Books

This book explores the interpretation of grammar and turn-taking in Japanese talk-in-interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis. It pays special attention to the projectability patterns of turns in Japanese in comparison to English. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, it is shown that the postpositional grammatical structure and the predicate-final orientation in Japanese regularly result in a relatively delayed projectability of the possible point at which a current turn may become recognisably complete in comparison to English. Prior to such points, projectability is often limited to the progressive anticipation of small increments of talk. However, participants are able to achieve smooth speaker transitions with minimal gap or overlap through the use of specific grammatical and prosodic devices for marking possible points at which a transition may become relevant.

Past attempts at writing a history of Chinese translation theory have been bedeviled by a chronological approach, which often forces the writer to provide no more than a list of important theories and theorists over the centuries. Or they have stretched out to almost every aspect related to translation in China, so that the historical/political backdrop that had an influence on translation theorizing turns out to be more important than the theories themselves. In the present book, the author hopes to devote exclusive attention to the ideas themselves. The approach adopted centers around eight key issues that engaged the attention of theorists through the course of the twentieth century, in the hope that a historical account will be presented that is not time-bound. On the basis of 38 articles translated into English by teachers and scholars of translation, the author has written four essays discussing the Chinese characteristics of this body of theory. Separately they focus on the impressionistic, the modern, the postcolonial, and the poststructuralist approaches deployed by leading Chinese theorists from 1901 to 1998. It is hoped that publication of this book will make possible cross-cultural dialogue with translation academics in the West, although the general reader will find much firsthand information on Chinese thinking about translation.

This volume interfaces three fields of linguistics rarely discussed in the same context. Its underlying theme is linguistic variation, and the ways in which historical linguists and dialectologists may learn from insights offered by typology, and vice versa. The aim of the contributions is to raise the awareness of these linguistic subdisciplines of each other and to encourage their cross-fertilization to their mutual benefit. If linguistic typology is to unify the study of all types of linguistic variation, this variation, both diatopic and diachronic, will enrich typological research itself. With the aim of capturing the relevant dimensions of variation, the studies in this volume make use of new methodologies, including electronic corpora and databases, which enable cross- and intralinguistic comparisons dialectally and across time. Based on original research and unified by an innovative theme, the volume will be of interest to both students and teachers of linguistics and Germanic languages.

Typological hierarchies are widely perceived as one of the most important results of research on language universals and linguistic diversity. Explanations for typological hierarchies, however, are usually based on the synchronic properties of the patterns described by individual hierarchies, not the actual diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns cross-linguistically. This book aims to explore in what ways the investigation of such processes can further our understanding of typological hierarchies. To this end, diachronic evidence about the origins of several phenomena described by typological hierarchies is discussed for several languages by a number of leading scholars in typology, historical linguistics, and language documentation. This evidence suggests a rethinking of possible explanations for typological hierarchies, as well as the very notion of typological universals in general. For this reason, the book will be of interest not only to the broad typological community, but also historical linguists, cognitive linguists, and psycholinguists.

Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies), the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers, the distribution of inflectional, agglutinative, and analytic formation among syntactic categories, regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation, suppletion, aspects of syntactic convergence, and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals, with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology, Functional Sentence Perspective, Functional Grammar, functional-pragmatic typology, and general grammaticalization theory.

Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language, and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties, to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey, to codified varieties in Macedonia, and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects, including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.

What is it like? – This is often the first question we ask about any object, and it is typically answered with adjectives: old, smooth, pointed, narrow, etc. Characteristics of things around us is a fundamental aspect of how we conceptualize the physical world, regardless of when or where we live – and regardless of our language. Despite this, the vocabulary of physical qualities has received comparatively little attention in lexical typology: most research so far has focused on verbs and the actions they express.

This volume presents a lexico-typological study of several domains of physical qualities: ‘sharp’/‘blunt’, ‘wet’, ‘empty’/‘full’, ‘old’, as well as dimensions temperature and surface texture. It discusses several theoretical issues including intragenetic language sampling, the possibility of signed vs. spoken language comparison at the lexicon level, and the potential of applying computational models of distributional semantics to lexical typology.

The book will be of interest to linguists with a focus on typology, general and lexical semantics, to lexicographers, and to language students and teachers.

Typology research is extremely important in both proposing classification frameworks and in promoting the careful investigation and analysis of the core concepts inherent within the classification contrasts employed. More exemplary of the latter aspect, the present collection of papers on the typology of writing systems address a number of significant linguistic and psycholinguistic issues surrounding the classification of writing systems. The seven contributions within this volume, which originally appeared as a special issue of Written Language and Literacy 14:1 (2011), cover a wide variety of issues, ranging from an overview of writing system typology research, comparative graphematics, letter-shape similarities, the morphographic principle, tone orthography typology, measuring graphematic transparency, to unconventional spellings within online chat. Reflecting the growing interest in writing, the book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers working on writing systems, written language, and reading research.