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This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology sociolinguistics and pragmatics and language acquisition. Including data from North African Levantine and Gulf varieties of Arabic as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia dialect contact and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis actualization and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology word order and constructional syntax.

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages prepositions verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting their argument structure in the complement of the verbal root and that their meaning is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions enriched with the CAUSE operator. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs based on the operation of predicate transfer. It also offers a uniform analysis of cases. Prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the agreement operation whereat the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore it examines prepositions from a diachronic perspective and argues that they can be grammaticalised as future markers under certain circumstances.

This volume assesses the state of the art of parallel corpus research as a whole reporting on advances in both recent developments of parallel corpora – with some particular references to comparable corpora as well– and in ways of exploiting them for a variety of purposes. The first part of the book is devoted to new roles that parallel corpora can and should assume in translation studies and in contrastive linguistics to the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora and to advances in parallel corpus alignment annotation and retrieval. There follows an up-to-date presentation of a number of parallel corpus projects currently being carried out in Europe some of them multimodal with certain chapters illustrating case studies developed on the basis of the corpora at hand. In most of these chapters attention is paid to specific technical issues of corpus building. The third part of the book reflects on specific applications and on the creation of bilingual resources from parallel corpora. This volume will be welcomed by scholars postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of contrastive linguistics translation studies lexicography language teaching and learning machine translation and natural language processing.

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena for example ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and relatively concrete—should be an ideal source domain in metaphor and a less likely target. But is this the case across diverse languages? And are some sensory modalities perhaps more concrete than others? This volume presents critical new data on perception metaphors from over 40 languages including many which are under-studied. Aside from the wealth of data from diverse languages—modern and historical; spoken and signed—a variety of methods (e.g. natural language corpora experimental) and theoretical approaches are brought together. This collection highlights how perception metaphor can offer both a bedrock of common experience and a source of continuing innovation in human communication.

The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil is the first publication in English to offer studies on a whole set of varieties of Portuguese in Africa as well as Brazilian Portuguese. Authored by specialists on varieties of Portuguese in Africa and Brazil the eleven chapters and the epilogue promote a dialogue between researchers interested in their genesis sociohistories and linguistic properties. Most chapters directly address the idea of a continuum of Portuguese derived from parallel sociohistorical and linguistic factors in Africa and Brazil due to the colonial expansion of the language to new multilingual settings. The volume contributes to the understanding of structural properties that are often shared by several varieties in this continuum and describes the various situations and domains of language use as well as sociocultural contexts where they have emerged and where they are being used.

As of 26 July 2021 the ebook edition is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the cross-disciplinary role and impact of Pragmatics in relation to several areas of study that it interfaces with. Pragmatics has contributed significant insights to a range of disciplines just as these disciplines have contributed to it. Borrowing and cross-pollination between disciplines is natural as well as necessary but at times it seems important to take a pause and reflect on and problematize the role of pragmatics at these interfaces. In an age when disciplinary boundaries are being blurred we need to investigate the relationship and interplay between pragmatics and related or complementary fields of enquiry with the goal of broadening and deepening our understanding of the contributions and boundaries of pragmatics as such. Here in twelve original contributions internationally recognized authorities explore the current state and future trends in Pragmatics vis-à-vis adjacent disciplines.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence including the auxiliary do verbal -s and the progressive aspect and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal.

The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the “long” eighteenth century 1680–1800. Aggregate findings are balanced by analysing individuals and their varying participation in these processes. The final chapter places these results in a wider context and considers them in relation to past sociolinguistic work.

One of the major findings of the studies is that in most cases the overall pace of change was slow. Factors retarding change include speaker evaluation and repurposing outgoing features in particular for certain styles and registers.

Evidentiality in communication is better investigated in delimited and recognizable contexts where the multiple levels of meaning in interactional practices are manifested. Taking this viewpoint the present volume explores the interrelations between evidentials and textual genre in Spanish. Adopting a discursive perspective all of the chapters examine how the functional category of evidentiality is brought into discourse which set of linguistic strategies evidentiality makes explicit what counts as evidence in certain contexts and in certain textual genres and what particular pragmatic meanings these mechanisms acquire invoke and project onto the on-going discourse. In particular this book is concerned with the relationship between evidential expressions and the pragmatic meaning(s) triggered by those expressions and the role of genre in shaping the evidential meanings. The volume is addressed to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars in the disciplines of Pragmatics Discourse Analysis Sociolinguistics Communication Studies and Psychology.

This volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other’s face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions.

The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected such as citizens’ encounters with traffic police officers negotiations with a line manager political news interviews or public inquiries. Other types of activity such as service calls or guided tours involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases the situated vulnerabilities studied here whether expected or not lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event with implications for goal achievement.

The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The diversity of languages and institutional environments examined will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in face-to-face interaction and serve to stimulate debate in the field of pragmatics and beyond.

Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 7:4 (2016).