Browse Books

Doing more than one thing at the same time – a phenomenon that is often called ‘multitasking’ – is characteristic to many situations in everyday and professional life. Although we all experience it its real time features remain understudied. Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking offers a fresh view to the phenomenon by presenting studies that explore how two or more activities can be related and made co-relevant as people interact with one another. The studies build on the basis that multiactivity is a social verbal and embodied phenomenon. They investigate multiactivity by using video recordings of real-life interactions from a range of different contexts such as medical settings office workplaces and car driving. With the companion collection Interacting with Objects: Language materiality and social activity the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction especially the significance of embodiment materiality participation and temporality. A close appreciation of how people use language and interact for and during multiactivity will not only interest researchers in language and social interaction communication studies and discourse analysis but will be very valuable for scholars in cognitive sciences psychology and sociology.

Approximately a quarter of a century ago the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers such as movies music magazine texts student writing social media letters to the editor and reports in different languages (English Spanish Portuguese) and contexts (engineering journalism the classroom the entertainment industry the Internet etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator Doug Biber an introduction to MD statistics as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts genres and registers are used in society what their lexis and grammar look like and how they are interrelated.

This volume provides a multifaceted view of certain key themes in multilingualism research today and offers future directions for this research area in the context of the multilingual development of individuals and societies. The selection of studied languages is eclectic (e.g. Amondawa Cantonese Bulgarian Dene Dutch Eipo Frisian German Mandarin Chinese Māori Russian Spanish and Yukatek among others) they are typologically diverse and they are contrasted from a variety of perspectives such as cognitive development aging acquisition grammatical and lexical processing and memory. This collection also illustrates novel insights into the linguistic relativity debate that multilingual studies can offer such as new and revealing perspectives on some well-known topics (e.g. colour categorisation or language transfer). The critical and comprehensive discussions of theoretical and methodological considerations presented in this volume are fundamental for numerous current future empirical and interdisciplinary studies of linguistic diversity linguistic typology and multilingual processing.

The problem of form and meaning in morphology has produced an impressive amount of scholarly work over the last hundred years. Nevertheless many issues continue to be in need of clarification. The present volume assembles 18 selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 9–12 February 2012) relating to this vast field of research. The introduction provides a detailed overview of the state of the art in the field. It is followed by three articles derived from the plenaries that are dedicated to fundamental issues such as the relationship between morphological meaning and concepts between word formation and meaning change as well as indirect coding. The section papers tackle a wide array of issues including affixal polysemy pathways of grammaticalization the processing of compounds mismatches between form and meaning synonymy avoidance or the semantics of specific patterns of noun incorporation compounding reduplication and mimetic verbs.

The volume aims at a universal definition of modality or “illocutionary/speaker’s perspective force” that is strong enough to capture the entire range of different subtypes and varieties of modalities in different languages. The central idea is that modality is all-pervasive in language. This perspective on modality allows for the integration of covert modality as well as peripheral instances of modality in neglected domains such as the modality of insufficieny of attitudinality or neglected domains such as modality and illocutionary force in finite vs. nonfinite and factive vs. non-factive subordinated clauses. In most languages modality encompasses modal verbs both in their root and epistemic meanings at least where these languages have the principled distribution between root and epistemic modality in the first place (which is one fundamentally restricted in its strict qualitative and quantitative sense to the Germanic languages). In addition this volume discusses one other intricate and partially highly mysterious class of modality triggers: modal particles as they are sported in the Germanic languages (except for English). It is argued in the contributions and the languages discussed in this volume how modal verbs and adverbials next to modal particles are expressed how they are interlinked with contextual factors such as aspect definiteness person verbal factivity and assertivity as opposed to other attitudinal types. An essential concept used and argued for is perspectivization (a sub-concept of possible world semantics). Language groups covered in detail and compared are Slavic Germanic and South East Asian. The volume will interest researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics typology the semantics/pragmatics interface and language philosophy as it is part of a larger project developing an alternative approach to Universal Grammar that is compatible with functionalist approaches.

The notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued however that "Old" and "New" used traditionally for characterising information refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects as attention-driven phrases are also related to aboutness the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English German French Polish Russian Greek Latin and Japanese the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns their permutations and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.

The contributions in this volume go beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor complementing it in a number of relevant ways. Some of the papers argue for a more dynamic interdisciplinary approach to metaphor looking into it from semiotic psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Other contributions focus on the crucial role played by metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction at a discourse/textual level. Finally the volume also includes proposals which revolve around the alleged universal nature of metaphorical mappings and their suitability to account for grammatical phenomena.

The contributions in this volume display an ample gamut of theoretical approaches pointing to the viability of taking a functional-cognitive stance on the analysis of metaphor and metonymy in contrast to a purely cognitive one.

This book is structured into three major sections: i) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: revisions and recent developments; ii) metaphor and/or metonymy across different discourse/genre types; and iii) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: current applications. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:1 (2011).

This book represents a bold attempt to address contemporary issues in both metaphor and psychotherapy research. On one hand metaphor research is increasingly concerned not just with describing metaphors in discourse but how they could be used more adroitly in purposive ‘real world’ contexts such as psychotherapy. On the other hand while a growing number of mental health professionals believe that metaphors contribute in some way to the psychotherapy process their ability and willingness to use metaphors might be compromised by a relative unfamiliarity with the various nuanced aspects of metaphor theory. The present analysis of metaphors in authentic psychotherapeutic talk brings these theoretical aspects to the forefront and suggests how they can be applied to enhance the use of communication of metaphors in psychotherapy. It should be of interest to metaphor researchers mental health professionals and discourse analysts in general.

This work is composed of two parts. The first or introductory part contains a palaeographical discussion about Bodleian Library MS Auctarium D.2.19 that is to say the MacRegol Gospels or the Rushworth Gospels edited by Kenichi Tamoto and which forms the second and main part of this book. The provenience of the MS the Latin text the use of the MS and the Old English gloss are discussed in detail in the introductory part. The chief aim that the author set himself is firstly to survey preceding printed versions of the MS such as Stevenson & Waring (1856-65) and W.W. Skeat (1871-87) and secondly to publish the complete edition of the MS with the whole Latin text interlineally glossed in Old English. This work will stimulate further research into the MS in particular the comparative study of Old English glosses such as those of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

In response to the need for reliable results from natural language processing this book presents an original way of decomposing a language(s) in a microscopic manner by means of intra/inter‑language norms and divergences going progressively from languages as systems to the linguistic mathematical and computational models which being based on a constructive approach are inherently traceable. Languages are described with their elements aggregating or repelling each other to form viable interrelated micro‑systems. The abstract model which contrary to the current state of the art works in intension is exploitable for all sorts of applications where only the elements which are useful are assembled in the micro‑systems needed to solve the problem in hand. Numerous definitions schemata and examples involving many languages make the book accessible to students as well as academics and industrial researchers looking for new theories and methodologies for representations and problem solving wherever language and quality meet.