Books

Iconicity: East Meets West presents an intersection of East-West scholarship on Iconicity. Several of its chapters thus deal with Asian languages and cultures, or a comparison of world languages. Divided into four categories: general issues; sound symbolism and mimetics; iconicity in literary texts; and iconic motivation in grammar, the chapters show the diversity and dynamics of iconicity research, ranging from iconicity as a driving force in language structure and change, to the various uses of images, diagrams and metaphors at all levels of the literary text, in both narrative and poetic forms, as well as on all varieties of discourse, including the visual and the oral.

Several current linguistic approaches converge in rejecting the wide-spread idea that language is an autonomous system, i.e. that it is structured independently from the outside world and the natural equipment of language users. Around the world, semiotically biased linguistics (functionalism, naturalism, etc.) takes this position, which differentiates it very clearly from generative linguistics. One of the basic assumptions of such approaches is that language structure includes some non-arbitrary aspects, from the phonological through the textual level, and a great amount of research has occurred in the last decade regarding the “iconic aspects” of language(s). This volume focuses on generally neglected dimensions of language and semiotic activity, featuring contributions by philosophers, linguists, semioticians, and psychologists. After tracing the tradition of iconicity in the history of linguistic thought, the central section is devoted to specific analyses emphasizing the role of non-arbitrary phenomena in language foundation and linguistic structure. Specifically discussed are numeration systems, the gestural systems of communication among deaf people, the genesis of writing in children, and inter-ethnic communication.

In his account of text and textual meaning, Pettersson demonstrates that a text as commonly conceived is not only a verbal structure but also a physical entity, two kinds of phenomena which do not in fact add up to a unitary object. He describes this current notion of text as convenient enough for many practical purposes, but inadequate in discussions of a theoretically more demanding nature. Having clearly demonstrated its intellectual drawbacks, he develops an alternative, boldly revisionary way of thinking about text and textual meaning. His careful argument is in challenging dialogue with assumptions about language-in-use to be found in a wide range of present-day literary theory, linguistics, philosophical aesthetics, and philosophy of language.

This volume contributes to the emerging research on the social formation of translators and interpreters as specific occupational groups. Despite the rising academic interest in sociological perspectives in Translation Studies, relatively little research has so far been devoted to translators’ social background, status struggles and sense of self. The articles assembled here zoom in on the “groups of individuals” who perform the complex translating and/or interpreting tasks, thereby creating their own space of cultural production. Cutting across varied translatorial and geographical arenas, they reflect a view of the interrelatedness between the macro-level question of professional status and micro-level aspects of practitioners’ identity. Addressing central theoretical issues relating to translators’ habitus and role perception, as well as methodological challenges of using qualitative and quantitative measures, this endeavor also contributes to the critical discourse on translators’ agency and ethics and to questions of reformulating their social role.The contributions to this volume were originally published in Translation and Interpreting Studies 4:2 (2009) and 5:1 (2010).

This collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of a range of identity struggles in the workplace context. It features twenty-two case studies that present an eclectic mix of workplaces in different socio-cultural contexts. They include, among others, household workers in Peru and Hong Kong, female professionals in India and the UK, social workers in Botswana and on Canadian reserves, tourist guides in Europe and construction workers in New Zealand. The volume addresses important questions on professional competence, group membership, (sometimes competing) expectations, and identity boundaries. The chapters establish that identity struggles are a reflection of issues of knowledge, competing norms and attempts for social change.

The present volume represents a selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Ideophones held in January 1999 in St. Augustin, Germany. They center around the following hypotheses: Ideophones are universal; and constitute a grammatical category in all languages of the world; ideophones and similar words have a special dramaturgic function that differs from all other word classes: they simulate an event, an emotion, a perception through language. In addition to this unique function, a good number of formal parallels can be observed. The languages dealt with here display strikingly similar patterns of derivational processes involving ideophones. An equally widespread common feature is the introduction of ideophones via a verbum dicendi or complementizer. Another observation concerns the sound-symbolic behavior of ideophones. Thus the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound-symbolism. Finally it is made clear that ideophones are part of spoken language — the language register, where gestures are used — rather than written language.

This book examines delexical verb + noun collocations such as make a decision, give rise to and take care of in Swedish and Chinese learner English. Using a methodological framework that combines learner corpus research with a contrastive perspective, the study is one of the very few in the field to incorporate corpora of the learner’s L1 to investigate the effects of L1 influence. The book provides a highly detailed and multi-faceted analysis of delexical verb + noun collocations in terms of frequency of occurrence, lexical preferences and morphosyntactic patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results on overuse, underuse and errors are presented with linguistically and pedagogically relevant interpretations that include cultural and discourse aspects. More importantly, the book throws light on how L2 learners may alternate between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle as well as the extent and nature of L1 influence on their collocational use.

This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

The relationships between perception and imagery, imagery and spatial processes, memory and action: these are the main themes of this text. The interest in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience on imagery and spatial cognition has remarkably increased in the last decades. Different areas of research contribute to the clarification of the multiple cognitive processes subserving spatial perception and exploration, and to the definition of the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning these cognitive functions. The aim of this book is to provide the reader (post-graduate students as well as experts) with a complete overview of this field of research. It illustrates how brain, behaviour and cognition interact in normal and pathological subjects in perceiving, representing and exploring space.(Series B)