Books

This book offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date, multidisciplinary approach to the work of Galician jongleur Martin Codax and the Vindel Parchment. This medieval manuscript with the texts of seven cantigas de amigo by Martin Codax and the music score of six of them, is a philological gem that underwent numerous vicissitudes. The current volume comprises eighteen chapters dealing in depth with Codax’s work and the Vindel Parchment from five basic perspectives: literature; linguistics, codicology and ecdotics; music; history and reception of the Vindel Parchment; and the historical background of medieval Vigo (at the time still a small town where Codax’s cantigas de amigo are set). Specialists from different disciplines and countries joined forces in a effort to improve our understanding of Martin Codax and his lyric poetry. The research included here tries to go beyond received knowledge in the field by using new approaches and perspectives, delving deeper into areas that had not been sufficiently studied, or by venturing into unexplored territories. Many hypotheses are put forward, contributing to raising interest in a fascinating, enigmatic author, in his extraordinary cantigas and in a medieval parchment that is becoming less and less mysterious. The volume contains contributions in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Galician, each accompanied by a summary in English.

The volume contains 13 specially written specialist articles on a wide range of subjects within the ambit of the history of the English language and prominent literary uses of it. In uniting linguistic and literary pursuits in a single volume, it follows the noble Neapolitan scholar’s research interests, as well as representing topics that figure prominently in any comprehensive university course in English. Subjects range from the rise of the present progressive in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle via issues in Medieval English, concepts of language inherent in the Early Modern English grammatical treatises and an evaluation of their value as evidence for the development of the language, the “new science” and language in the 17th century, on literary issues like the “implied director” in Macbeth, Sir Elyot’s Enigmatic “Image of Governance”, English history reflected in Ben Jonson to the history of text types and Jespersen’s reading of Saussure’s “Cours”. Apart from an introductory section with articles on Frank’s biography, his scientific activities and his impact on the field, the book contains work by Susan Fitzmaurice, Nicola Pantaleo, Gabriella Di Martino, Konrad Koerner, Stefano Manferlotti, Uwe Baumann, Anna Maria Palombi Cataldi, Rosanna Sornicola and Dieter Stein.

This book is a textbook on R, a programming language and environment for statistical analysis and visualization. Its primary aim is to introduce R as a research instrument in quantitative Interactional Linguistics. Focusing on visualization in R, the book presents original case studies on conversational talk-in-interaction based on corpus data and explains in good detail how key graphs in the case studies were programmed in R. It also includes task sections to enable readers to conduct their own research and compute their own visualizations in R. Both the code underlying the key graphs in the case studies and the datasets used in the case studies as well as in the task sections are made available on the book’s companion website.

Whenever we think about the world – including its concrete and abstract entities – we typically see a series of so-called mental images in front of our eyes that aid us in everyday problem solving and navigating ourselves in the world. Visual metaphors, similarly to their linguistic counterparts, largely build on such images.

Nevertheless, the interplay of metaphorical/metonymical text and imagery is not necessarily (and not usually) straightforward and raises complex theoretical and methodological questions. The eleven chapters in this collection address a wide range of such challenges, such as what are visual metaphors in the first place; how can they be identified; what is their relationship to linguistic metaphors; what are their most common manifestations; what knowledge structures are required for their interpretation; and how do they interact with metonymies. The studies cut across linguistics, politics, philosophy, poetry, art and history – highlighting the ubiquitous role that visual metaphor plays in everyday life and conceptualizations.

Originally published as special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1 (2020).

Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language processing interacts with our knowledge and perception of the immediate environment. Scientists interested in how language users integrate what they know with their perception of objects and events will find the book a rewarding read. The book further covers lexical, sentence, and discourse level processes, as well as active visual context effects in both non-interactive and interactive tasks and thus present a well-balanced view of the field. It is aimed at experienced researchers and students alike in the hopes of attracting new talent to the field. Thanks to its in-depth methodological introduction and broad coverage it constitutes an excellent course book.

The eleven chapters of Vocabulary in a Second Language are written by the world’s leading researchers in the field of vocabulary studies in second language acquisition. Each chapter presents experimental research leading to new conclusions about and insights into the selection, the learning and teaching, or the testing of vocabulary knowledge in foreign languages. This book is intended as an up-to-date overview of the important domain of the lexicon for researchers in the field of second language acquisition, teacher trainers and professional teachers of second or foreign languages.

Vocalize-to-Localize? Meerkats do it for specific predators… And babies point with their index finger toward targets of interest at about nine months, well before using language-specific that-demonstratives. With what-interrogatives they are universal and, as relativizers and complementizers, play an important role in grammar construction. Some alarm calls in nonhumans display more than mere localization: semantics and even syntax. Instead of telling another monomodal story about language origin, in this volume advocates of representational gestures, semantically transparent, but with a problematic route toward speech, meet advocates of speech, with a problematic route toward the lexicon. The present meeting resulted in contributions by 23 specialists in the behaviour and brain of humans, including comparative studies in child development and nonhuman primates, aphasiology and robotics. The near future will tell us if the present crosstalk — between researchers in auditory and in visual communication systems — will lead to a more integrative framework for understanding the emergence of babbling and pointing, two types of neural control whose coordination could pave the way toward the word and syntax.

The contributions to this volume were previously published as Interaction Studies 5:3 (2004) and 6:2 (2005).

The second volume in the VARGReB series deals with voice in the wider sense, encompassing both alternations that preserve semantic valency, with passives as the most typical instance, and valency-changing devices such as the causative. Regarding the former, special attention is given to event-structural conditions on passivization, non-canonical passives, and the relation between passives and (active) impersonals. Papers dealing with causatives focus on valency patterns and argument marking in canonical as well as extended uses of causative morphology. Other articles consider converse constructions and the argument structure of middles, which seem to hold a position between voice in the narrow sense and valency-changing operations. An introductory article provides background information on the repertoire of voice alternations in Baltic from a cross-linguistic perspective. Representing different approaches and methods, the contributions to this volume offer fine-grained analyses of data from contemporary Latvian and Lithuanian.

This collection aims first to establish a structure-independent, language-independent definition of pragmatic voice, and more specifically then a universal functional definition of “inverse”. The grammar and pragmatic function of the four major voice constructions — direct-active, inverse, passive, antipassive — are surveyed using narrative texts from 14 languages: Koyukon (Athabascan), Plains Cree (Algonquian), Chepang (Tibeto-Burman), Squamish and Bella Coola (Salish), Sahaptin (Sahaptian), Kutenai (isolate), Surinam Carib (Carib), Spanish and Greek (Indo-European), Korean, Maasai (Nilotic), Cebuano and Karao (Philippine). The comparative quantified study of pragmatic voice functions tests the validity of a universal functional definition of voice and in particular of “inverse”. The cross-language comparison of grammatical structures that code the various voice functions then lays down the foundation for a non-trivial cross-language typology of “inverse”.

The volume's central concern is grammatical voice, traditionally known as diathesis, and its classical manifestations as Active, Middle, and Passive. While numerous problems in the meaning, syntax, and morphology of these categories in Indo-European remain unsolved, their counterparts in more exotic languages have raised still further questions. What discourse functions and diachronic events unite 'voice' as a recognizable phenomenon across languages? How are they typically grammaticalized? What stages do children go through in learning them? How does 'voice' link up with ergativity and with other categories and constructions such as the Inverse and the Antipassive? The authors in this volume have different perspectives on these problems: they discuss voice, e.g., from a typological-universal view, in relation to language acquisition and to ergativity, and from diachronic and cross-linguistic perspectives.