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New Zealand English is currently one of the most researched varieties of English world-wide. This book presents an up-to-date account of all the major aspects of New Zealand English by leading scholars as well as younger specialists in each of the major fields of enquiry. The book is authoritative in its range and represents not only a synopsis of past research but also new research in many areas of study. It is of interest not just to specialists in regional varieties of English but many of the chapters detail new approaches to the study of dialect phenomena. It contains an introduction describing the external history of New Zealand English and the development of the study of New Zealand English. It comes with a full bibliography of work on New Zealand English and is fully indexed. This book is a significant landmark in the study of English varieties and will prove indispensable for anyone who is a student of English and New Zealand English.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This book addresses some of the most fundamental questions that can be asked about target language (TL) acquisition in the classroom context namely<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>1. What is negotiated interaction?<br/>2. What are the main discourse functions of negotiated interaction?<br/>3. How frequent is negotiated interaction in TL classrooms and does this frequency vary by proficiency level?<br/>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?<br/>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 “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European Uralic and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly though both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.

The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer K. Baertsch K. Adams & P. Michalove) the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe) and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin) with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp B. Vine W. Baxter and B. Comrie.

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.

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.

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

Numeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Interestingly although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure this study reports that in actual usage the semantic role of classifiers is slight — only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear however that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.

“Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is an up-to-date introduction to the language of patients with non-fluent aphasia. Recent research in languages other than English has challenged our old descriptions of aphasia syndromes: while their patterns can be recognized across languages the structure of each language has a profound effect on the symptoms of aphasic speech. However the basic linguistic concepts needed to understand these effects in languages other than English have rarely been part of the training of the clinician.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>“Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” introduces these concepts plainly and concretely in the context of dozens of examples from the narratives and conversations of patients speaking most of the major languages of Europe North America and Asia. Linguistic and clinical terms are carefully defined and kept as theory neutral as possible.<br/>“Non-Fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is especially useful for speech-language pathologists whose patients are immigrants and guestworkers and for the clinician who must deal creatively with the challenges of providing aphasia diagnosis and therapy in a multicultural multidialectical setting.

The continuing expansion of research in dialectology sociolinguistics and English as a world language has made the field increasingly difficult to survey. This bibliography is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant publications of the past few years. Like its predecessor it will prove an indispensable reference book. The collection is in four parts dealing respectively with general studies Britain and Ireland the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. There is a joint index in which the 2800 entries are classified according to specific areas ethnic groups and major linguistic categories thus making the bibliography easy to use with the greatest profit. The present bibliography complements the one compiled by W. Viereck E.W. Schneider and M. Görlach which covered the period from 1965 to 1983 and was published in the same series in 1984.

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