Books

Narrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments, of being totally absorbed in a book, a movie, or computer game. Typically we do not have any idea about how we ended up in such a state. Nor do we fully realize how we might have changed as we return for the fictional worlds we have visited. The feeling of being absorbed is one of the most illusive and transient feelings, but also one that motivates audiences to spend considerable amounts of time in narrative worlds, and one that is central to our understanding of the effects of narratives on beliefs and behavior. Key specialists inform the reader of this book about the nature of the peculiar state of consciousness during episodes of absorption, the perception of absorption in history, the role of absorption in meaningful experiences with narratives, the relation with related phenomena such as suspense and identification, issues of measurement, and the practical implications, for instance in education-entertainment.

Various fields have worked separately on topics of absorption, albeit using different terminology and methods, but having reached a high level of development and complexity in understanding absorption. Now is the time to bring them together. This volume will be a point of reference for years to come.

Comprising of more than twenty five percent of the world’s known languages, the Pacific is considered to be the most linguistically diverse region in the world. What unifies the region is the culture of storytelling, which provides a fundamental means for perpetuating cultural knowledge across generations. The volume brings together linguists, literary theorists, anthropologists and historians to explore the Pacific peoples’ constructions of identities through narrative. Chapters are organized under three themes: fine grained analysis at the storyworld level, the interactional context of narrative telling, and finally, the interconnections between narrative and cultural memory. The volume reflects the Pacific region’s rich linguistic and cultural diversity, with discussions on the narrativization patterns in Australian and New Zealand English, Palmerston Island and Pitkern-Norfl’k English, Fiji Hindi, Hawaiian, Samoan, Solomon Island Pidgin, the Australian Aboriginal languages Jaminjung and Kriol, the Micronesian languages Mortlockese and Guam Chamorros, and the Vanuatuan languages Auluan, Neverver and Sa.

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories, such as temporality, perspective, connectivity, and narrative coherence. Moreover, a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume, an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally, the effects of input on narrative construction in children’s first and second language are examined in several studies.

Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.

Conversational narratives provide valuable resources for the discursive construction and invoking of personal and sociocultural identities. As such, their sociolinguistic and cultural analysis constitute a high priority in the agenda of discourse studies. This book contributes to the growing line of discourse-analytic research on the dynamic relations between narrative forms and functions and their immediate and wider communicative contexts. The volume draws on a large corpus of spontaneous, conversational stories recorded in Greece, where everyday stortytelling is a central mode of communication in the community’s interactional contexts and thus a rich site for a meaningful enactment of social stances, roles, and relations. The study brings to the fore the stories’ text-constitutive mechanisms and explores the ways in which they situate the narrated experiences globally, by invoking sociocultural knowledge and expectations, and locally, by making them sequentially and interactionally relevant to the specific conversational contexts. The stories’ micro- and macro-level analysis, richly illustrated with narrative transcripts throughout, leads to the uncovery of a global mode of narrative performance which is based on a closed set of recurrent devices. It is argued that the choice or avoidance of this mode is at the heart of the stories’ (re)constitution of a self, an other and a sociocultural world. The numerous cases of intergenerational narrative communication (adults-children) shed additional light on the performance’s contextualization aspects and contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the dynamics of oral performances.

Besides students and researchers of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, narrative analysis and Greek studies, this book will also appeal to all those interested in communication and cultural studies.

The volume examines the role of narratives in old and new media. Its ten contributions firstly center on the various forms and functions narratives assume in computer-mediated environments, e.g. websites, weblogs, message boards, etc. In this light, past and present approaches to the description of narratives are presented and reevaluated based on their ability to capture the conceptual and methodological exigencies of new media. Secondly, the volume sheds new light upon the multimodal composition of new media narratives which typically feature multiple co-occurring semiotic modes such as speech, sound, text, static or moving images. In this vein, each paper explores a wide array of authentic examples from text genres as diverse as political speeches, real-time narratives and contemporary feature films. Its wide scope should not only appeal to linguists interested in the discursive and pragmatic dimension of narratives but also to scholars and students in other scientific disciplines.

Narrative – State of the Art which was originally published as a Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006) is edited by Michael Bamberg and contains 24 chapters (with a brief introduction by the editor) that look back and take stock of developments in narrative theorizing and empirical work with narratives. The attempt has been made to bring together researchers from different disciplines, with very different concerns, and have them express their conceptions of the current state of the art from their perspectives. Looking back and taking stock, this volume further attempts to begin to deliver answers to the questions (i) What was it that made the original turn to narrative so successful? (ii) What has been accomplished over the last 40 years of narrative inquiry? (iii) What are the future directions for narrative inquiry? The contributions to this volume are deliberately kept short so that the readers can browse through them and get a feel about the diversity of current narrative theorizing and emerging new trends in narrative research. It is the ultimate aim of this edited volume to stir up discussions and dialogue among narrative researchers across these disciplines and to widen and open up the territory of narrative inquiry to new and innovative work.

In recent years, narrative skills have been receiving increasing attention from researchers for their relevance in the development of language, literacy and socio-cognitive abilities. This volume brings together studies focusing on two key issues in the development of children’s narrative skills. The first part of the Volume addresses the issue of the interrelatedness between narrative skills and literacy, language and socio-cognitive development, as well as of the impact of narrative practices on the promotion of these different skills. The second part of the Volume addresses the issue of how early interactional experiences, particular contextual settings and specific intervention procedures, can help children promote their narrative skills.

The studies span a wide age range, from toddlers to late elementary school children, concern different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew and Italian), and consider narrative skills and practices from a rich variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

‘Scrambling’, the kind of word order variation found in West Germanic languages, has been commonly treated as a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic ‘Object Shift’. This book questions this view and defends a unified analysis on the basis of strictly syntactic and phonological evidence. Given that its main conclusions are drawn from German data, it also sheds light on several problematic aspects of the grammar of this language, which have traditionally resisted a principled account. Prominent among these are: the inconsistent behaviour of German coherent infinitives with respect to extraction of their internal arguments; the existence of a less ‘liberal’ type of ‘Scrambling’ within topicalised VPs; the link between reordering possibilities and headfinalness; the asymmetry exhibited by monotransitive and ditransitive structures with respect to the interaction between ‘Scrambling’ and the unmarked word order, and, finally, certain anomalies in the reordering of the lower arguments of ditransitive predicates that assign inherent case.

The Nation and the Child – Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930–1970 is the first comprehensive study to investigate the active role of children’s literature in the intensive cultural project of building a Hebrew nation.

Which social actors and institutions participated in creating a Hebrew children’s literature? How did they envision their young readership and what new cultural roles did they prescribe for them through literary texts? How tolerant was the children’s literary field to alternative or even subversive national options and how did the perceptions of the “national child” change in the transition from the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine to a sovereign state? This book seeks to provide answers to such questions by focusing on the literary activities of leading taste-setters and writers for children, from the most intense period of Israeli nation building – the 1930s and 1940s, the two last decades of the pre-state era, and the 1950s, the first decade following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 – through the 1960s, when the nation-building fervor gradually waned.

This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.

This volume challenges and extends the definition of right and right-wing discourse as traditionally conceived in male scholarship. The eleven papers share a common perspective: a critique of the ideology of 'natural difference' as the basis for oppression of the dominated group. In a radical feminist analysis, the relation of domination between the sexes is seen as central to the projects of the right, in which the constructions of 'nations', 'races' and 'gender' present variations in time and space. In its linking of oppressions, this books makes an important and timely contribution to feminist theory and puts the case for a radical and altogether coherent rethinking of right-wing political space.

While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

Negation and speculation detection is an emerging topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers, and there is clearly a lack of relevant textbooks and survey texts. This book aims to define negation and speculation from a natural language processing perspective, to explain the need for processing these phenomena, to summarise existing research on processing negation and speculation, to provide a list of resources and tools, and to speculate about future developments in this research area. An advantage of this book is that it will not only provide an overview of the state of the art in negation and speculation detection, but will also introduce newly developed data sets and scripts. It will be useful for students of natural language processing subjects who are interested in understanding this task in more depth and for researchers with an interest in these phenomena in order to improve performance in other natural language processing tasks.

This volume deals with issues on negation patterns in languages of West Africa and the adjacent north and east. The first aim is to provide data on various aspects of negation in African languages. Although the topics addressed here reflect a great diversity of negation patterns, the following typological features have been identified to be prominent in our region: conflict or even incompatibility between negation and focus, use of other indirect means of negating non-indicative mood (covered under the term ‘Prohibitive’), different negation patterns in different Tense-Aspect-Moods (e.g. Imperfective vs. Perfective), lack of negative indefinites, and disjunctive negative marking (often referred to as ‘double negation’). The articles presented here show that areal factors have played a significant role in the development of negation strategies in the languages of West Africa and beyond. On the other hand genetic factors seem to be less prominent.

The idea of this book on "Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description" comes from the observation that, over the last 30 years, much attention has been devoted to the manner/path divide in relation to the distinction between Verb-Framed and Satellite-Framed languages. This mainstream focus has left aside other aspects of motion event descriptions. The chapters of this volume take an in-depth look at three less-studied aspects of motion expression. The first part of the book focuses on directional deixis, especially in relation to associated motion and visual motion. The second part explores variations in Source-Goal asymmetries. The third part investigates different types of motion event constructions, e.g., with various types of co-events. Many languages are taken into consideration throughout the 11 chapters, which gives the volume a clear typological dimension. This book is intended for students and academics interested in motion, spatial semantics, typological variation and cognitive linguistics.

On the basis of the meticulous transcription/observation process of ‘Conversation Analysis’, this book observes recurrent patterns in sequences where Japanese speakers negotiate agreement and disagreement. It contributes to the growing body of research on ‘interaction and grammar’ by examining how linguistic recourses are utilized for constructing turns and anticipating the upcoming course of interaction. More specifically, it focuses on the recurrent use of two structurally different types of connective expressions: clause-initial connectives and clause-final connective particles. The study examines the occurrences of these causal and contrastive markers with reference to their sequential environment and the resulting interaction. While the introductory chapters situate this approach in the current literature, the main analytical chapters investigate the ways in which ‘delivery of agreement’, ‘delivery of disagreement’, and ‘pursuit for agreement’ are performed with the use of the different types of connective expressions. As one of the earliest conversation analytic studies of Japanese, this book also addresses methodological issues concerning cross-linguistic, cross-cultural studies of human interaction.

Observing naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in Japanese, this book examines how Japanese speakers segment their talk into relevant interactional units and use particles such as ne and sa to accomplish local pragmatic work. The study provides a conversation analytic, action-oriented account for the ubiquity of such particles in Japanese talk.

The study argues that such particles are important resources for Japanese speakers to negotiate and fine-tune particular conversational contingencies within the emerging sequential environment of the talk. Various examples show that prospective alignment and the negotiability of conversational next action are ever-present issues for Japanese conversationalists and are handled at the precise moment of their relevance through interlocutors’ deployment of ne and sa. This study thus adds to the literature on Japanese conversational interaction a novel understanding of particle use in its synthesis of functional linguistics and conversation analysis.

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience make possible an understanding of the neural events that are associated with different forms of consciousness. To fully understand and unveil the mystery of consciousness inside the brain we require examination of the concept of neural basis of conscious mind.This book provides a systematic exploration of consciousness and gives an overview of neural and quantum basis of conscious mind through careful explanation of proposed models and extends these theories challenging some generalised views on consciousness.

Each chapter provides a review of the findings and theoretical accounts related to neural basis of consciousness and the mechanisms of the different varieties of consciousness.

Professor Naoyuki Osaka (Kyoto University) has been active in experimental research on consciousness and attention for more than 15 years. (Series B)

This groundbreaking work offers a comprehensive account of brain-based research on translation and interpreting. First, the volume introduces the methodological and conceptual pillars of psychobiological approaches vis-à-vis those of other cognitive frameworks. Next, it systematizes neuropsychological, neuroscientific, and behavioral evidence on key topics, including the lateralization of networks subserving cross-linguistic processes; their relation with other linguistic mechanisms; the functional organization and temporal dynamics of the circuits engaged by different translation directions, processing levels, and source-language units; the system’s susceptibility to training-induced plasticity; and the outward correlates of its main operations. Lastly, the book discusses the field’s accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and requirements. Its authoritative yet picturesque, didactic style renders it accessible to researchers in cognitive translatology, bilingualism, and neurolinguistics, as well as teachers and practitioners in related areas. Succinctly, this piece establishes a much-needed platform for translation and interpreting studies to fruitfully interact with cognitive neuroscience.

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. New Adventures in Language and Interaction gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.

The twenty papers from the eighteenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages deal with diverse aspects of the Romance languages and Romance linguistics. They reflect the current state of Romance studies in North America and of the particular outlook among the international group of contributors and participants to LSRL 18. The thriving research front accords central importance to formal questions of synchronic analysis. The group of seven historical and typological papers amounts to a strong alternative. Several papers treat the group of Romance languages not only as a well-defined, almost exclusive research province, but move from Romance phenomena outward to other language types, even to genuinely universal dimensions. Other contributions maintain a more circumscribed outlook exploiting the typological closeness of the Romance idioms for improved analyses. Three invited contributions by Georg Bossong, Yves Charles-Morin and Maria-Luisa Rivero on typological, phonological and syntactic questions set the tone for the volume.

The analysis of language attitudes is important not only because attitudes can affect language maintenance and language change but also because such reflections and discussions can bring light to social, cultural, political and educational matters that require an interdisciplinary approach. This volume fills a crucial void in the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by introducing the latest production in the discipline of attitudes toward Spanish, Spanish sign language, Portuguese, Guarani and Papiamentu around the world, from South America and the Caribbean to the United States, Spain and Japan. The studies presented in this collection – a variety of sociolinguistic scenarios and methodological approaches – will make an important contribution to theoretical discussions on linguistic attitudes, specifically in the domains of language integration through education, language policy, and language maintenance. This book is intended for sociolinguists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities as well as graduate students enrolled in sociolinguistics courses.

This volume unifies a wide breadth of interdisciplinary studies examining the expression of motion in Slavic languages. The contributors to the volume have joined in the discussion of Slavic motion talk from diachronic, typological, comparative, cognitive, and acquisitional perspectives with a particular focus on verbs of motion, the nuclei of the lexicalization patterns for encoding motion. Motion verbs are notorious among Slavic linguists for their baffling idiosyncratic behavior in their lexical, semantic, syntactical, and aspectual characteristics. The collaborative effort of this volume is aimed both at highlighting and accounting for the unique properties of Slavic verbs of motion and at situating Slavic languages within the larger framework of typological research investigating cross-linguistic encoding of the motion domain. Due to the multiplicity of approaches to the linguistic analysis the collection offers, it will suitably complement courses and programs of study focusing on Slavic linguistics as well as typology, diachronic and comparative linguistics, semantics, and second language acquisition.

Nearly three decades since the publication of the seminal Metaphors We Live By, Cognitive Linguistics is now a mature theoretical and empirical enterprise, with a voluminous associated literature. It is arguably the most rapidly expanding ‘school’ in modern linguistics, and one of the most exciting areas of research within the interdisciplinary project known as cognitive science. As such, Cognitive Linguistics is increasingly attracting a broad readership both within linguistics as well as from neighbouring disciplines including other cognitive and social sciences, and from disciplines within the humanities. This volume contains over 20 papers by leading experts in cognitive linguistics which survey the state of the art and new directions in cognitive linguistics. The volume is divided into 5 sections covering all the traditional areas of study in cognitive linguistics, as well as newer areas, including applications and extensions. Sections include: Approaches to semantics; Approaches to metaphor and blending; Approaches to grammar; Language, embodiment and cognition; Extensions and applications of cognitive linguistics.

The articles in this volume examine a number of critical issues in grammaticalization studies, including the relationship between grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, subjectification and intersubjectification, and grammaticalization and language contact. The contributions consider data from a broad range of spoken and signed languages, including Greek, Japanese, Nigerian Pidgin, Swedish, and Turkish Sign Language. The authors work in a variety of theoretical frameworks, and draw on a number of research traditions. The volume will be of primary interest to historical linguists, though the diversity of approaches and sources of data mean that the volume is also likely have considerable general appeal.

There is an ever-growing body of work on New Englishes, and the time has come to take stock of how research on varieties of English is carried out. The contributions in this volume critically explore the gamut of familiar and unfamiliar methods applied in data collection and analysis in order to improve upon old methods and develop new methods for the study of English around the world. The authors present novel approaches to the use of the International Corpus of English, critical insights into phonological analyses of New Englishes, applications of linguistic dialectology in territories in which New Englishes are used, improvements on attitudinal research, and an array of mixed-methods approaches. The contributions in this volume also include a range of Englishes, considered not only in situ but also in online and diaspora settings, and thus question received understandings of what counts as New Englishes.

Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) considers how people can interact with robots in order to enable robots to best interact with people. HRI presents many challenges with solutions requiring a unique combination of skills from many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, social sciences, ethology and engineering. We have specifically aimed this work to appeal to such a multi-disciplinary audience. This volume presents new and exciting material from HRI researchers who discuss research at the frontiers of HRI. The chapters address the human aspects of interaction, such as how a robot may understand, provide feedback and act as a social being in interaction with a human, to experimental studies and field implementations of human–robot collaboration ranging from joint action, robots practically and safely helping people in real world situations, robots helping people via rehabilitation and robots acquiring concepts from communication. This volume reflects current trends in this exciting research field.

Who mediated intercultural exchanges in 9th-century East Asia or in early voyages to the Americas? Did the Soviets or the Americans invent simultaneous interpreting equipment? How did the US government train its first Chinese interpreters? Why is it that Taiwanese interpreters were executed for Japanese war crimes? Bringing together papers from an international symposium held at Rikkyo University in 2014 along with two select pieces, this volume pursues such questions in an eclectic exploration of the practice of interpreting, the recruitment of interpreters, and the challenges interpreters have faced in diplomacy, colonization, religion, war, and occupation. It also introduces innovative use of photography, artifacts, personal journals, and fiction as tools for the historical study of interpreters and interpreting. Targeted at practitioners, scholars, and students of interpreting, translation, and history, the new insights presented in the ten original articles aim to spark discussion and research on the vital roles interpreters have played in intercultural communication through history.

Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.

This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.

This volume complements earlier work on English as a lingua franca (ELF) by providing an in-depth study of the phenomenon from a decidedly European perspective. Distancing itself from more traditional approaches to the study of English in Europe (linguistic imperialism and “Euro-English”), the study is theoretically grounded in more recent approaches, namely the ELF paradigm and the postmodernist conceptualisation of “English”. Methodologically speaking, the study analyses language use in Eurovision Song Contest press conferences as a community of practice of European salience. The ethnographically based analyses focus on various linguistic levels, thereby producing a comprehensive picture of European ELF as a discursive formation. Various qualitative and quantitative methods are used to shed light on the following aspects: code-choice practices in ELF talk, participants’ metalinguistic comments on the use of ELF, complimenting behaviour via ELF and relativisation patterns. On the basis of this data, the concluding section advances discussions revolving around the conceptualisation of ELF in general, the connection between ELF and Europeanness, and implications for European language policies.

This is the first of two volumes of papers selected from those given at the 12th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. The second is New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics (2): Lexis and Transmission. Together the volumes provide an overview of many of the issues that are currently engaging practitioners in the field. In this volume, the primary concern is with the historical grammar of English. Some papers take a broad overview of the subject, positioning it within current advances in linguistic theory, while others deal with specific points of syntax and morphology in a historical context. There is a recurrent emphasis on data collection and analysis, with a chronological range from Old to Present Day English, and a geographical spread from Scotland to Newfoundland. Contributions from scholars around the world remind us that not only English itself but the history of English is now an international possession.

In the South-West Indian Ocean, Mauritius and Reunion are part of a group of islands where French-based Creoles are spoken. In spite of their geographical proximity, Mauritian Creole and Reunion Creole are strikingly different in their morphosyntax. The first part of this volume describes some structural properties of their grammars. Both languages also differ in the degree to which they are standardized and used in education and in public spaces. One of the goals of this volume is to examine their social status and their use in writing, especially after the introduction of Mauritian Creole as a subject in schools as one of the ancestral languages. French and Bhojpuri are also part of the multilingual Mauritian context. One chapter in this volume analyses the role of Bhojpuri in the formation of Mauritian Creole, while another studies the pronunciation of Mauritian French.

This is the first of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote address delivered by Denis Bouchard on exaptation and linguistic explanation, as well as seventeen contributions by emerging and internationally recognized scholars of Spanish, French, Italian, as well as Rumanian. While the emphasis bears on formal analyses, the coverage is remarkably broad, as topics range from morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and language acquisition. Each article seeks to represent a new perspective on these topics and a variety of frameworks and concepts are exploited: distributive morphology, entailment theory, grammaticalization, information structure, left-periphery, polarity lattice, spatial individuation, thematic hierarchy, etc. This volume will challenge anyone interested in current issues in theoretical Romance Linguistics.

This is the first book entirely and exclusively devoted to the grammar of the two copular verbs ser and estar, certainly one of the most intriguing features of Spanish grammar. Although the topic has long attracted the interest of scholars, it had never given rise to a collection of papers that covers both theoretical issues in syntax and semantics and topics in the acquisition domain. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the central research questions concerning the ser / estar alternation: the syntactic or semantic nature of the distinction, its link with aspect and with the Individual-Level / Stage-Level distinction, and its connection with interface phenomena. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Hispanic linguistics, but can be equally attractive for researchers working on Romance linguistics, theoretical linguistics (syntax, semantics, pragmatics), acquisition theory, and historical linguistics.

The 29 papers in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the Glottalic Theory and Lachmann's Law to the hermeneutic analysis of text-structure in Tacitus' Germania. The volume focuses on three themes specifically: the morphology and semantics of lexical formation; the internal and external syntax of the noun phrase; and the pragmatics of textual cohesion. The papers are descriptive rather than historical in approach, and most of the contributors are Latinists by training. For this reason the volume will be of interest not only for philologists and general linguists but also for those working with the Latin language.

The papers in this volume reflect the renewed interest in the semantics of grammatical categories and the issues of invariance and variation in grammar. In particular, this collection presents the current understanding of invariance of grammar with respect to the synchronic and diachronic analyses of specific languages, and as realized in work on typology and universals.The book is divided into five sections: The Question of Invariance; Invariance and Grammatical Categories; Grammar and Discourse; Grammar and Pragmatics; Typology and Universals.

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the younger post-colonial varieties of English. It is therefore not surprising that previous research focused on lexical and phonological aspects of NZE and practically neglected grammatical peculiarities. New Zealand English Grammar — Fact or Fiction? presents a careful comparative analysis of parallel corpora of New Zealand, British, American and Australian English in order to single out morphological, syntactic and lexico-grammatical features typical of an emerging New Zealand standard. In addition to corpus data on regional variation, the author uses data on short-term diachronic change within British and American English to show how regional variation is closely related to both stylistic variation (a world-wide colloquialisation of the written norms of English) and ongoing linguistic change leading to temporal regional differences. NZE is different from other national varieties of English in terms of preferences for certain variants rather than categorically different grammatical rules. Nevertheless, it is a standard in its own right in so far as it is a typical mix of variants available in World English. The methodological approach combines both qualitative analyses and statistical evidence. The question in how far statistically significant differences in word frequencies can be shown to be linguistically significant is also relevant for other quantitative research into emerging national standards.

Jucker endeavors to test pragmatic concepts (such as Grice’s principles of conversational inference) by applying them to concrete data. This application leads to suggestions for various modifications in the available pragmatic methodology. While pursuing this theoretical goal, he makes a significant contribution to descriptive pragmatics by offering a detailed picture of linguistically relevant aspects of news interviews, which show communicative behavior in ‘laboratory conditions’ where as many influencing factors as possible are kept stable while the influence of one specific factor at a time can be tested.

Master Nicholas of Amsterdam was a prominent master of arts in Germany during the first half of the fifteenth century. He composed various commentaries on Aristotle’s works. One of these commentaries is on the logica vetus , the old logic, viz. on Porphyry’s Isagoge and on Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation. This commentary is edited and introduced here.

Nicholas is a ‘modernus’ – as opposed to the ‘antiqui’, who were realists – which means that he is a conceptualist belonging to the university tradition that accepted John Buridan (ca. 1300-1360 or 1361) and Marsilius of Inghen (ca. 1340-1396) as its masters. In medieval philosophy, a parallel between thinking and reality is generally upheld. Nicholas makes a sharp distinction between the two; this may be interpreted as a step towards a separation between the two realms, as is common in philosophy in later centuries.

Other characteristics of Nicholas are that he defends the position that science has its place in a proposition, and does not simply follow reality. Furthermore, he emphasizes the part played by individual things.

Fifteenth-century philosophy has hardly been studied, mainly because that century has long been considered unoriginal. Nicholas of Amsterdam certainly deserves the historian’s interest in order to evaluate how medieval philosophy prepared the way for modern philosophy.

The impetus for producing a bibliography of Noam Chomky’s output (so far) derives from a strong interest in and commitment to a historical accounting of the contribution to the field of linguistic theory and possibly other subjects, such as philosophy and political science, by a man who has dominated linguistics for more than a generation, at least in North America. This bibliography lists his writings in linguistics and related fields, his writings on political issues and other non-linguistic subjects, and interview and discussions with Noam Chomsky.

The body of theory on speech production and speech disorder developed prior to Descartes has been so neglected by historians that its very existence is practically unknown today. Yet it provides a framework for understanding the speech process which is not only comprehensive and coherent, but of great relevance to current debates on issues of language performance and applied linguistics. Current theoretical difficulties stem largely from initial errors of Descartes; whereas earlier theoretical formulations, while outlining a bio-mechanics of speech, retain the central role of the human agent.

The discussions explicated in this book come mainly from the natural-philosophic and medical literature of Greco-Roman Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and early 17th century. This uncharted territory is mapped by tracing its textual history and diffusion as well as explaining the theory on its own terms but in clear and comprehensible language. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the book encompasses topics of interest not only to the language sciences, but also to the biosciences, medicine, philosophy of human movement, psychology and behavioral sciences, neurosciences, speech pathology, experimental phonetics, speech and rhetoric, and the history of science in general.

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.

This volume aims to extend both the range of analyses and the database on nominal classification systems. Previous analyses of nominal classification systems have focussed on two areas: the semantics of the classification system and the role of the system in discourse. In many nominal classification systems, there appear to be a significant percentage of nominals with an arbitrary classification. There is a considerable body of literature aimed at elucidating the semantic bases of clasification in such systems, thereby reducing the degree of apparent arbitrariness. Contributors to this volume continue this line of enquiry, but also propose that arbitrariness in itself has a role from a wider socio-cultural perspective. Previous analyses of the discourse role of classification systems posit that they play a significant role in referential tracking. For the languages surveyed in this volume, contributors propose that reference instantiation is an equally significant function, and indeed that reference instantiation and tracking cannot be properly divided from one another. This volume provides detailed information on classification in a number of northern Australian languages, whose systems are otherwise poorly known.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified, ranging from languages rich in compounds, such as German, Saami, Estonian and Finnish, to languages poor in compounds, such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech, like Russian, Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers, supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition, allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

This monograph presents a new model of the internal syntax of nominal phrases. The model is mainly based on Scandinavian, since with the wide range of variation that Scandinavian displays in the nominal domain, despite the close genetic relationship between the different varieties, Scandinavian is particularly well-suited for explorations into nominal syntax. Among the topics covered are the basic syntactic structure of nominal phrases, definiteness, adjective phrases, possessors, relative clauses, and nominal predicates. The model is however meant to be a tool for analysing the nominal phrases of any language. While the base-generated structure is taken to be universally uniform, the model allows for variation in the feature makeup of individual elements, in the phonological realisation of the features, and in the movements that may or may not apply. Hence, as shown in the final chapter, patterns found in languages outside of Scandinavian can also be accounted for within the model.

Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas, yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship, which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right, and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages, with focus on South America, examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions, their internal and external syntax, and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.