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This monograph presents the first book-length study to focus on formulaic humor and humorous formulae situated at the crossroads of Pragmatics Phraseology and Conversational Humor Studies. Based upon a self-compiled corpus of 34 television series (4214 episodes; 19.4 million words) it adopts a corpus-assisted exploratory mixed-method approach to analyze 13 types of humorous formulae across 146 samples. A conversation-analytical lens reveals how these formulaic patterns are systematically embedded in fictional dialogue and how they pragmatically shape scripted interaction.The study’s key contributions include a typology of humorous formulae an account of their discursive functions and new insights into their role in the stylistics of telecinematic discourse. Of special interest is its demonstration of how scripted talk employs formulaicity to generate humor efficiently and effectively. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in Linguistics Pragmatics Humor Studies and media discourse while extending existing knowledge on formulaicity in language use.

This book is the first comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the first language acquisition of four Finno-Ugric languages: Estonian Finnish Hungarian and North Saami. Ten chapters review research on phonological lexical and grammatical development bringing the research within the language family into one source enabling easy access to topics touching upon acquisition of the key linguistic domains cross-linguistic comparisons between the languages and discussion of the ways in which Finno-Ugric languages contribute to theory in the field of first language acquisition. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of language acquisition linguists psychologists clinicians and educational professionals.

This volume constitutes a significant step in establishing field research as a central methodological approach in translation and interpreting studies. Following an integrative approach it addresses both translation and interpreting across professional paraprofessional and non-professional settings. The chapters in this volume focus on lived experiences in diverse real-world contexts—including refugee centres UN missions NGOs virtual environments and the workplaces of specialised translators. They offer rich insights into the situated and dynamic nature of translation and interpreting practices and discuss common aspects and challenges such as the researchers’ reflexivity ethical considerations and the role of materiality in fieldwork. By shedding light on underexplored areas and offering critical reflections on field research methodology the volume contributes to expanding the boundaries of translation and interpreting studies and deepening our understanding of translation and interpreting in their social and material contexts.

Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

This book is an attempt to revisit the main specifically corpus-linguistic statistics/measures the field has been relying on for decades: frequency dispersion association and keyness. The book first discusses the purpose of these measures and how they have been measured. Then the book makes three main proposals: First that many measures of dispersion association and keyness are too confounded with frequency and how to 'take frequency out of them' to obtain conceptually cleaner and more interpretable measures. Second that many existing measures can be replaced by the simple information-theoretic measure of the Kullback-Leibler divergence and that it too can have frequency 'removed' from it. Third that corpus linguistics should abandon the tradition of trying to describe its findings with a single number and adopt a tupleization approach instead where we use several separate dimensions of information for description and interpretation. The book is written in an informal hands-on style and comes with its own R package featuring functions example data and several thousand lines of code exemplifying all applications.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic Romance Uralic and Mayan.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Figurativity has attracted scholars’ attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. Figurativity and Human Ecology endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined environment co-function as a system. The volume sees figurativity not only as embedded in an environment but also as a way of acting within that environment. It places figurativity within an ecological context and approaches it as a phenomenon which cuts across bodily psychological linguistic social cultural and natural environments.

Figurativity and Human Ecology will appeal to those interested in the analysis of the all-encompassing creativity of the human mind and in the methodological difficulties associated with the study of cognition.

This volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian English French Portuguese and Spanish.

This book combines explanatory breadth with analytical delicacy. It offers a comprehensive study of a broad array of traditional figures of speech by systematizing linguistic evidence of the cognitive processes underlying them. Such processes are explicitly linked to different communicative consequences thus bringing together pragmatics and cognition. This type of study has allowed the authors to provide new definitions for all the figures while making their dependency relations fully explicit. For example hypallage antonomasia anthimeria and merism are studied as variants of metonymy and analogy paragon and allegory as variants of metaphor. An important feature of the book is its special emphasis on the combinations of figures of speech into conceptually more complex configurations. Finally the book accounts for the principles that regulate the felicity of figurative expressions. The result is a broad integrative framework for the analysis of figurative language grounded in the relationship between pragmatics and cognition.

Intersubjectivity and usage play central roles in figurative language and are pivotal notions for a cognitively realistic research on figures of thought speech and communication. This volume brings together thirteen studies that explore the relationship between figurativity intersubjectivity and usage from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The studies explore the impact of figurativity on areas of lexicon and grammar on real discourse and across different semiotic systems. Some studies focus on the psychological processes of the comprehension of figurativity; other studies address the ways in which figures of thought and language are socially shared and the variation of figures through time and space. Moreover some contributions are established on advanced corpus-based techniques and experimental methods. There are studies about metaphor metonymy irony and puns; about related processes such as humor empathy and ambiguation; and about the interaction between figures. Overall this volume offers the advantages and the opportunities of an interactional and usage-based perspective of figurativity embracing both the psychological and the intersubjective reality of figurative thought and language and empirically emphasizing the multidimensional character of figurativity its central function in thought and its impact on everyday communication.

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness the emergence of fixed expressions their connection to social action the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data mostly everyday conversation in English Estonian Finnish Japanese and Mandarin with some crosslinguistic comparison.