Books

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.

Although the contributors to this book do not belong to one particular ‘school’ of linguistic theory, they all share an interest in the external functions of language in society and in the relationship between these functions and internal linguistic phenomena. In this sense they all take a functional approach to grammatical issues. Apart from this common starting-point, the contributions share the aim of demonstrating the non-autonomous nature of morphology and syntax, and the inadequacy of linguistic models which deal with syntax, morphology and lexicon in separate, independent components. The recurrent theme throughout the book is the inseparability of lexis and morphosyntax, of structure and function, of grammar and society. The third and more specific common thread is case, which in some contributions is adduced to illustrate the more general point of the link between word form on the one hand and clausal and textual relations on the other hand, while in other papers it is at the centre of the discussion.

The interest of the proposed volume consists in the fact that it brings together the views of leading scholars in functional linguistics of various ‘denominations’ on the place of morphosyntax in linguistic theory. The book provides convincing argumentation against a modular theory with autonomous levels (the dominant framework in mainstream 20th century linguistics) and is a plea for further research into the connections between the lexicogrammar and the linguistic and extralinguistic context.

Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian, a southern Russian contact variety with Yiddish and Ukrainian elements, and Russian lexifier pidgins illustrate the reconstruction process, which involves making the most of all available documentation, particularly literature and stereotypical descriptions. Historical sociolinguistics of this kind straddles the fields of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and contact; this book brings together the methods and theories of these areas to show how they can result in a rich reconstruction of linguistic and socially-conditioned variation. We reconstruct the circumstances and social settings that produced this variation, and demonstrate how to reconstruct which variants were used by different types of speakers under different circumstances, and what kinds of social identities they indexed.

English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as relatively few documents have been available digitally or in print, they have been an underresearched resource.

This volume shows the tremendous potential of late- and post-medieval English local documents: highly variable in language, often colourful, including developing formulae as well as glimpses of actual recorded speech. The volume contains eleven chapters relating to a new resource, A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The first four chapters outline a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of local documents. The remaining seven present studies of different aspects of the material, including supralocalization, local patterns of spelling and morphology, land terminology, punctuation, formulaicness and multilingualism.

Redefining Trial by Media: Towards a critical-forensic linguistic interface applies a range of linguistic models to recast trial by media not as a sensationalist and infrequent phenomenon, but as a systematic and routine process. Using critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic models, this book builds a Spectrum of Trial by Media which views juries in criminal trials as moulded by ideological media-made constructions of crime. The role of these media constructions is enhanced by the isolation levied on jurors by the linguistic composition of trial language, and reinforced by the language strategies of legal professionals in court. Critically deconstructing media portrayals of crime and forensically examining the language of criminal proceedings, this book offers a redefinition of trial by media which casts the role of the press as much more prevalent in the courtroom trial than is presently appreciated.

Reembedding Translation Process Research is a rich collection of empirical research papers investigating important new facets of the relationship between translation and cognition. The common thread running through the collection is the notion of “re-embedding” the acts of translating and interpreting—and the ways we understand them. That is, they all aim to re-situate these acts within what we now know about the brain, the powerful relationship of brain and body, and the complex interaction between cognition and the environment in which it is embedded. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the overall notion of re-embedding, thereby expanding the breadth of empirical research about translating. This book refuses Descartes' distinction between mind and brain, and reaffirms the highly dynamic, emergent, and interactive nature of cognitive processes in translation. The overarching conclusion is that translation studies should reconsider, re-embed, any model of translation processes that arises without properly accommodating the interdependence of brain, body, and environment in the emergence of cognition.

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns, both from a historical and present-day perspective, and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches, including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones, and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public, such as letters, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and online communication in the form of reader comments, discussion pages, and tweets. In addition to English, the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines, such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences, who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.

Based on recent research in formal linguistics, this volume provides a thorough description of the whole system of Romanian Noun Phrases, understood in an extended sense, that is, in addition to nouns, pronouns and determiners, it examines all the adnominal phrases: genitive-marked DPs, adjectives, relative clauses, appositions, prepositional phrases, complement clauses and non-finite modifiers. The book focuses on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface but also includes a systematic morphological description of the language. The implicitly comparative description of Romanian contained in the book can serve as a starting point for the study of the syntax/semantics of Noun Phrases in other languages, regardless of whether or not they are typologically related to Romanian. This book will be of special interest to linguists working on Romanian, Romance languages, comparative linguistics and language typology, especially because Romanian is relevant for comparative linguistics not only as a Romance language, but also as part of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund.

Referencias culturales: retos en la traducción de la fraseología y del lenguaje de especialidad aspira a ser una contribución seria a la problemática de la traducción de culturemas. Este volumen colectivo reune a investigadores con lenguas de trabajo distantes o enraizadas en un tronco común (francés-español, inglés-español, chino-español, ruso-español, rumano-francés e italiano-inglés) que, basándose en corpus que abarcan géneros tan diversos como la prensa, las redes sociales, el cine, el comic o los repositorios instucionales, analizan, desde una óptica comparativa y/o traductológica, un amplio espectro de estructuras fraseológicas y terminológicas en las que las nociones de lengua y cultura son indisociables y plantean innumerables desafíos al traductor.

This volume aims to be a serious contribution to the issue of translating culture-specific elements. It brings together researchers with distant or related working languages: French-Spanish, English-Spanish, Chinese-Spanish, Russian-Spanish, Romanian-French and Italian-English. Based on corpora covering diverse genres such as press, social networks, cinema, comics or institutional repositories, they analyze, from a comparative and/or translation perspective, a wide spectrum of phraseological and terminological structures in which the notions of language and culture are inseparable and pose countless challenges to the translator.

In Reflections on Language and Language Learning: In honour of Arthur van Essen, thirty-one leading language scholars and educational linguists in the Netherlands and abroad with whom over the years Professor van Essen, one of the grandees of applied linguistics, has collaborated provide original essays and studies which discuss the most recent insights and trends in the fields of linguistics and foreign language teaching. While interdisciplinary in scope, the volume encompasses theoretical advances in (educational) linguistic thinking; for example, the perceptive articles written by Michael Byram, Christopher N. Candlin, Natalia Gvishiani, Peter Jordens, Jan Koster, Leo van Lier, and Bondi Sciarone — as well as a sample of the latest methodological developments in areas such as ELT, LSP, and content-based language teaching; cases in point are the useful contributions by Jeanine Deen & Hilde Hacquebord, Michaël Goethals, Paul Meara & Ignacio Rodríguez Sánchez, Rosamond Mitchell & Christopher Brumfit, and Uta Thürmer.