hand, and the lack of consensus in the linguistic literature on the other? And secondly, it raises again the old question of why subject extractions are dispreferred. This work also provides intriguing new insights into the long-standing question on how to analyse German constructions such as Wer glaubst du hat recht? – the ‘parenthesis versus extraction debate'. In this work decisive evidence points in favour of the parenthetical analysis.
-
-
-
Extravagant Morphology
More LessTaking extra-vagans literally (Lat. ‘wandering outside, out of bounds’), this volume comprises nine case studies on extravagant morphology ranging from pattern-extending derivational processes via theory-challenging compounding processes to interface-straddling morphosyntactic phenomena. As a heuristic approach, morphological extravagance captures word-formation processes characterised by constraint violations, interface phenomena as well as borderline phenomena not easily reconcilable with traditional postulates of morphological accounts. In this regard, the notion of extravagance allows for an exploration of rule-bending language use both empirically and theoretically. The volume makes a valuable contribution to studies on morphological variation, which has only recently seen a renewed and growing interest in morphological phenomena that challenge morphological frameworks. The volume is of interest to all researchers who seek to gain a broader understanding of the mechanisms and factors at work in morphological variation and who are interested in the reassessment of morphological theorising in light of empirical data.
-
-
-
Eye Tracking and Multidisciplinary Studies on Translation
More LessThrough cohesive yet wide-ranging contributions focused on the rapidly growing area of eye tracking in Translation Studies, this volume provides readers with an insightful cross-section of the state of the art in this multidisciplinary field. Showcasing the great potential and challenges of this still nascent paradigm, it offers novel, practical methods and approaches to conduct ambitious, experimental studies. Through a variety of methodologically-oriented chapters and case studies, categorised into three key areas – ‘Method’, ‘Process’ and ‘Product’ –, the book presents some of the most up-to-date eye-tracking methods and results in Translation Studies, including experiment design, statistical and analytical approaches, the translation process, audience and reader response, and audiovisual translation. The reproducible research protocols, re-iterative approaches and ambitious triangulations of data included in this volume seek to inspire new research using eye tracking in Translation Studies by providing the necessary methodological support and ideas for new avenues of inquiry.
-
-
-
Eye-tracking in Interaction
More LessThis volume presents a state-of-the-art of current research on the role of eye gaze in different types of interaction, including human-human and human-computer interaction. Approaching the phenomenon from different disciplinary and methodological angles, the chapters in the volume are united through a shared technological approach, viz. the use of eye-tracking technology for measuring speakers’ and hearers’ eye gaze patterns while engaged in interaction. Envisioned as an ‘innovating reader’, the volume addresses key questions of interdisciplinary relevance (e.g. to what extent can the analysis of fine-grained eye gaze data, obtained with eye-tracking technology, inform conversation analysis, and vice versa?), positioning (e.g. what is the semiotic status of eye gaze in relation to linguistic signaling?), and methodology (e.g. can we strike a balance between experimental control and authenticity in setting up dialogue settings with eye-tracking technology?). The exploration of these and other questions contributes to the demarcation of a burgeoning research program.
-
-
-
Eyes on Text
More LessEyes on Text presents a contemporary overview of research on eye movements in reading and language processing by spinning around the heptagon of cognitive science, which consists of linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, artificial intelligence, education in its corners. The book consists of four parts: basics, methodology, perspectives, and bridging the gaps. After introducing the basic terminology in the first two chapters, the book introduces the methodology of the research on eyes on text, focusing on factors that shape experiment designs and data analysis. The book then introduces modeling perspectives (models of human text processing and eye movement control), empirical perspectives (eyes on text at various levels of language processing), and reader-oriented perspectives (children, elderly readers, reading disorders, and nonnative reading processes) to the study of eyes on text. The final chapters of the book discuss the diversity of the current approaches and introduce several frontiers that allow bridging the gaps between the domains that conduct studies on eyes on text. It emphasizes the incorporation of the Human-in-the-Loop (HitL) paradigm into Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications as a promising approach to bridge the gaps between the domains, also allowing designing personalized interfaces.
-
-
-
Ezourvedam
More LessThe Ezourvedam, used by Voltaire among others, as sourcebook for the most ancient of religions, was thereupon found to have been a fraud. Actually it was composed by a Christian – the text shows him to have been a French Jesuit missionary, who did not necessarily know Sanskrit – in order to convert Hindus to Christianity. The controversy surrounding the spurious Veda continues, involving a number of scholars and missionaries particularly in the question of whether or not the Veda was composed in Sanskrit or French. In tracing the history of the Ezourvedam Ludo Rocher adds a number of points, one being that the text was definitely first written in French with a view to a later Sanskrit translation or, more likely, to one of several modern Indian vernaculars. This edition is based on the manuscripts of Voltaire and Anquetil du Perron, and, especially, on a third manuscript preserved at the Bibliotheque National in Paris, wrongly catalogued there as Yajurveda. This edition is therefor markedly different from the 1778 edition by the Baron de Sainte-Croix.
-