Books

Why are some firms successful on global markets whilst others are not? In this collection of papers, a group of distinguished international researchers examine the inter-relationship between national context, firm performance and global competitiveness. In a series of empirical studies covering major industries (such as banking, telecommunications, construction, automobiles, and airlines) in a number of European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Slovenia), the studies show how distinctive patterns of firm competences and capabilities arise from national contexts. These influence the way in which firms perform in response to changing technologies and competitive pressures. Thus the impact of the globalisation of economic activity may be to reinforce existing national differences in firm performance rather than producing a homogenisation and standardisation.

This book will be of interest to researchers in business and management, sociology, economics and political science for its comparative organizational approach to problems of economic performance.

Iconicity and naturalness remain controversial concepts in recent linguistic research. The present volume aims to scrutinize unresolved issues of iconicity and naturalness in language. The studies discuss topics such as naturalism in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of linguistics, linguistic iconicity in semiotics, iconic structures in Sign Languages, natural and unnatural sound patterns, the iconic nature of parts of speech, the relation between (un)markedness and naturalness, and lexical and syntactic iconicity. The research conducted is based on sound (meta)theoretical analyses and/or original empirical research. The data and innovative views presented are bound to spark discussion in an age-old debate that has lost nothing of its significance.

The study of negation across languages has left no stone unturned with respect to a range of frequently-researched areas, such as negative raising, negative concord, and the behavior of quantifiers under negative scope. Past research has chiefly focused on the category of negation from a cross-linguistic perspective, with probably less attention devoted to the study of negation across dialects of languages, or across contact languages. The observation of universal quantification in the scope of negation in the English spoken in Singapore, for example, is an area which has been largely under-researched in the literature, as has the rarely-reported phenomenon of negative raising in Singapore English. The present volume profiles some of the problems of negation in English and Singapore English, framed against the background of studies of negation in other contact dialects of English and pidgins/creoles, and offering a diverse range of theoretical approaches to the problems.

In the last decade, there has been a revival of interest regarding negation and polarity, with much cross-fertilization between semantic and syntactic approaches. The papers in the present volume address key issues regarding the syntax and semantics of negation and polarity, including both synchronic and diachronic perpectives. Central to the discussions are the distribution of negative markers and the structure of the clause, negative concord phenomena, licensing of polarity items, similarities between Neg-movement and wh-movement. The papers, by main contributors to the field, reflect different theoretical frameworks, including Principles and Parameters and Minimalist approaches, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Formal Semantics, or approaches interested in pragmatics. The volume is of interest to syntacticians, semanticians, historical linguists, typologists, and philosophers.

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

During an election campaign in 2008, Ken Livingstone said to a newspaper reporter “this election is not a joke”. By doing so, he introduced an expectation into the discourse that someone does, in fact, think it is a joke. This book explores how it is that saying what is not the case communicates something about what is. Bringing together a focus on text with cognitive and pragmatic approaches, a case is made for an application of linguistic negation as a tool of analysis. This tool is used to explore the ideological implications of projecting or reflecting readerly expectations. This book contributes to the growing field of Critical stylistics and aims to add to the range of stylistic insights which anchor the analysis of discourse to a consideration of the nuances of language choice.

This book addresses some of the most fundamental questions that can be asked about target language (TL) acquisition in the classroom context, namely

1. What is negotiated interaction?

2. What are the main discourse functions of negotiated interaction?

3. How frequent is negotiated interaction in TL classrooms, and does this frequency vary by proficiency level?

4. To what extent does the initiation of negotiation overlap with the negotiation of power in such a setting of unequal-power discourse as the TL classroom?

The negotiation process allows TL learners to obtain ‘comprehensible input’, to receive ‘negative input’, and to produce ‘comprehensible output’. Since these are key variables in the acquisition process, by researching the negotiation work occurring in TL classroom discourse, the book fully contributes to the understanding of the process of interlanguage development in TL classrooms and thereby has major implications for TL teaching and teacher training. The book also contributes to further the understanding of negotiated interaction from a sociolinguistic standpoint: the asymmetrical nature of negotiation work in TL classrooms reflects the role and power relationships, the social organization, as well as the tacit interactional and cultural rules that seem to be at work in the TL classroom context.

The topic of negotiation has turned out to be of crucial interdisciplinary interest for our understanding of what we are doing in language use. Are we exchanging meanings defined in advance and presupposing equal understanding on the basis of a rule-governed system, or are we negotiating meaning and understanding in the framework of an open dialogic universe? Negotiation, on the one hand, can be taken as the name of a specific dialogue type or action game of bargaining. On the other hand, it represents a methodological concept for describing and explaining dialogic interaction which replaces the orthodox view of pattern transference. The papers collected in this volume deal with both versions of the concept of negotiation. This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on Pragmatics and Negotiation at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June, 1999. The dialogic aspect was taken as the key concept to guide the present selection.

Over the past 35 years urban sociolinguistics has developed upon the base of detailed case studies carried out mainly in western countries. A fundamental dichotomy informing the interpretation of variation has been carried out within what is termed the “standard-vernacular model”. Higher vs. lower social class, power vs. solidarity, open networks vs. closed networks are a few of the conceptual dyads which have been invoked to order linguistic variation operating with an input from a standard/vernacular source. The present study, based on the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, focuses on a linguistic landscape where the notions of “standard” and “vernacular” are of little relevance in ordering urban linguistic variants. It is argued that linguistic variation is best conceptualized and ordered in terms of the twin variables of neighborhood and ancestral norms. A detailed analysis of 13 linguistic variables based on a corpus of about 500,000 words invokes an urban linguistic world different from that in the West. To integrate this landscape into current sociolinguistic thinking a typology of urban variation is outlined using familar, yet relatively unutilized sociolinguistic parameters: neighborhood, ancestry, minority status and institutionalization.

This pioneering book explores in depth the role of neurotransmitters in conscious awareness. The central aim is to identify common neural denominators of conscious awareness, informed by the neurochemistry of natural, drug induced and pathological states of consciousness. Chemicals such as acetylcholine and dopamine, which bridge the synaptic gap between neurones, are the 'neurotransmitters in mind' that form the substance of the volume, which is essential reading for all who believe that unravelling mechanisms of consciousness must include these vital systems of the brain.Up-to-date information is provided on:

• Psychological domains of attention, motivation, memory, sleep and dreaming that define normal states of consciousness.

• Effects of chemicals that alter or abolish consciousness, including hallucinogens and anaesthetics.

• Disorders of the brain such as dementia, schizophrenia and depression considered from the novel perspective of the way these affect consciousness, and how this might relate to disturbances in neurotransmission.



(Series B)