Books

In this volume, second language (L2) acquisition researchers and creolists engage in a dialogue, focusing on processes at work in L2 acquisition and creole genesis. The volume opens with an overview of the relationship between L2 acquisition and pidgins/creoles (Siegel). The first group of papers addresses current language contact at a societal or an individual level (Smith; Terrill and Dunn; Bruhn de Garavito and Atoche; Liceras et al.; Müller). The second section focuses on processes characterizing various stages of L2 acquisition and creole genesis: relexification and transfer from the L1 and their role in the initial state (Sprouse; Schwartz; Kouwenberg; Aboh; Ionin). Chapters in the third section discuss processes involved in developing grammars, namely, reanalysis and restructuring (Sánchez; Brousseau and Nikiema; Steele and Brousseau). The final section concentrates on fossilization and the end state (Cornips and Hulk; Montrul; Lardiere). Between them, the chapters cover lexical, morphological, phonological, semantic and syntactic properties of interlanguage grammars and creole grammars.

Die Frage nach der Laien in der Philosophie des späteren Mittelalters wurde bis jetzt kaum oder gar nicht thematisiert. Entweder beschränkte sich die philosophiehistorische Forschung auf die Erschliessung der Texte aus der gelehrten und universitären Tradition des Philosophierens oder unterließ es, den Stand der Philosophierenden oder Adressaten zu berücksichtigen. Indessen zeigt bereits ein sehr oberflächlicher Blick auf die im späteren Mittelalter produzierten Texte philosophischen Inhalts, daß es sich lohnt, die Frage nach den »Laien« und ihrer Beziehung zur Philosophie aufzuwerfen: Es läßt sich in der Tat eine stattliche Zahl von Texten identifizieren, die für Laien geschrieben worden sind. Nicht weniger bedeutsam sind jene Texte, die von Laien verfaßt wurden. Es genügt, an Dante, Lull und Christine von Pisan zu erinnern. Sind diese Fakten für die Philosophiehistorie belanglos oder eröffnen sie den Zugang zu einer anderen Wahrnehmung der Philosophie im Mittelalter? In den fünf Studien dieses Bandes wird dafür plädiert, daß es sich lohnt, die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Laien und Philosophie genauer zu untersuchen. Dank einer sehr reichhaltigen Dokumentation eröffnet dieser Band den Zugang zu einer bisher völlig vernachlässigten Welt der mittelalterlichen Philosophie, von der die Philosophiegeschichte in Zukunft nicht mehr wird abstrahieren können. Mit gutem Recht kann hier von der Entdeckung eines anderen philosophischen Mittelalters gesprochen werden.

The relationship between landscape and culture seen through language is an exciting and increasingly explored area. This ground-breaking book contributes to the linguistic examination of both cross-cultural variation and unifying elements in geographical categorization. The study focuses on the contrastive lexical semantics of certain landscape words in a number of languages. The aim is to show how geographical vocabulary sheds light on the culturally and historically shaped ways people see and think about the land around them.

Notably, the study presents landscape concepts as anchored in a human-centred perspective, based on our cognition, vision, and experience in places. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach allows an analysis of meaning which is both fine-grained and transparent. The book is aimed, first of all, at scholars and students of linguistics. Yet it will also be of interest to researchers in geography, environmental studies, anthropology, cultural studies, Australian Studies, and Australian Aboriginal Studies because of the book’s cultural take.

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.

Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think the ideal organization of the grammar, given its need to be learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional division between language acquisition and syntax, this influential work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure, bringing syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase structure composition operations are proposed, Adjoin-α, which adjoins adjuncts into the structure, and Project-α, which fuses open class and closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept of subgrammars, successively larger grammars that take the child from the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest to those in the areas of syntax, language acquisition, learnability, and cognitive science in general.

Language Acquisition in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings builds a bridge between Second Language Acquisition and Learner Corpus Research (LCR) methodologies to take the evaluation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to a new level. The study innovates in two main ways. First, it is based on a highly diversified L2 database which includes learner corpus data as well as experimental data from the same learners. These linguistic components of the database are complemented with extensive information on learner variables, including cognitive and affective factors, which are rarely studied in LCR. Second, the study relies on multifactorial statistical analyses to assess the effectiveness of CLIL itself as well as the impact of the selectivity inherent in the CLIL system, which has frequently been ignored. The linguistic focus of the study is the English passive, which is investigated in CLIL and non-CLIL teaching materials, and subsequently related to learner output.

This is a collection of essays on the native and non-native acquisition of syntax within the Principles and Parameters framework. In line with current methodology in the study of adult grammars, language acquisition is studied here from a comparative perspective. The unifying theme is the issue of the 'initial state' of grammatical knowledge: For native language, the important controversy is that between the Continuity approach, which holds that Universal Grammar is essentially constant throughout development, and the Maturation approach, which maintains that portions of UG are subject to maturation. For non-native language, the theme of initial states concerns the extent of native-grammar influence.Different views regarding the continuity question are defended in the papers on first language acquisition. Evidence from the acquisition of, inter alia, Bernese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian and Japanese, is brought to bear on issues pertaining to clause structure, null subjects, verb position, negation, Case marking, modality, non-finite sentences, root questions, long-distance questions and scrambling.The views defended on the initial state of (adult) second language acquisition also differ: from complete L1 influence to different versions of partial L1 influence. While the target language is German in these studies, the native language varies: Korean, Spanish and Turkish. Analyses invoke UG principles to account for verb placement, null subjects, verbal morphology and Case marking.Though many issues remain, the volume highlights the growing ties between formal linguistics and language acquisition research. Such an approach provides the foundation for asking the right questions and putting them to empirical test.

This work consists of an examination and revision of some of the main theses of Speech Act Theory in relation to the problem of ideology and action-guiding language. Starting from the idea that linguistic philosophy must take into account how the social structure of the linguistic community may influence and direct the way its language is used, a critical method of analysis is proposed, developing Speech Act Theory in a way suitable for this purpose. The main guideline of this proposal is the consideration that a theory of action rather than a theory of meaning should be taken as central in the analysis of language. The notion of illocutionary force, the problem of intentions and conventions in the constitution of speech acts, the definition of context, and the classification of speech acts, are then discussed. Based on the conclusions of this discussion a pragmatic method for the analysis of language is formulated.