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Information on Forthcoming Books can be found on the benjamins.com website.
61 - 73 of 73 results
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Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese
More LessThis edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase.
Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population.
They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin, as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes, often in comparison with English, how the Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy, education, and culture of its users.
Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures, Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor, has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies, linguistics, education, psychology) as well as for the general public (parents, business, government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China, Korea and Japan, but mainly about the various writing systems, some exotic, some familar, some simple, some complex, but all fascinating.
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Writing Development
More LessThis volume presents a selection of papers presented at a series of three workshops organized by the Network “Written Language and Literacy” as launched by the European Science Foundation. The main topics making up Writing Development are: (1) Writing and literacy acquisition: Links between speech and writing, with contributions by David R. Olson, Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Emilia Ferreiro, Ruth Berman, Liliana Tolchinsky & Ana Teberosky; (2) Writing and reading in time and culture, with contributions by Collette Sirat, Françoise Desbordes, Harmut Günther, Peter Koch, & Jean Hébrard: (3) Written language competence in monolingual and bilingual contexts, with contributions by Michel Fayol & Serge Mouchon, Georges Lüdi, & Ludo Verhoeven; (4) Writing systems, brain structures and languages: A neurolinguistic view, with contributions by Giuseppe Cossu, Heinz Wimmer & Uta Frith, & Brian Butterworth. The volume heads off with an extensive introduction “Studying writing and writing acquisition today: A multidisciplinary view”.
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Writing History as a Prophet
More LessThis is a postmodernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past.
Beginning with the poetics of Sir Walter Scott, Wesseling moves via a global survey of 19th century historical fiction to modernist innovations in the genre.
Noting how the self-reflexive strategy enables a novelist to represent an episode from the past alongside the process of gathering and formulating historical knowledge, the author discusses the elaboration of this strategy, introduced by novelists such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, in the work of, among others, Julian Barnes, Jay Cantor, Robert Coover and Graham Swift. Wesseling also shows how postmodernist writers attempt to envisage alternative sequences for historical events. Deliberately distorting historical facts, authors of such uchronian fiction, like Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael R. Read, Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass, imagine what history looks like from the perspective of the losers, rather than the winners.
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Writing History in Late Modern English
More LessThis 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
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Writing in Nonstandard English
More LessThis book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest.
The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.
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Writing Organization
More LessCarl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.
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Writing Systems, Reading Processes, and Cross-Linguistic Influences
More LessThis book provides readers with a unique array of scholarly reflections on the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in relation to reading processes and data-driven interpretations of cross-language transfer. Distinctively broad in scope, topics addressed in this volume include word reading with respect to orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic processing as well as cross-linguistic influences on reading in English as a second language or a foreign language. Given that the three focal scripts have unique orthographic features not found in other languages – Chinese as logography, Japanese with multi-scripts, and Korean as non-Roman alphasyllabary – chapters expound script-universal and script-specific reading processes. As a means of scaling up the body of knowledge traditionally focused on Anglocentric reading research, the scientific accounts articulated in this volume importantly expand the field’s current theoretical frameworks of word processing to theory building with regard to these three languages.
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Writing(s) at the Crossroads
More LessThis volume aims at contributing to an interpretive approach to writing and its dynamics. It offers a general scope on the process-product interface by multiplying the points of view on both the process and the product and their links. The book presents new findings and perspectives in the study of language and writing, both theoretical and methodological (e.g. dual process models of writing, pragmatics of writing, linguistic analysis of psycholinguistic units such as bursts of production). It also presents new tools for a longitudinal approach to the writing steps, key-stroke logging with integrated linguistic modules, and textometric analysis of written texts. The volume is composed of five sections that highlight different approaches to writing from the viewpoint of multiple disciplines: Anthropology, Cognitive Psycholinguistics, Communication Studies, Didactics (Applied Linguistics), Discourse Analysis, Literacy, Sociolinguistics and Text Genetics. This book will be relevant for scholars and students interested in writing, text analysis, literacy, learning and teaching.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Writings in General Linguistics
More LessThis volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikołay Kruszewski (1851-1887), whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz’ translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski’s Master’s thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic, first published in German in 1881, the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever, by Gregory M. Eramian, of Kruszewski’s doctoral thesis, Outline of Linguistic Science, supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883, which until now has been available only in German translation, published in Techmer’s “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig, 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1973). Together with a detailed introduction, a full list of Kruszewski’s writings, a bibliography of secondary sources, including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski, and detailed indexes of biographical names, subjects & terms, and languages cited for examples, the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.
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Written Communication across Cultures
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Winner of ABC's award for Distinguished Publication for 2006
This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia, New Zealand and China. It is also one of those inspired by contrastive rhetoric but has contributed innovatively and uniquely by incorporating research findings from genre analysis, in particular, the sociocognitive genre perspective into this cross-cultural study.
On the one hand, the endeavor represents an in-depth theoretical exploration by considering not only discourse community and cognitive structuring, but also the deep semantics of genre and intertextuality, while broadening genre study by integrating insights from cross-cultural communication as well as the Chinese perspectives. On the other hand, the book also addresses pragmatic issues. As a particular feature, it solicits professional members’ intercultural viewpoints; thus confirming the shared social "stock of knowledge" employed in the culturally defined writing conventions.
Last but not least, this book explores the implications for genre education and training, and develops an appropriate model for cross-cultural genre learning, which encourages learning through legitimate peripheral participation and intercultural learning in business organizations.
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Written Language Revisited
More LessJosef Vachek, one of the last living exponents of the Prague School, has dedicated 50 years of his life to the study of written language in all its aspects. This volume is a tribute to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It contains a selection of his papers written between 1945 and 1987. Contents Writing and phonetic transcription; Written language and printed language; The linguistic status of written utterances; The primacy of writing?; Segmentation of the flow of speech and written language; The stylistics of written language; Glossematics and written language; Paralinguistic sounds, written language and language development; Written language as a heterogenous system; The 1929 Praguian Theses, internal speech, and written language; Written language seen from the functionalist angle; On the problem of written language; The development of the written norm of English; Puristic tendencies in written language; Redundancy in written language with special regard to capitalization of graphemes; Spelling as an important linguistic concept; Pluridimensionality of written utterances and its consequences; Revaluations of redundant graphemes; Thoughts on some fifty years of research in written language.
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The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology
More LessMethods of linguistic data collection are among the most central aspects in empirical linguistics. While written questionnaires have only played a minor role in the field of social dialectology, the study of regional and social variation, the last decade has seen a methodological revival. This book is the first monograph-length account on written questionnaires in more than 60 years. It reconnects – for the newcomer and the more seasoned empirical linguist alike – the older questionnaire tradition, last given serious treatment in the 1950s, with the more recent instantiations, reincarnations and new developments in an up-to-date, near-comprehensive account. A disciplinary history of the method sets the scene for a discussion of essential theoretical aspects in dialectology and sociolinguistics. The book is rounded off by a step-by-step practical guide – from study idea to data analysis and statistics – that includes hands-on sections on Excel and the statistical suite R for the novice.This book has a companion website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/impact.40.website
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Written Reliquaries
More LessWritten Reliquaries: The resonance of orality in medieval English texts establishes the linguistic component of orality and oral tradition. The relics it examines are traces of spoken performance, artifacts of linguistic and cultural processes. Seven case studies animate verbal acts of making promises, quoting proverbs, pronouncing curses, speaking gibberish, praying Pater Nosters, invoking saints, and keeping silence. The study of their resonance is enabled by a methodological conjunction of historical pragmatics and oral theory. Insights from oral theory enlighten spoken traditions which in turn may be understood in the larger historical-pragmatic context of linguistic performance. The inquiry ranges across broad as well as narrow planes of reference to trace a complex set of cultural and linguistic interactions. In this way it reconstructs relevant discursive contexts, giving detailed accounts of underlying assumptions, traditions, and conventions. Doing so, the book demonstrates that an integrated methodology not only allows access to oral discourse in both Old English and Middle English but also provides insight into the fluid medieval interchange of literacy and orality.
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