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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.

Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders surveys a broad range of expository polemical and analytical literary forms that came into prominence during the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. They stand in contrast to better-known romantic fiction in that they endeavor to address the world of daily empirical experience rather than that of more explicitly self-referential fanciful creation. Among them are genres that have since the nineteenth century come to characterize many aspects of modern life like the periodical or the psychological case study; others flourished and enjoyed wide-spread popularity during the nineteenth century but are much less well-known today like the almanac and the diary. Travel narratives pamphlets religious and theological texts familiar essays autobiographies literary-critical and philosophical studies and discussions of the visual arts and music all had deep historical roots when appropriated by romantic writers but prospered in their hands and assumed distinctive contours indicative of the breadth of romantic thought.

SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts society life the sciences and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume Romantic Prose Fiction where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance novel novella short story and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries a heritage still very close to our age.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.romanticism.pdf

Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative Artificial Intelligence and media studies — studies models and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers providing perspectives from computational linguistics agent research psychology ethology art and media theory. It describes artificial agents with narratively structured behavior agents that take part in stories and tours systems that automatically generate stories dramas and documentaries and systems that support people telling their own stories. It looks at how people use stories the features of narrative that play a role in how people understand the world and how human narrative ability may have evolved. It addresses meta-issues in NI: the history of the field the stories AI researchers tell about their research and the effects those stories have on the things they discover. (Series B)

This volume is devoted to the central cases relating to the basic oppositions between subject-object and agent-patient viz. nominative and accusative as well as their counterparts such as ergative and absolutive. It aims at contributing to the typological investigation of these cases by providing descriptive studies of ten different languages not only Romance and Germanic languages but also Polish and Basque as well as Cora Warrwa and Ewe. These studies show that the formal devices used to mark the two nuclear cases may be quite diverse (including non-overt and ‘configurational’ coding) but that all the languages studied crucially display a subject-object asymmetry even languages such as Basque and Ewe for which this had been questioned. One of the most striking subthemes to emerge from this collection is the complexity of the object-zone both with regard to formal and functional diversity. Various studies in the volume also contribute reflections couched mainly in broadly cognitive-functional terms about the semantic function of the subject-object contrast and why it is so central across languages.

This volume based on the first two identifies the verbal and nonverbal personal and environmental components of narrative and dramaturgic texts and the cinema — recreated in the first through the ‘reading act’ according to gaze mechanism and punctuation — and traces the coding-decoding processes of the characters’ semiotic-communicative itinerary between writer-creator and reader-recreator. In our total experience of a play or film we depend on the sensory and intellectual relationships between performers audience and the environment of both in a temporal dimension starting on the way to the theater and ending as one comes out. Two chapters discuss the speaking face and body of the characters and the explicit and implicit (at times ‘unstageable’) paralanguage kinesics and quasiparalinguistic and extrasomatic and environmental sounds in the novel the theater and the cinema and the functions of personal and environmental silences. Another shows the functions limitations and problems of punctuation systems in the creative-recreative processes and how a few new symbols and modifications would avoid some ambiguities. The stylistic communicative and technical functions of nonverbal repertoires in the literary text are then identified as enriching critical analysis and offering new perspectives in translation. Finally ‘literary anthropology’ (developed by the author in the 1970s) is is presented as an interdisciplinary area based on synchronic and diachronic analyses of the literatures of the different cultures as a source of anthropological and ethnological data. Nearly 1200 quotes from 170 authors and 291 works are added to those in the first two volumes.

In a progressive and systematic approach to communication and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our ‘speaking face’ to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as ‘verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics’ which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of ‘nonverbal categories’ for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and based on all the previous material his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters which suggests many applications in different fields such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

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: <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>• Psychological domains of attention motivation memory sleep and dreaming that define normal states of consciousness. <br/>• Effects of chemicals that alter or abolish consciousness including hallucinogens and anaesthetics. <br/>• 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.<br/><br/>(Series B)

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. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

How does narrative give shape and meaning to human life? And what special role do narratives play in identifying one as a person in the world? This book explores these questions from the vantage points of various human and cultural sciences with special attention to the importance of narrative as expression of embodied experience mode of communication and form for understanding the world and ultimately ourselves. Presenting a variety of perspectives — from narrative psychology and literary criticism to discourse communication and cultural theory — these studies examine the intricacies of narrative identity construction. With contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field the book highlights the cultural field in which narratives shape forms of life. Using verbal and pictorial linguistic and performative oral and written natural and literary autobiographical texts the studies demonstrate how the construction of selves memories and life-worlds are interwoven in one narrative fabric.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This volume contains revised versions of thirteen of the papers presented at the parasession “New Solutions to Old Problems: Issues in Romance Historical Linguistics” held as part of the 29th Linguistic Symposium on the Romance Languages (1999). These studies examine specific problems in Romance historical linguistics within the framework of new analytical approaches many of which represent extensions into the diachronic realm of methodologies and theories originally formulated to explain aspects of synchronic phonology and syntax. Insights afforded by Principles and Parameters the Minimalist Program Optimality Theory grammaticalization theory and sociohistorical linguistics are used to elucidate such long-standing issues in traditional historical grammar as diphthongization in Hispano-Romance syncope of intertonic vowels in Hispano- and Gallo-Romane Romance lenition the role of analogy in morphological change word order infinitival constructions and the collocation of clitic object pronouns in Old French and Old Spanish.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>