Browse Books

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.

This volume presents a cross-linguistic investigation of clausal noun-modifying constructions in genetically varied languages of Eurasia. Contrary to a common premise that in any language adnominal clauses that share some features of relative clauses constitute a structurally distinct construction some languages of Eurasia exhibit a General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction (GNMCC) -- a single construction covering a wide range of semantic relations between the head noun and the clause. Through in-depth examination of naturally-occurring and elicited data from Ainu languages of the Caucasus (e.g. Ingush Georgian Bezhta Hinuq) Japanese Korean Marathi Nenets Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Cantonese Mandarin Rawang) and Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish Sakha) the chapters discuss whether or not the language in question exhibits a GNMCC and the range of noun modification covered by such a construction. The findings afford us new facts new theoretical perspectives and the first step toward a more global assessment of the possibilities for GNMCCs.

This book aims at providing a cross-section of current developments in English linguistics by tracing recent approaches to corpus linguistics and statistical methodology by introducing new inter- and multidisciplinary refinements to empirical methodology and by documenting the on-going emphasis shift within the discipline of English linguistics from the study of dominant language varieties to that of post-colonial minority non-standardised learner and L2 varieties. Among the key focus areas that define research in the field of English linguistics today this selection concentrates on four: corpus linguistics English as a global language cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. Most of the articles in this volume concentrate on at least two of these areas and at the same time bring in their own suggestions towards building bridges within and across sub-disciples of linguistics and beyond.

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.

Auch die Britischen Inseln waren von der wikingerzeitlichen Expansion ab dem 8. Jh. betroffen. Nördlich und westlich des dänischen Danelag in England entstanden norwegische Siedlungen auf den Shetland- und Orkneyinseln in Nordschottland auf den Hebriden an der schottischen und nordenglischen Westküste um die Irische See herum und südwärts. Waren die Nordleute anfangs als Plünderer und Eroberer unterwegs wirkten sie bald auch als Händler und Stadt- und Staatengründer. Der daraus resultierende keltisch-westnordische Sprachkontakt hielt ein halbes Jahrtausend an und hinterließ Spuren im Norn der frühneuzeitlichen nordischen Sprache die bis ins 18. Jh. auf den Shetland- und Orkneyinseln und in Caithness gesprochen wurde. So finden sich Keltizismen sowohl in den wenigen Aufzeichnungen des Norn als auch im nordischen Substrat der schottischen Gegenwartsmundarten die das Norn ablösten.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The British Isles were among the geographical areas affected by the Viking expansion from the 8th century onwards. North and west of the Danish Danelaw Norwegian settlements were established on Shetland and Orkney in Northern Scotland on the Hebrides along the west coast of Scotland and Northern England around the Irish Sea and even further south. Raiders and conquerors at the outset the Norsemen soon became traders and founded towns and states. The resulting language contact between Celtic and Old West Norse lasted half a millennium and left its mark on Norn an early modern Nordic language spoken on Shetland Orkney and in Caithness until the 18th century. Thus Celticisms can be found both in the few written records of Norn and in the Nordic substratum of those varieties of Modern Scots that came to supplant Norn.

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.

This collection of original chapters gives center stage to the concept of ‘narrative’ in medical contexts. The contributors come from the disciplines of literary and cultural studies linguistics psychology and medicine and work with texts as diverse as autobiographies graphic novels Renaissance medical treatises and reports short stories reflective writing creative writing and online narratives. The interdisciplinary dialogue shows the richness and scope of the concept ‘narrative’ and demonstrates how crucial it is for practices in the medical context as well as in the contributing disciplines. The collection raises awareness of the great variety and multivocality of narratives on the experience of illness besides paying heed to the many different positions and angles from which these narratives can be perceived read and analyzed. The wide range of approaches assembled in this collection provides a comprehensive view on illness and health and on the multiple ways in which they are represented in narrative.

In contrast with the central arguments of the event structure which have been extensively studied much less attention has been given to non-arguments. To bridge this gap the present volume focuses on prepositional and adverbial phrases expressing instrumental causal spatial temporal roles and the like i.e. semantic roles which have been typically associated with oblique case. The various contributions show that case in general and oblique case in particular is at the intersection between form and meaning: at issue are the nuclear versus non-nuclear status of these phrases and the semantic roles they express. The import of these phrases on the event structure is described in a functional-cognitive perspective for Cora Nyulnyul German Dutch French and Spanish.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The specific analyses of empirical phenomena presented in this volume as well as their implications for linguistic theory in general will be of interest for scholars interested in syntax semantics and pragmatics.<br/>This is the sixth and final volume of the Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages project.<br/>

Despite a recent spate of publications the valency of nouns is a topic that still remains in the shadow of the valency of verbs. This volume aims to contribute to the discussion of noun valency not only from a theoretical point of view as is often the case but also from an empirical one by presenting a series of studies focusing on particular questions and based on data-driven research. It explores properties of valency nouns in a variety of languages including Bulgarian Czech German Latin Romanian and Spanish. The specificity of this book consists in the diversity of the methodological approaches used. It includes empirical studies and it explores different theoretical frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) the Minimalist Program within Generative Grammar Functional Generative Description (FGD) and Construction Grammar. Special attention is paid to deverbal nouns but nouns expressing quantity and “compound-like” constructions involving relationship and interactivity are also dealt with.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure the diverse functions of grammatical categories linguistic complexity agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.