Books

This book describes and evaluates alternative approaches within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to representing the structure of language at the level of form. It assumes no prior knowledge of SFL, and can therefore be read as an introduction to current issues within the theory. It will interest any linguist who takes a functional approach to understanding language.
Part 1 summarizes the major developments in the forty years of SFL’s history, including alternative approaches within Halliday’s own writings and the emergence of the “Cardiff Grammar” as an alternative to the “Sydney Grammar”. It questions the theoretical status of the ‘multiple structure’ representations in Halliday’s influential Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994), demonstrating that Halliday’s model additionally needs an integrating syntax such as that described in Part 2.
Part 2 specifies and discusses the set of ‘categories’ and ‘relationships’ that are needed in a theory of syntax for a modern, computer-implementable systemic functional grammar. The theoretical concepts are exemplified at every point, usually from English but occasionally from other languages.
The book is both a critique of Halliday’s current theory of syntax and the presentation of an alternative version of SFL that is equally systemic and equally functional.

L’édition critique de la première question du traité (Utrum aliquis philosophus per inquisitionem philosophicam in naturali lumine ad veram humanae beatitudinis notitiam valeat pervenire) est basée sur les sept manuscrits connus, dont deux autographes.
L’auteur du traité, le maître parisien Pierre d’Ailly, qui deviendra plus tard un homme d’Eglise d’une grande importance politique, y conduit sa recherche en intégrant l’Ethique à Nicomaque d’Aristote et la corrigeant pour ainsi dire par la Consolation de Boèce, choisie comme texte de base (complémentaire) à l’enseignement de l’éthique en faculté des arts.
Quelques précieux aspects de l’histoire de la philosophie et de la théologie (denier quart du XIVème siècle) sont mis à jour, grâce à l’édition et l’étude de cette question: Pierre d’Ailly, qui ne cache pas ses sympathies pour Ockham, œuvre en polémiste contre Jean de Ripa et l’attaque en quelques points centraux de sa doctrine sur la vision béatifique.

This monograph deals with variable tag questions. These are utterances with a variable interrogative tag, like It's peculiar writing, isn't it, and the semi-variable tag innit, such as Nice, innit. The aim is to provide a corpus-based, comprehensive semantic-pragmatic typology of British English tag questions. Compared to existing descriptions, the proposed typology is novel in three ways. Firstly, whereas almost all existing typologies are single-layered classifications, the functions of tag questions are categorized into two parallel dimensions of interpersonal meaning: the speech function and the stance layer. Secondly, semantic generalizations are proposed for clusters of grammatical, intonational and conversational properties. Thirdly, the bottom-up description is based on a sizeable amount of authentic, spontaneous conversations, which are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

The thesis of this essay is that social or cultural competence consists more of an interpretive or methodological ability to use language in the service of interaction than of a substantive knowledge of collections of cultural categories and of the semantic relations between the terms naming those categories.

This book brings together a collection of current research on the assessment of oral proficiency in a second language. Fourteen chapters focus on the use of the language proficiency interview or LPI to assess oral proficiency. The volume addresses the central issue of validity in proficiency assessment: the ways in which the language proficiency interview is accomplished through discourse.Contributors draw on a variety of discourse perspectives, including the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, language socialization theory, sociolinguistic variation theory, human interaction research, and systemic functional linguistics. And for the first time, LPIs conducted in German, Korean, and Spanish are examined as well as interviews in English.
This book sheds light on such important issues as how speaking ability can be defined independently of an LPI that is designed to assess it and the extent to which an LPI is an authentic representation of ordinary conversation in the target language. It will be of considerable interest to language testers, discourse analysts, second language acquisition researchers, foreign language specialists, and anyone concerned with proficiency issues in language teaching and testing.

This edited volume brings together scholars from psychology, linguistics, sociology and communication science to investigate how performative notions of gender and sexuality can be fruitfully explored with the rich set of tools that have been developed by conversation analysis and discursive psychology for analyzing everyday practical language use, agency and identity in talk.
Contributors re-examine the foundations of earlier research on gender in spoken interaction, critically appraise this research to see if and how it 'translates' successfully into the study of sexuality in talk, and promote innovative alternatives that integrate the insights of recent feminist and queer theory with qualitative studies of talk and conversation. Detailed empirical analyses of naturally occurring talk are used to uncover how gender and sexual identities, agencies and desires are contingently accomplished in conversational practices. Collectively, they pose the important question of what a critical theory of talk, gender and sexuality ought to look like if it is to be sensitive to a politics of conversation analysis.

This volume brings together cognitive psychologists, interpreting scholars and translation researchers, who look at the process phenomena involved in translation and interpreting (T/I) from various linguistic vantage points.
The focus is on methodology and the problems that loom large in a multidisciplinary discipline. The authors include Annette de Groot, Juliane House, Kirsten Malmkjaer and Miriam Shlesinger.
The topics discussed range from simultaneous interpreting, subtitling, translating in pairs, the sub-skills involved in T/I, to expertise and management issues.
Three major challenges emerge from T/I process research as it is portrayed in this book:
- How to maintain a clear vision of the object of study?
- How to ensure methodological sobriety?
- How to transfer the emerging knowledge of expertise to translation pedagogy?

The book seeks to enlarge the theoretical scope, research agenda, and practices associated with TBLT in a two-way dynamic, by exploring how insights from writing might reconfigure our understanding of tasks and, in turn, how work associated with TBLT might benefit the learning and teaching of writing. In order to enrich the domain of task and to advance the educational interests of TBLT, it adopts both a psycholinguistic and a textual meaning-making orientation. Following an issues-oriented introductory chapter, Part I of the volume explores tenets, methods, and findings in task-oriented theory and research in the context of writing; the chapters in Part II present empirical findings on task-based writing by investigating how writing tasks are implemented, how writers differentially respond to tasks, and how tasks can contribute to language development. A coda chapter summarizes the volume’s contribution and suggests directions for advancing TBLT constructs and research agendas.

This volume extends the Task-Based Language Teaching: Issues, Research and Practice books series by deliberately exploring the potential of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in a range of EFL contexts. It is specifically devoted to providing empirical accounts about how TBLT practice is being developed and researched in diverse educational contexts, particularly where English is not the dominant language. By including contributions from settings as varied as Japan, China, Korea, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, and France, this collection of 13 studies provides strong indications that the research and implementation of TBLT in EFL settings is both on the rise and interestingly diverse, not least because it must respond to the distinct contexts, constraints, and possibilities of foreign language learning. The book will be of interest to SLA researchers and students in applied linguistics and TESOL. It will also be of value to course designers and language teachers who come from a broad range of formal and informal educational settings encompassing a wide range of ages and types of language learners.