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 is a corpus-based study of lexicalization of motion events in Serbo-Croatian and English, with contrasting examples from Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese and Albanian. Talmy’s typology (1985) provides the backdrop for the analysis and the focus is on intratypological differences that affect habitual presence or absence of information in motion expressions crosslinguistically as well as “pattern clashing” in translation. This fresh look at issues regarding linguistic typology, lexical and construction meaning and spatio-temporal construals in language and experience results in a more finely grained classification of verbalized motion events. The study offers an eclectic overview of different theoretical approaches and insists on theoretically unbiased set of tools and principles that can be used in studies of any cognitive domain in any language. It provides an in-depth discussion of current issues in cognitive linguistics in particular and suggests systematic implementation of the research findings in applied and interdisciplinary studies of language.

Misunderstandings have been examined extensively in studies on cross-cultural (mis)communication which associate them with participants’ differing cultural backgrounds and/or linguistic knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of misunderstandings from cross- and intra-cultural encounters, this book argues that miscommunication does not relate exclusively to participants’ background differences or similarities, but that its creation and development are tightly interwoven with the dynamic manner in which social encounters unfold. Against a backdrop of Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis and Goffman’s theory of frames and roles, the volume discusses a large number of misunderstandings and shows that they are associated with the constant identity and activity shifts as well as with the turn-by-turn construction of interpretative context in interaction. Besides students and researchers of pragmatics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, this book will also appeal to all those interested in the process of making, misinterpreting and clarifying meaning in social interaction.

This book is a collection of studies on political interaction in a variety of broadcast, namely news and current affairs programs, political interviews, audience participation programs and radio phone-ins. Following a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, dialogic forms of news production and media talk in general, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars investigate the discursive and interactional practices that give rise to the arena of public politics in contemporary society. Chapters span an array of cultural contexts, as diverse as Sweden, Greece, Belgium (Flanders), the U.K., Spain, Israel, the U.S.A., Australia and China. Authors combine an interest in discourse analysis and conversation analysis with different disciplinary orientations, such as linguistics, media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, and social psychology. The book uncovers current trends in media and political discourse, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of media discourse and politics.

This volume is the first book-length attempt to bring together the fields of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and second language pragmatics by exploring how the teaching and assessment of pragmatics can be integrated into TBLT. The TBLT-pragmatics connection is illustrated in a variety of constructs (e.g., speech acts, honorifics, genres, interactional features), methods (e.g., quantitative, quasi-experimental, conversation analysis), and topics (e.g., instructed SLA, heritage language learning, technology-enhanced teaching, assessment, and discursive pragmatics). Chapters in this volume collectively demonstrate how the two fields can together advance the current practice of teaching language for socially-situated, real-world communicative needs.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is being encouraged as part of a major overhaul of the entire school languages curriculum in New Zealand. However, teachers often struggle with understanding what TBLT is, and how to make TBLT work in classrooms. Using the stories that emerged from a series of interviews with teachers (the curriculum implementers) and with advisors (the curriculum leaders), this book highlights the possibilities for TBLT innovation in schools. It also identifies the constraints, and proposes how these might be addressed. The result is a book that, whilst rooted in a particular local context, provides a valuable sourcebook of teacher stories that have relevance for a wide range of people working in a diverse range of contexts. This book will be of genuine interest to all those who wish to understand more about TBLT innovation, and the opportunities and challenges it brings.