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This is a book in the classical Quaestiones genre like the Tusculanae Quaestiones (“Tusculan questions”) of Cicero (around 45 BCE) and the Quæstiones disputatæ de Veritate (“disputed questions on truth”) of St. Thomas Aquinas (1256-1259). It seeks to ask seven series of questions about key theoretical approaches to the study of translation: three on equivalence theories (semantic equivalence dynamic equivalence and deverbalization) three on Descriptive Translation Studies (norms Toury’s laws and the translator’s narratoriality) and one on the translator’s visibility. Each “Question” (chapter) charts a circuitous course through past answers to new questions and new answers drawing especially on the theoretical traditions of hermeneutics phenomenology and 4EA cognitive science. The book will guide both veteran and novice scholars of translation deep into the complexities besetting the seven keywords.

What are the implications of strategic manoeuvring for the activity of the simultaneous interpreter? This is the main question addressed in The Quest for Argumentative Equivalence. Based on the analysis of a multilingual comparable corpus named ARGO the book investigates political argumentation with an eye to its reformulation by interpreters. After reporting and discussing a series of case studies illustrating interpreters’ problems in the political context the study reconstructs the prototypical argumentative patterns used by Obama Cameron Sarkozy and Hollande not only in a hermeneutical perspective but also considering interpreters’ need to reproduce them into a foreign language. Situated at the intersection of Argumentation Theory and Interpreting Studies the book provides a contribution to the descriptive study of political argumentation highlighting the presence of interpreters as a key contextual variable in political communication and deepening the study of the interlinguistic and translational implications of the act of arguing.

In recent years migration has moved to the forefront of national and global debates intensifying discussions about borders security identity and citizenship. In this volume we ask how language and sexuality impact these discussions: how do sexuality and language contribute toward the construction and maintenance of varying scales of borders? How do sexuality and language figure in border crossings across time space embodied differences and culture? The contributors to this volume all anthropologists demonstrate how anthropological theories concepts and methods uniquely address the operations of sexuality and language in the making unmaking and remaking of these borders. In this volume terminology discourse language choice and other forms of linguistic practice are at the forefront of research on transnational queer im/migrant populations allowing us to better understand how language shapes and is shaped by queer peoples’ movements across borders.

Originally published in Journal of Language and Sexuality Vol. 3:1 (2014).

Sharing certain assumptions but differing in theory and practice both Columbia School linguistics (CS) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) have increasingly supported their analyses with quantitative evidence. Citation of individual sentences in isolation or in context has been supplemented with counts of linguistic forms in texts informant questionnaires and perception tests. The present volume continuing a dialogue between CS and CG offers six such qualitative-quantitative studies one on Afrikaans and five on Dutch. Topics include (a) demonstratives (b) pragmatic particles and imperatives (c) a puzzling “dismissive” idiom (d) progressive aspect and (e) indirect objects. While CS is better suited for analyzing relatively closed systems (e.g. tense pronouns) CG provides more insight into the vagaries of the amorphous lexicon. The author also offers personal remarks on “linguistics as a path” and discusses how in one case a wrong prediction reflects his dual role as both linguist and student of Dutch as a foreign language.

Quantitative methods in linguistics which the protean American structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh introduced in the 1950s have become increasingly popular and have opened the world of languages to interdisciplinary approaches. The papers collected here are the work not only of descriptive and historical linguists but also statisticians physicists and computer scientists. They demonstrate the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an unprecedented world-wide scale providing cutting-edge insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies rates of birth and extinction of languages lexical borrowability the identification of language family homelands the assessment of genealogical relationships and the development of new phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.

Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010).

This is a comprehensive guidebook to the quantitative methods needed for Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). It provides a systematic description of the various statistical tests used in Corpus Linguistics which can be used in translation research. In Part 1 Theoretical Explorations the interplay between quantitative and qualitative methodologies is explored. Part 2 Essential Corpus Studies describes how to undertake quantitative studies with a suitable level of technical and relevant case studies. Part 3 Quantitative Explorations of Literary Translations looks at translations of classic works by Cao Xueqin James Joyce and other authors. Finally Part 4 on Translation Lexis uses a variety of techniques new to translation studies including multivariate analysis and game theory. This book is aimed at students and researchers of corpus linguistics translation studies and quantitative linguistics. It will significantly advance current translation studies in terms of methodological innovation and will fill in an important gap in the development of quantitative methods for interdisciplinary translation studies.

This book presents a comprehensive account of quantifier scope in German. The author investigates scope behavior of ordinary quantifiers and negative adverbial interrogative relative and particle quantifiers. The areas which are dealt with include: relative scope in simple sentences absolute and relative scope in complex sentences noun-phrase internal scope and scope behavior of indefinite noun phrases. A theory of explicit and implicit quantification is proposed and a uniform process of scope determination is sketched which encompasses the scope of explicit as well as implicit quantifiers. Quantifier scope is a challenge to linguistic theory as it is a phenomenon which is determined by the interplay of diverse syntactic and semantic factors which interact in a weighted and cumulative way. The factors' interplay is part of the syntax/semantics-interface i.e. the constraints relating syntax and semantics which are considered to be relatively autonomous parallel levels connected by an interface of correspondence constraints.

This book addresses how cross-linguistic interference is represented in the bilingual mind. Examining novel oral production data from older bilingual children representing two Quechua varieties this research concludes that interference in the feature specification of functional categories leads to language change in a language contact situation and links convergence a common set of feature values for the same functional category in both languages to the activation of features related to the informational structure of the sentence. These mechanisms are illustrated in detail by the presence of overt determiners canonical SVO word order and the absence of accusative marking in bilingual Quechua and by neutralization of case and gender distinctions in direct object pronouns as well as in the emergence of null pronouns with definite antecedents in bilingual Spanish.

This introduction to quantum brain dynamics is accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The authors a brain scientist and a theoretical physicist present a new quantum framework for investigating advanced functions of the brain such as consciousness and memory. The book is the first to give a systematic account founded in fundamental quantum physical principles of how the brain functions as a unified system. It is based on the quantum field theory originated in the 1960s by the great theoretical physicist Hiroomi Umezawa to whom the book is dedicated. Both quantum physics for sub-microscopic constituents of brain cells and tissues and classical physics for the microscopic and macroscopic constituents are simultaneously justified by this theory. It poses an alternative to the dominant conceptions in the neuro- and cognitive sciences which take neurons organized into networks as the basic constituents of the brain. Certain physical substrates in the brain are shown to support quantum field phenomena and the resulting strange quantum properties are used to explain consciousness and memory. The whole of memory is stored in such a state of macroscopic order and consciousness is realized by the creation and annihilation dynamics of energy quanta of the electromagnetic field and molecular fields of water and protein. This change of perspective results in a radically new vision of how the brain functions. (Series A B)

Since the 1960s quantitative linguistics has undergone a great development marked especially by attempts to work systematically with language phenomena on all language levels. Besides traditional areas where significant results were already achieved before the 60s (phonology graphemics and lexicology) quantitative linguistics has now also penetrated into morphology syntax stylistics history and typology of languages and more recently into semantics. This book gives a comprehensive account of the various developments and applications in quantitative linguistics.After an overview of methods used in quantitative linguistics it discusses the main areas: lexical statistics grammatical statistics and semantics statistics with reference to a great number of studies of different languages and language families. Chapter 4 deals with other domains (phonology graphemics stylistics typology development of languages word-formation) Chapter 6 deals with various applications and Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between quantitative linguistics and the computer. The volume is completed by an extensive list of references and indices of names and of subjects.