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Human language in its performances is not to be considered without taking into account the environment in which it takes place i.e. its physical social or cultural setting. A description of the regularity or pattern driven character of this relationship is however still a desideratum for modern pragmatics. The contributions of the book in hand set out to show how such a conception may be achieved. In so doing they enhance the pragmatic agenda by regarding the context-based nature of utterances from a variety of perspectives in which the identification of pairs of utterance type and utterance situation as well as the interactive build-up of shared scenarios for interpretation are viewed as part of the linguistic and cultural competence of the speaker / hearer.The approaches united in this volume have in common that they all model the complex dynamic relationship between the utterance the context and common ground using patterns templates or schemas as core notions. It is assumed that such dynamic scalable models are fundamental units of human interaction and they are described in terms of forming relatively stable entities. The emergence usage and scope of these complex entities is elaborated in a variety of theoretical and analytical approaches including corpus studies on modern day communication and online communication.

Practising Stylistics marks the career of Professor Paul Simpson a leading figure in the discipline of stylistics and one who embodies the practical and rigorous linguistic analysis of literary works and social discourse. A prominent figure in the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) since its earliest days and Baines Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool Simpson has been a leading light and a steady hand on the stylistics tiller across his career. In this volume his friends colleagues co-authors and former students offer a series of essays that speak to the range and importance of Simpson’s influence.In its contribution and design this book reflects the artisanal ethos of stylistics itself. Each contribution includes a detailed illustrative example of stylistics practice with argument and method open to examination replication and constructive critical discussion. In this volume full-length stylistics essays are interspersed with shorter ‘vignettes’ that demonstrate practical applications of stylistics which are anchored by strong theoretical awareness. As such each chapter is representative of the rigorous stylistic analysis championed by Simpson.Demonstrating the value of stylistic approaches to literary criticism and discourse analysis by illustrating its workings is the most accessible way of reaffirming the discipline and so this book will likely be a key resource for scholars seeking the sort of exemplary stylistic practice inspired by Paul Simpson.

This volume presents recent research in colour studies with a particular focus on language offering both continuity and innovation within the field. All chapters are developed from papers first presented at the Progress in Colour Studies 2022 (PICS2022) conference held at Tallinn University Estonia. Building on the results of earlier PICS meetings and publications this book continues the series’ tradition of offering fresh perspectives on colour across languages and cultures.The contributions examine colour in linguistic contexts ranging from semantics and pragmatics to translation lexicography and discourse employing approaches such as corpus-based analysis and experimental methods. Some chapters formulate broad discussions on colour and its role in language and culture while others present in-depth studies of single colour terms such those denoting red green grey orange or beige. The volume’s international scope is reflected in the diversity of languages represented.The book opens with an editorial preface situating the contributions within the broader field. It also includes a comprehensive subject index and numerous illustrations. Taken together these studies make the volume an essential resource for scholars interested in the linguistic dimensions of colour and their broader cognitive and cultural implications.

This volume consists of corpus-based analyses of progressive aspect constructions in Germanic and Romance. By adopting a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks these studies provide valuable insights into the development grammaticalization and use of various progressive structures across two subgroups of the Indo-European family. The progressive constructions under scrutiny range from widely studied and seemingly well understood constructions to relatively infrequent and obscure ones. Most chapters investigate a specific function of a particular progressive structure or a change affecting it. Some chapters cast new light on the pragmatic non-aspectual functions fulfilled by the progressive. All the chapters present a substantial amount of new empirical work. This collection thus provides a unique opportunity for linguists working on Romance languages to get an instant insight into similar phenomena in Germanic languages and vice versa. At the same time the volume addresses contemporary theoretical and methodological issues in corpus contact and historical linguistics showing that research on the progressive remains today as relevant and inspiring as ever.

This volume contains nine chapters that cover a wide range of topics in Arabic linguistic research. The papers are organized into four parts; these are phonetics and phonology morphology syntax and semantics and decolonizing linguistics. Drawing on a wide range of Arabic varieties articles in this volume bring cross-dialectal data that shed light on critical issues in linguistic theory. This volume also includes a non-traditional paper that critiques the methodology and practices of Arabic linguistic research. Scholars and graduate students of Arabic and general linguistics will benefit from the cutting-edge research in this volume.

The volume aims to advance understanding of argumentative practices in different communicative contexts with special regard for those with heightened public resonance: politics media and public debate in general. Furthermore it intends to explore the linguistic aspects of argumentation including both explicit codification with the related issue of indicators and the activation of implicit meanings.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Bringing together different paradigms to account for the relations between contextual factors and discourse realizations the contributions articulate around three foci placing emphasis on one or more of them: the communicative purpose within a given genre or activity type; the argumentative and linguistic features of the investigated discourses among which prototypical patterns argumentative styles and implicit meanings; the assessment of argumentation quality and strategies to cope with illegitimate practices.<br/>

This book discusses patterns of predication and their grammatical and semantic implications in a variety of African languages. It covers several prominent topics about predication in the languages including locative predication expressions of tense aspect and mood in relation to verbal complexes and verb serialisation verb semantics and nominalization of predicates. The chapters take inspiration from Felix Ameka’s approach to the study of language according to which the main task of a linguist is to collaborate with language users to understand communicative practices in different contexts and to uncover how these practices impact grammatical and semantic aspects of the language. Accordingly the descriptions and analyses in this book serve to understand language variation in different ecologies rather than to impose pre-established descriptive frames on less described languages. Together the chapters in the book represent a bird’s eye view of predication strategies in various African languages and can therefore serve as readings for both introductory and advanced level courses on predication from a typological or comparative perspective.

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields including formal semantics historical linguistics linguistic typology and variationist sociolinguistics.

Pantomime is a unique form of communication which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a number of perspectives including neuropsychological developmental and gesture research. Recently pantomime has come under the attention of evolutionary linguistics as a strong candidate for a precursor of verbal communication. The volume Perspectives on pantomime: evolution development interaction brings together authors who are at the forefront of these studies which challenge the notion that pantomime is merely a fallback mode of expression. This multidisciplinary journey traverses language evolution cognitive science cognitive semiotics sign language linguistics psychology and gesture studies to unveil the profound role that pantomime plays in human communication.

This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation) between vowels (monophthongization) or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology and to phonologists in general and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.