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This volume presents works seeking to re-think the very nature and scope of figurativity calling into attention some of the received tenets in accounts of figurativity both as a holistic category and for individual types and families of figures but also attempting to expand upon the current scope of figurative theorizing. The works presented here investigate a wider array of figures than the typically-studied tropes of metaphor irony and metonymy and they address broad issues such as figurativity writ large (what figurativity actually is and does including how embodied it is) multimodality contiguity of figurative forms and furthering our consideration of the ingredients of irony. It should appeal to any scholar interested in figurativity in all its expansive guises.

This book examines three controversial generalizations concerning wh-island effects in Chinese: argument and adjunct asymmetry subject and object asymmetry and D-linked and non-D-linked asymmetry. Experiments under the factorial definition of island effects reveal that: (1) both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to the wh-island displaying no asymmetry; (2) subject wh-in-situ manifests a larger magnitude of island effects whereas object wh-in-situ shows a smaller size due to the confounding of double name penalty exhibiting a special pattern of asymmetry; (3) D-linked and non-D-linked who-in-situ evince no asymmetry while D-linked and non-D-linked what-in-situ demonstrate a marginal asymmetry. Findings support the theory of covert wh-movement on the interpretation of Chinese wh-in-situ. The pattern of wh-island effects can be attributed to the violation of locality principles during wh-feature movement. This book is primarily tailored for researchers interested in the study of Chinese wh-questions and generative linguistics in the broad sense.

The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography the culture of the book and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors and more recently on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774) the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain Protestant bastions in continental Europe and America. Between the covers of Words Books Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon Milton Defoe Dryden Pope Richardson Swift Byron Mary Shelley and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street the biographer John Aubrey the lexicographer and biographer Johnson the bibliophile Hollis and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse poach snip and savour a book’s every word and image.

The current volume aspires to add to previous research on the connection between writing and language learning from a dual perspective: It seeks to reflect current progress in the domain as well as to foster future developments in theory and research. The theoretical postulations contained in Part I identify and expand in novel ways the diverse lenses through which the varied multi-faceted dimensions of the connection between writing and language learning can be explored. The methodological reflections put forward in Part III signal theoretically-grounded and pedagogically-relevant paths along which future empirical work can grow. The empirical studies reported in Part II illuminate the myriad of individual educational and task-related variables that (may) mediate short-term and long-term language learning outcomes. These studies examine diverse forms of writing performed in varied environments (including pen-and-paper and digital writing) conditions (writing individually and/or collaboratively) and instructional settings (academic settings – including secondary school and college level institutions – as well as out-of-school contexts).

This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive pragmatic semantic and syntactic factors the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics generic usages or onymic articles.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis syntax semantics morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts such as year of publication sex of the author geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories as well as the above-mentioned metadata information can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) purpose-designed software by IrLab is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849

Where is Adaptation? Mapping cultures texts and contexts explores the vast terrain of contemporary adaptation studies and offers a wide variety of answers to the title question in 24 chapters by 29 international practitioners and scholars of adaptation both eminent and emerging. From insightful self-analyses by practitioners (a novelist a film director a comics artist) to analyses of adaptations of place culture and identity the authors brought together in this collection represent a broad cross-section of current work in adaptation studies. From the development of technologies impacting film festivals to the symbiotic potential of interweaving disability and adaptation studies censorship exploring the “glocal” and an examination of the Association for Adaptation Studies at its 10th anniversary the original contributions in this volume aim to trace the leading edges of this evolving field.

The volume explores crisis rhetoric in contemporary U.S. American presidential speechmaking. Rhetorical leadership constitutes an inherent feature of the modern presidency. Particularly during times of critical events the president is expected to react and address the nation. However the power of the office also allows him or her to direct attention to particular topics and thus rhetorically create or exploit the notion of crisis. This monograph examines the verbal responses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to pressing issues during their terms in office. Assuming an interdisciplinary approach it illuminates the characteristics of modern crisis rhetoric. The aim of the book is to show that elements of Puritan rhetoric and specifically the tradition of the jeremiad although taken out of their original context and modified to suit a modern multiethnic society can still be detected in contemporary political communication. It will be of interest to students and scholars of presidential rhetoric political communication sociolinguistics and cultural studies.

The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles and in Romance.

In 1978 Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature formulating the term “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words music dancing visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then creative works have played a crucial role in realigning reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume is divided into three sections each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural political cultural fictional literary linguistic and virtual worlds and why does this matter?