Books

Although it is widely thought that structural linguistics began abruptly with the publication of Saussure's 'revolutionary' Course in General Linguistics, the work of E. F. K. Koerner has demonstrated that Saussure, for all his originality, remained true to the basic tenets of his 19th-century predecessors. In this volume, the development of modern linguistics before, during and after Saussure is traced in 20 studies honouring the scholar who has done more than anyone else to professionalize linguistic historiography during the last quarter century. Among the wide range of topics covered are: grammar and philosophy in the age of comparativism, the relation of Saussure's anagram studies to his theory of the linguistic sign, nationalist overtones in German linguistics from 1914 to 1945, and the true story (with newly discovered documentation) of why Chomsky's Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory didn't get published during the 1950s or 60s. In addition to an introductory overview of Koerner's career and a complete listing of his publications, the volume includes previously unpublished materials from Saussure's notebooks.

This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is, syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly, as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin, and Swedish.

The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions, focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns, or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns, serve as resources for projection, (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally, moment-by-moment, out of the real-time trajectories of action, (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action, and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation.

The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of syntax as fundamentally temporal, emergent, dialogic, sensitive to local interactional contingencies, and interwoven with other semiotic resources.

Interest in human emotion no longer equates to unscientific speculation. 21st-century humanities scholars are paying serious attention to our capacity to express emotions and giving rigorous explanations of affect in language. We are unquestionably witnessing an ‘emotional turn’ not only in linguistics, but also in other fields of scientific research.

Emotion in Discourse follows from and reflects on this scholarly awakening to the world of emotion, and in particular, to its intricate relationship with human language. The book presents both the state of the art and the latest research in an effort to unravel the various workings of the expression of emotion in discourse. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, for emotion is a multifarious phenomenon whose functions in language are enlightened by such other disciplines as psychology, neurology, or communication studies. The volume shows not only how emotion manifests at different linguistic levels, but also how it relates to aspects like linguistic appraisal, emotional intelligence or humor, as well as covering its occurrence in various genres, including scientific discourse. As such, the book contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary field which could be labeled “emotionology”, transcending previous linguistic work and providing an updated characterization of how emotion functions in human discourse.

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The contributions draw on the well established, converging traditions of conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis together with recent work on interactional storytelling, stylization, and multimodal analysis. By adopting a discursive approach to emotion in multilingual talk, the volume breaks with the dominant view of emotions as cognitive and intra-psychological phenomena and their study through self-report. Through detailed analyses of original recorded data, the chapters examine how participants produce emotion-implicative actions, identities, stances, and morality through their interactional work in ordinary face-to-face conversation, computer-mediated interaction, institutional talk in medical, educational, and broadcast media settings, and in research interviews. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion, multilingual speakers and settings, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

Emotional Cognition gives the reader an up to date overview of the current state of emotion and cognition research that is striving for computationally explicit accounts of the relationship between these two domains. Many different areas are covered by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this area and the book crosses a range of domains, from the neurosciences through cognition and formal models to philosophy. Specific chapters consider, amongst other things, the role of emotion in decision-making, the representation and evaluation of emotive events, the relationship of affect on working memory and goal regulation. The emergence of such an integrative, computational, approach in emotion and cognition research is a unique and exciting development, one that will be of interest to established scholars as much as graduate students feeling their way in this area, and applicable to research in applied as well as purely theoretical domains. (Series B)

It has become well recognized that affective dimensions of language constitute an integral part of the linguistic system. Japanese provides a prime example of the significance of emotivity as it has grammaticalized a wide variety of expressions to communicate affective information. The collected articles demonstrate the rich diversity of emotive communication in Japanese and analyze various expressions with theoretical perspectives that are often independent from Western models. This volume reflects the influence of traditional Japanese scholars for whom examining affective-relational aspects of language has long been a central concern. The authors are also influenced by more recent scholars in Japanese pragmatics such as Susumu Kuno, Akio Kamio, and Senko K. Maynard. They also draw on anthropological notions such as the inside vs. outside dichotomy that have been used to describe Japanese society.

This monograph is intended as a contribution to the integral description of language and verbal communication. Chapter I and Chapters VII and VIII are concerned with general problems of emotivity and expressivity in language as such and on all linguistic levels. These chapters describe emotivity from a new semiotic perspective and suggest a typology of emotive signs and meanings. Chapter II discusses general methodology of investigating and "measuring" emotive meaning in the area of word-formation (with examples from Russian). Chapters III, IV and V treat Russian diminutives fromgeneral-structural, lexical-contextual and pragmatic perspectives, while Chapter VI presents a comparison of the semantic structures of the various types of emotive noun derivatives which exist in Russian. The book thus begins with a general treatment on emotivity, goes on to consider the specific case of emotive noun-formation, giving special attention to the Russian diminutives, and then returns, by way of a comparison of the semantic structures of various types of emotive nouns, to more general problems of emotivity in language and to semiotic typology.

This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues, they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis, experimentation, or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions, delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages, range from mechanisms through which information structure, connection and discourse organization are realized, to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers, as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics, who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.

This book reports a research program into one of the most controversial questions in the syntax — processing interface: The behavior of the parser at gap positions. While the work done is largely experimental, the results are analyzed both for their relevance to sentence processing and for their implications for competing syntactic frameworks. In particular the differing predictions of PPT and HPSG for structures with dislocated constituents are tested for their empirical adequacy. The author addresses a broad range of questions about gap processing and uses a broad range of methodologies to cut through the confounds which prevent previous work providing clear answers. Wh-movement, scrambling, raising, and equi structures are all addressed, and all current accounts of the experimental evidence evaluated. The results move the debate forward significantly, and provide clear confirmation of some non-trivial claims of generative grammar.