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What makes a Figure : Rethinking figurativity
Oct 2025
Book
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.
World Englishes in their Local Multilingual Ecologies
Apr 2025
Book
World Englishes coexist and interact with local languages in multilingual ecologies. Multilingual speakers use the languages in their ecologies for different functions with different interlocutors and at different proficiency levels. Attitudinal responses to the languages vary. Speaker groups are heterogenous manifesting only partial overlap regarding language repertoires use proficiencies and attitudes. The languages in multilingual ecologies may shift in status over time. Some languages may be lost while new languages appear. Strong regional languages and English typically persist. The volume explores multilingual ecologies around the globe and the position of English within them. Case studies are drawn from Africa East South and Southeast Asia the Middle East and Europe all written by distinguished scholars in the field who consider both standardized and non-standardized forms of English. The volume argues for a more inclusive study of World Englishes incorporating speakers’ social backgrounds as well as the other languages in their repertoires.
This ebook is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Wh-island Effects in Chinese : A formal experimental study
Feb 2024
Book
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.
When Data Challenges Theory : Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
Feb 2022
Book
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories such as Focus and Topic to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. <br/> This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.<br/>
Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century : Essays for Allen Reddick
Dec 2021
Book
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.
Where Words Get their Meaning : Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language
Nov 2020
Book
Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations pattern detection and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only and hereby extended to extra-linguistic contexts. <br/>By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience.
Writing and Language Learning : Advancing research agendas
Nov 2020
Book
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).
World Englishes on the Web : The Nigerian diaspora in the USA
Aug 2020
Book
World Englishes on the Web focuses on linguistic practices at the intersection of international migration and social media examining the language repertoires of Nigerians living in the United States and their negotiations of identity and authenticity on a Nigerian web forum. Based on a large corpus of informal multilingual interactive online writing this book describes how diasporic Nigerians employ African-American Vernacular English Nigerian English Nigerian Pidgin and ethnic Nigerian languages in an online community of practice. The project combines corpus linguistic methods—relying on a corpus management tool custom-made for web forum data—with ethnographically-informed qualitative analyses of morphosyntactic lexical and orthographic features and immigrants’ language attitudes and ideologies. It is relevant particularly for linguists and other social scientists interested in World Englishes the sociolinguistics of globalization and computer-mediated communication corpus linguistics and pidgin and creole languages
Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article : Functional Main and Side Roads
Apr 2020
Book
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.
Widening Contexts for Processability Theory : Theories and issues
Nov 2019
Book
This book explores relationships between Processability Theory approaches and other approaches to SLA. It is distinctive in two ways. It offers PT-insiders a way to see connections between their familiar traditions and theories with other ways of working. Parallel to this it offers readers who work in other traditions ways of connecting with a research tradition that makes specific testable claims about second language acquisition processes. These dual perspectives mean that both beginning and established SLA researchers as well as those seeking to connect their work with views of language learning will find something of interest. Studies of multiple languages and multiple aspects of language are included. Chapters cover areas as diverse as literacy language comprehension language attrition and language testing.
Writing History in Late Modern English : Explorations of the Coruña Corpus
Oct 2019
Book
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
A World Atlas of Translation
Feb 2019
Book
What do people think of translation in the different historical cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not.
But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.
But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.
Where is Adaptation? : Mapping cultures, texts, and contexts
Oct 2018
Book
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.
Writing Systems, Reading Processes, and Cross-Linguistic Influences : Reflections from the Chinese, Japanese and Korean Languages
Jul 2018
Book
This 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.
Words of Crisis as Words of Power : The jeremiad in American presidential speeches
May 2018
Book
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.
Word Hunters : Field linguists on fieldwork
Feb 2018
Book
In Word Hunters eleven distinguished linguists reflect on their career-spanning linguistic fieldwork. Over decades each has repeatedly stood up to physical intellectual interpersonal intercultural and sometimes political challenges in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. These scholar-explorers have enlightened the world to the inner workings of languages in remote communities of Africa (West East and South) Amazonia the Arctic Australia the Caucasus Oceania Siberia and East Asia. They report some linguistic eureka moments but also discuss cultural missteps illness and the other challenges of pursuing linguistic data in extreme circumstances. They write passionately about language death and their responsibilities to speech communities. The stories included here—the stuff of departmental and family legends—are published publicly for the first time.
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact : Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Dec 2017
Book
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.
Why Gesture? : How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating
Apr 2017
Book
Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first to systematically explore the functions of gesture in speaking thinking and communicating – focusing on the variety of purposes served for the gesturer as well as for the viewer of gestures. Chapters in this edited volume present a range of diverse perspectives (including neural cognitive social developmental and educational) consider gestural behavior in multiple contexts (conversation narration persuasion intervention and instruction) and utilize an array of methodological approaches (including both naturalistic and experimental). The book demonstrates that gesture influences how humans develop ideas express and share those ideas to create community and engineer innovative solutions to problems.
Worldmaking : Literature, language, culture
Jan 2017
Book
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?
World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition : Insights from Southeast Asian Englishes
Sept 2016
Book
Bridging the gap between the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition this volume offers an in-depth comparative analysis of two postcolonial varieties of English (Singapore and Malaysian English) and neighbouring Indonesian learner English in order to examine the Outer/Expanding Circle distinction and shed light on the genesis of postcolonial varieties of English. The study identifies and analyses more than thirty linguistic features in the categories phonology morphology syntax and discourse concluding that in spite of clear syntactic differences the distinction between the Outer and Expanding Circles is gradual rather than strictly categorical and should rely on current sociolinguistic realities rather than on historical criteria. The volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in the dynamics of Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of English in Southeast Asia or the integration of the paradigms of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition.
World Englishes : New theoretical and methodological considerations
May 2016
Book
This book provides a collection of articles that reflect the current state of affairs in the blossoming field of World Englishes by bringing together several innovative synchronic and diachronic approaches. It contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the criteria that make a low-frequency item represent an incipient change and examines the suitability of the sociolinguistics of globalisation theory for the study of non-traditional avenues for the spread of vernacular varieties of English (recent migrations the entertainment industry the web). It explores crucial aspects of language change and dialect evolution through the study of grammatical phenomena and the particular linguistic and socio-historical factors conditioning them. Together with theoretical questions the volume shows a concern for methodological issues such as sociolinguistic interviews map-task experiments metalinguistic comments acceptability judgments and corpus-based methods. This volume represents the latest trends in the field and will undoubtedly set the agenda for the years ahead.
This title is in pledging for Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023
The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology : History, theory, practice
Dec 2015
Book
Methods 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
Writing(s) at the Crossroads : The process–product interface
Aug 2015
Book
This 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.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>As of January 2019 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Where do nouns come from?
Jun 2015
Book
The noun is an apparent cross-linguistic universal; nouns are central targets of language acquisition; they are frequently prototypical exemplars of Saussurian arbitrariness. This volume considers nouns in sign languages and in the evanescent performances of homesigners (and gesturers) which exhibit considerable iconic motivation. Do such systems mark nouns formally? Do they share strategies for forming nominal expressions? Individual chapters consider formal criteria for a noun/verb distinction in sign languages with different socio-linguistic profiles strategies of “patterned iconicity” in a subcategory of nouns in both well-established and emerging sign languages grammatical markers for a nominal class in a first generation family homesign system from Mexico and the changing role of handshapes in signs referring to action and objects over the gradual development of a single deaf child’s homesign. The volume is of special interest to scholars of gesture sign languages linguistic typology and the evolution socialization and ethnography of language. Originally published in Gesture Vol. 13:3 (2013).
Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese : Revised edition
Dec 2014
Book
The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese Korean and Japanese- originated developed and are used today. Uniquely this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other and (2) discusses how these scripts are and historically have been used in literacy and how they are learned written read and processed by the eyes the brain and the mind. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In this second edition the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts added several new sections and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest. <br/>The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.
Weak Referentiality
Dec 2014
Book
This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases such as modality number neutrality narrow scope incorporation predication and case marking and that in a range of languages (Arabic Brazilian Portuguese Catalan German Papiamentu Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque Dutch English French) involving scrambling modification possession and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics but also in psycholinguistics and language typology.
Word Formation in South American Languages
Nov 2014
Book
This volume focuses on word formation processes in smaller and so far underrepresented indigenous languages of South America. The data for the analyses have been mainly collected in the field by the authors. The several language families described here among them Arawakan Takanan and Guaycuruan as well as language isolates such as Yurakaré Kalapalo and Cholón reflect the linguistic diversity of South America. Equally diverse are the topics addressed relating to word formation processes like reduplication nominal and verbal compounding clitic compounding and incorporation. The traditional notions of the processes are discussed critically with respect to their implementation in minor indigenous languages. The book is therefore not only of interest to readers with an Amerindian background but also to typologists and historical linguists and it is a supplement to more theory-driven approaches to language and linguistics.
Word Classes : Nature, typology and representations
Sept 2014
Book
The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems morphology syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word class issues and present original analyses and new data from a number of languages. The primary focus is on methods (including computational ones) and criteria for identifying and representing major word classes and subclasses in specific languages with considerable attention also directed towards the characterization of the nature and role of minor — or neglected — word classes including trans-categorization processes. The range of topics and perspectives covered makes this volume of considerable interest to both theoretical linguists and typologists.
Women's Epistolary Utterance : A study of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611
Sept 2013
Book
Located at the intersection of historical pragmatics letters and manuscript studies this book offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575-1611. It investigates multiple ways in which socio-culturally and socio-familially contextualized reading of particular collections may increase our understanding of early modern letters as a particular type of handwritten communicative activity. The book also adds to our understanding of these women as individual users of English in their historical moment especially in terms of literacy and their engagement with cultural scripts. Throughout the book analysis is based on the manuscript letters themselves and in this way several chapters address the importance of viewing original sources to understand the letters' full pragmatic significance. Within these broader frameworks individual chapters address the women's use of scribes prose structure and punctuation performative speech act verbs and (im)politeness sincerity and mock (im)politeness.
What is a Context? : Linguistic approaches and challenges
Oct 2012
Book
Context is a core notion of linguistic theory. However while there are numerous attempts at explaining single aspects of the notion of context these attempts are rather diverse and do not easily converge to a unified theory of context. The present multi-faceted collection of papers reconsiders the notion of context and its challenges for linguistics from different theoretical and empirical angles. Part I offers insights into a wide range of current approaches to context including theoretical pragmatics neurolinguistics clinical pragmatics interactional linguistics and psycholinguistics. Part II presents new empirical findings on the role of context from case studies on idioms unarticulated constituents argument linking and numerically-quantified expressions. Bringing together different theoretical frameworks the volume provides thought-provoking discussions of how the notion of context can be understood modeled and implemented in linguistics. It is essential for researchers interested in theoretical and applied linguistics the semantics/pragmatics interface and experimental pragmatics.
Where Do Phonological Features Come From? : Cognitive, physical and developmental bases of distinctive speech categories
Jul 2011
Book
This volume offers a timely reconsideration of the function content and origin of phonological features in a set of papers that is theoretically diverse yet thematically strongly coherent. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference "Where Do Features Come From?" held at the Sorbonne University Paris October 4-5 2007. Several invited papers are included as well. The articles discuss issues concerning the mental status of distinctive features their role in speech production and perception the relation they bear to measurable physical properties in the articulatory and acoustic/auditory domains and their role in language development. Multiple disciplinary perspectives are explored including those of general linguistics phonetic and speech sciences and language acquisition. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step towards synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current "state of the art" of the field.
Words in Dictionaries and History : Essays in honour of R.W. McConchie
May 2011
Book
Bringing together fifteen articles by scholars in Europe and North America this collection aims to represent and advance studies in historical lexis. It highlights the significance of the understanding of dictionary-making and language-making as important socio-cultural phenomena. With its general focus on England and English the book investigates the reception and development of historical and modern English vocabulary and culture in different periods social and professional strata geographical varieties of English and other national cultures. The volume is based on individual (meta)lexicographical etymological lexicosemantic and corpus studies representing two large areas of research: the first part focuses on the history of dictionaries analysing them in diachrony from the first professional dictionaries of the Baroque period via Enlightenment and Romanticism to exploring the possibilities of the new online lexicographical publications; and the second part looks at the interfaces between etymology semantic development and word-formation on the one hand and changes in society and culture on the other.
Word-Order Change as a Source of Grammaticalisation
Jun 2010
Book
This book presents a new perspective on the interaction between word-order and grammaticalisation by investigating the changes that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have undergone in Romance (Catalan French Spanish) as compared to Germanic (English Icelandic). It discusses a great deal of historical comparative data showing that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have (had) a semantic effect in the Germanic and in the Romance languages and that they both appear in the same functional category. The loss of stylistic fronting and oblique subjects is seen as an effect of grammaticalisation where grammaticalisation is taken to be a regular case of parameter change. In contrast to previous and recent approaches to grammaticalisation however the author shows that it is not the loss of morphology that triggers grammaticalisation with subsequent word-order changes but that the word-order change sets off grammaticalisation in the functional categories which is then followed by the loss of morphology.
Why Translation Studies Matters
Feb 2010
Book
Whether Translation Studies really matters is an important and challenging question which practitioners of translation and interpreting raise repeatedly. TS scholars many of whom are translators and interpreters themselves are not indifferent to it either. The twenty papers of this thematic volume contributed by authors from various parts of Europe from Brazil and from Israel address it in a positive spirit. Some do so through direct critical reflection and analysis arguing in particular that the engagement of TS with society should be strengthened so that the latter could benefit more from the former. Others illustrate the relevance and contribution of TS to society and to other disciplines from various angles. Topics broached include the cultural mediation role of translators issues in literary translation knowledge as intellectual capital globalization through English and risks associated with it bridging languages mass media corpora training the use of modern technology interdisciplinarity with psycholinguistics and neurophysiology.
World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects : Selected papers from the 13th IAWE conference
Sept 2009
Book
World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes the 22 articles in this collected volume selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englishes in Regensburg cover a broad range of topics which together reflect the state of the art of research in this field. The volume focuses on regions as diverse as Africa the Caribbean the Antipodes and Asia but also promotes a globally comparative perspective by analyzing selected characteristics of the English language across a wide range of varieties. Methodologically a number of different approaches are applied including corpus linguistic studies socio-phonetics as well as historical discourse analysis. Due to its wide scope the book is of interest not only to World Englishes scholars but also to sociolinguists as well as applied contact or corpus linguists.
Words, Grammar, Text : Revisiting the work of John Sinclair
Jul 2009
Book
John Sinclair’s work is widely known and has had a far-reaching influence particularly in the areas of corpus linguistics lexis phraseology lexicography grammar and discourse analysis. This collection of papers written by former colleagues at Birmingham University looks at some key writings by John Sinclair with the intention of showing why his ideas are of lasting significance. Contributions deal with the Cobuild Project (directed by Sinclair) and its innovative first dictionary; collocation and the Open Choice and Idiom Principles; the interactions between and interdependence of phraseology and grammar; semantic prosody; and the construction of meaning in text. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2 (2007).
Why Writing Matters : Issues of access and identity in writing research and pedagogy
Apr 2009
Book
This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world – UK Pakistan US South Africa Hungary Korea Mexico – to illustrate and celebrate the many ways in which Roz Ivanič has advanced the academic study of writing. Focusing on writing in different formal contexts of education from primary through to further and higher education in a range of national contexts the twenty one original contributions in the book critically engage with theoretical and empirical issues raised in Ivanič’s influential body of work. In their exploration of writers’ struggles with the demands of dominant literacy the authors significantly extend understandings of writing practices in formal institutions. Organized around three themes central to Ivanič’s work – creativity and identity; pedagogy; and research methodologies – the twelve chapters and nine personal and scholarly reflections reveal the powerful ways in which Ivanič’s work has influenced thinking in the field of writing and continues to open up avenues for future questioning and research.
What We Remember : The construction of memory in military discourse
Oct 2008
Book
This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered how it is remembered and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts historians sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.
What Counts as Evidence in Linguistics : The case of innateness
Jun 2007
Book
What counts as evidence in linguistics? This question is addressed by the contributions to the present volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Studies in Language 28:3 (2004). Focusing on the innateness debate what is illustrated is how formal and functional approaches to linguistics have different perspectives on linguistic evidence. While special emphasis is paid to the status of typological evidence and universals for the construction of Universal Grammar (UG) this volume also highlights more general issues such as the roles of (non)-standard language and historical evidence. To address the overall topic the following three guiding questions are raised: What type of evidence can be used for innateness claims (or UG)?; What is the content of such innate features (or UG)?; and How can UG be used as a theory guiding empirical research? A combination of articles and peer commentaries yields a lively discussion between leading representatives of formal and functional approaches.
Washing the Brain – Metaphor and Hidden Ideology
Jan 2007
Book
Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book Andrew Goatly using lexical data from his database Metalude investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture engineering education genetics ecology economics politics industrial time-management medicine immigration race and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is in fact culturally relative compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and as the basis for technological mega-projects has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes Hume Smith Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21st century ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises. The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor’s reductionist tendencies.
Written Reliquaries : The resonance of orality in medieval English texts
Dec 2006
Book
Written 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.
Written Communication across Cultures : A sociocognitive perspective on business genres
Nov 2005
Book
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.
Web Advertising : New forms of communication on the Internet
Dec 2004
Book
This book examines new forms of communication that have emerged through the interactive capabilities of the Internet in particular online advertising and web advertisements. It develops a new model of online communication incorporating mass communication and interpersonal communication. Interactive mass communication redefines the roles of online communication partners who are confronted with a higher degree of complexity in terms of hypertextual information units. In web advertising this new aspect of interactivity is linguistically reflected in different types of personal address forms directives and "trigger words". This study also analyzes the different strategies of persuasion with which web ads try to initiate their activation.Web Advertising provides essential information on the language of web advertisements for academics researchers and students in the fields of hypertext-linguistics advertising communication and media studies.
Williams Syndrome across Languages
Jun 2004
Book
Williams Syndrome (WS) aka Williams Beuren Syndrome is a developmental disorder that we have known about for some forty years. The cause for WS was detected only recently: a micro deletion on chromosome 7 more specifically at the region of chromosome 7q11.23. The cognitive and behavioral profile in WS is characterized by a marked discrepancy between verbal and non-verbal skills combined with relatively spared linguistic skills. Recent research has shown considerable progress defining the areas of intactness in linguistic abilities. This volume builds on that research giving an overview of the psycholinguistic research undertaken and opening up new perspectives and insights through new data and analyses. This book is of interest to researchers of applied cognitive science and to linguists more occupied with theoretical research.
Das Wissen vom Guten : Bedeutung und Kontinuität des Tugendwissens in den Dialogen Platons
Sept 2003
Book
This analysis of the relation between virtue and knowledge focuses on the following aspects: i) Virtue and Happiness can be objects of knowledge; ii) Virtue is knowledge; iii) The search for knowledge is aiming at – and justified by – the human to be happy. Plato therefore defines philosophy not as theory but as the search for wisdom in order to live well. Accordingly Plato does not distinguish different or independent branches of philosophy.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>These conclusions are reached by an investigation which traces the continuity and the development of the relation between virtue and knowledge throughout the different phases in Plato’s philosophy. The leading thesis of this book is unitarian but in order to corroborate it the methodology is used of those scholars who think that Plato’s philosophy has changed significantly through the dialogic phase. This way it can be shown that Plato kept developing new justifications for the same relation between virtue and knowledge.Diese Untersuchung der Beziehung von Tugend und Wissen konzentriert sich auf folgende Aspekte: i) Sowohl Tugend als auch Wissen können erkannt werden; ii) Tugend ist Wissen; iii) Die Wissenssuche wird durch das Glücksstreben finalisiert. Daher bestimmt Platon Philosophie nicht als Theorie sondern als Suche nach der Weisheit um glücklich zu leben. Entsprechend unterscheidet Platon keine Teilbereiche der Philosophie die unabhängige Ziele verfolgen.<br/>Diese Schlussfolgerungen werden erreicht durch eine Untersuchung die die Kontinuität und Entwicklung der Beziehung von Tugend und Wissen durch die verschiedenen Phasen in der Platonischen Philosophie verfolgt. Die leitende These ist unitarisch aber um sie zu bestätigen wird die Methode derjenigen verwandt die annehmen die Platonische Philosophie hätte sich in durch die Dialogphasen wesentlich entwickelt. So kann gezeigt werden dass Platon immer neue Begründungen für dieselbe Beziehung von Tugend und Wissen entwickelt hat.
Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820 : Epoche im Überblick
Dec 2001
Book
This volume is the twelfth to date in a series of works in French or English presenting the epochs and movements of a Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes). The original intention of the editors was to publish a four-volume history of European literature from 1760-1820 and the first of these volumes Des Lumières au Romantisme. Genres en Vers appeared as long ago as 1982. The volumes Genres en Prose and Théâtre are still awaited. In their absence the present volume Epoche im _berblick attempts a more comprehensive and rigorous treatment of the period and its historiographical problems than was initially planned providing the reader with an overview of sixty eventful years of European literary history — years in which German Classicism coincided with the birth initially in Germany and England of Romanticism. And at the centre of this turbulent period of European intellectual and literary history stands the French Revolution.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
Web Site Design is Communication Design
Nov 2001
Book
Web Site Design is Communication Design is written for practitioners trainers and students of Communication Business Information Science and Media Design.
This book is based on a series of case studies of web-site design processes in smaller and larger organizations including Amazon and Microsoft. It offers a well-researched reflective and thorough analysis of the activities undertaken in combination with practical real-life experiences of web-site designers and producers. It pays attention to the often complicated organizational context that web designers and producers have to work in while they serve both bosses and target groups to their best intents. The importance of careful evaluation is stressed throughout the book and in the concluding checklists which guide the practitioner through the design process from initial idea through site maintenance and re-design.
This book is based on a series of case studies of web-site design processes in smaller and larger organizations including Amazon and Microsoft. It offers a well-researched reflective and thorough analysis of the activities undertaken in combination with practical real-life experiences of web-site designers and producers. It pays attention to the often complicated organizational context that web designers and producers have to work in while they serve both bosses and target groups to their best intents. The importance of careful evaluation is stressed throughout the book and in the concluding checklists which guide the practitioner through the design process from initial idea through site maintenance and re-design.
Writing Organization : (Re)presentation and control in narratives at work
Aug 2001
Book
Carl 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.
Whose German? : The ach/ich alternation and related phenomena in ‘standard’ and ‘colloquial’
Mar 2001
Book
The author addresses a number of issues in German and general phonology using a specific problem in German phonology (the ach/ich alternation) as a springboard. These issues include especially the naturalness or lack thereof of the prescriptive standard in German and the importance of colloquial pronunciations as well as historical and dialect evidence for phonological analyses of the “standard” language. Other important topics include the phonetic and phonological status of German /r/ the phonetic and phonological representation of palatals the status of loanwords in phonological description and especially as regards the latter the usefulness of Optimality Theory in capturing phonological facts.The book addresses itself to scholars from the fields of German and Germanic linguistics as well as those concerned more generally with theoretical phonology (whether Lexical or Optimal). It may even appeal to the orthoëpists and lexicographers of modern German.
Word Order Change in Icelandic : From OV to VO
Jan 2001
Book
While Modern Icelandic exhibits a virtually uniform VO order in the VP Old(er) Icelandic had both VO order and OV order as well as ‘mixed’ word order patterns. In this volume the author both examines the various VP-word order patterns from a descriptive and statistical point of view and provides a synchronic and diachronic analysis of VP-syntax in Old(er) Icelandic in terms of generative grammar. Her account makes use of a number of independently motivated ideas notably remnant-movement of various kinds of predicative phrase and the long movement associated with “restructuring” phenomena to provide an analysis of OV orders and correspondingly a proposal as to which aspect of Icelandic syntax must have changed when VO word order became the norm: the essential change is loss of VP-extraction from VP. Although this idea is mainly supported here for Icelandic it has numerous implications for the synchronic and diachronic analysis of other Germanic languages.
When Listeners Talk : Response tokens and listener stance
Jan 2001
Book
Listeners are usually considered recipients in conversational interaction whose main activity is to take in messages from other speakers. In this view the listening activity is separate from speaking. Another view is that listeners and speakers are equal co-participants in conversations who construct the talk together. In support of this latter view one finds a group of vocalisations which are quintessentially listener talk — little conversational objects such as uh-huh oh mm yeah right and mm-hm. These utterances do not have meanings in a conventional dictionary sense but are nevertheless loaded with complex and subtle information about the stance listeners take to what they are hearing information that is gleaned not only from their phonetic form but also from their complex prosodic shape and their placement and timing within the flow of talk. This book summarises eight of these objects and explores one mm in depth.
Wh-Scope Marking
Sept 2000
Book
This volume is the first comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of wh-scope marking. Wh-scope marking constructions have recently received a lot of attention; their very existence and their intricate properties have important consequences for syntax semantics and the syntax–semantics interface (e.g. with respect to the wh-criterion the wh-movement parameter feature checking the theory of locality the interpretation of wh-phrases and why-chains and the nature of LF). The fifteen contributions share the basic assumptions of the Chomskyan approach to syntax and the model-theoretic approach to semantics; they address a variety of languages (among them German Hindi Hungarian English Frisian Kikuyu and Malay). A recurrent theme in all articles is whether wh-scope marking should be analyzed in terms of a direct indirect or mixed dependency. The wealth of cross-linguistic empirical evidence and the theory-independent relevance of the conclusions should make this book the ultimate source of information on wh-scope marking for years to come.
Word Order in Hungarian : The syntax of Ā-positions
Aug 2000
Book
Hungarian word-order is characterized by large scale preposing of constituents to sentence-initial positions. This study examines systematically the elements which occur in the left periphery. Focal wh- and negative operators which have scope over the whole sentence must appear in the left periphery overtly; topicalized elements precede the scope operators and appear in an organized system as well. The author proposes that the structure of the Hungarian sentence comprises a rich set of left-peripheral functional projections organized into sub-systems like the Scope field and the Topic field. On the basis of the structure of Hungarian the study proposes to consider these sub-systems as being in turn split that is hierarchically organized into specific functional projections.
The study also examines the well-formedness conditions linked to multiple preposing. It is shown that the various well-formedness criteria apply overtly in Hungarian. This enables to make a direct link between the scope properties of affective operators and the articulated structure of the left periphery.
The study also examines the well-formedness conditions linked to multiple preposing. It is shown that the various well-formedness criteria apply overtly in Hungarian. This enables to make a direct link between the scope properties of affective operators and the articulated structure of the left periphery.
Wh-Movement and the Theory of Feature-Checking
Jun 2000
Book
Wh-movement and the theory of feature-checking argues that cross-linguistic variation in wh-constructions reduces to the availability of different lexical instantiations of a +wh C0 both across languages and within a single language and the way in which such lexical elements are syntactically identified either via movement or base-generation. Evidence from a wide range of patterns including wh-expletive questions leads to the conclusion that wh-feature checking may sometimes be effected non-locally and ‘at a distance’ (long-distance wh-agreement) and that movement in general takes place for two related but discrete reasons: both to identify and activate an underspecified licensing head and in order for an element to occur in the checking domain projected by its relevant licensing head. Developing and generalizing the proposals beyond wh-phenomena the study also goes on to argue for a Minimalist model of syntax in which feature-dependencies are in fact all licensed in the overt syntax and where there is no need for any further level of LF.
Word Order, Agreement and Pronominalization in Standard and Palestinian Arabic
Apr 2000
Book
The two related issues of word order and subject-verb agreement have occupied center stage in the study of Arabic syntax since the time of Sibawayhi in the eighth century. This book is a contribution to both of these areas. It is grounded within the generative grammar framework in one of its most recent versions namely Minimalism as expounded in Chomsky (1995). <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In this volume a detailed description is given of word order options in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian Arabic (PA). It is shown that perhaps surprisingly the two varieties allow almost the same range of word orders.<br/>The important question of whether Arabic has a VP is addressed: the author argues extensively that Arabic has a VP category. The evidence derives from examining superiority effects ECP effects binding variable interpretations etc.<br/>Also discussed is the content of [Spec TP] in VSO sentences. It is argued that the position is occupied by an expletive pronoun. The author defends the Expletive Hypothesis which states that in VSO sentences the expletive may take part in checking some features of the verb. A typology of the expletive pronoun in Modern Standard Arabic Palestinian Arabic Lebanese Arabic and Moroccan Arabic is provided.<br/>A particularly interesting problem involving pronominal co-reference is the following: if the subject is the antecedent of a pronominal clitic word order is free; if a pronominal is cliticized onto the subject then the antecedent must precede. An account that derives these restrictions without recourse to linear order is proposed.
Writing in Nonstandard English
Feb 2000
Book
This 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.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>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.<br/>
Why We Curse : A neuro-psycho-social theory of speech
Dec 1999
Book
Psychiatrists psychologists neurologists linguists and speech pathologists currently have no coherent theory to explain why we curse and why we choose the words we do when we curse. The Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech draws together information about cursing from different disciplines and unites them to explain and describe the psychological neurological cultural and linguistic factors that underlie this startling phenomenon.
Why We Curse is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the dimensions and scope of cursing and outlines the NPS Theory while Part 2 covers neurological variables and offers evidence for right brain dominance during emotional speech events. Part 3 then focuses on psychological development including language acquisition personality development cognition and so forth while Part 4 covers the wide variety of social and cultural forces that define curse words and restrict their usage. Finally Part 5 concludes by examining the social and legal implications of cursing treating misconceptions about cursing and setting the agenda for future research.
The work draws on new research by Dr. Jay and others and continues the research reported in his groundbreaking 1992 volume Cursing in America. A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts in the movies in the schoolyards and on the streets.
Why We Curse is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the dimensions and scope of cursing and outlines the NPS Theory while Part 2 covers neurological variables and offers evidence for right brain dominance during emotional speech events. Part 3 then focuses on psychological development including language acquisition personality development cognition and so forth while Part 4 covers the wide variety of social and cultural forces that define curse words and restrict their usage. Finally Part 5 concludes by examining the social and legal implications of cursing treating misconceptions about cursing and setting the agenda for future research.
The work draws on new research by Dr. Jay and others and continues the research reported in his groundbreaking 1992 volume Cursing in America. A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts in the movies in the schoolyards and on the streets.
Work Organization and Europe as a Development Coalition
Mar 1999
Book
Work Organization has achieved recent prominence in European policy as new employment guidelines are embodied in the policies of all European Member States. New forms of Work Organization properly understood offer collaborative competitive advantage to European enterprises. This book based on decades of action research in separate European nations identifies the research background from which these new insights and policy initiatives have emerged with continuing lessons to be learned from differences.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Work Organization is the missing link which enables innovation and training to produce sustainable increases in productivity: this is not mere academic theory but also vital practical business. The book launches a new European research agenda which is attracting interest from across the developed world and beyond. Rather than arguing for a stronger role for the state or simply leaving matters to the market the book presents a “third way” based on networks and coalitions illustrated with numerous current European case studies which provide explanations for developments at the level of enterprises regions and the European Union itself. The book provides valuable insights into new European Commission initiatives and Transatlantic Dialogue and provides the foundations for renewed democratic dialogue.
Writing and Identity : The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing
Mar 1998
Book
Writing is not just about conveying ‘content’ but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the ‘me’ they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education because the ‘self’ which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses and the values beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity of the discoursal construction of identity of literacy and identity and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students providing:<br/> a case study of one writer’s dilemmas over the presentation of self;<br/> a discussion of the way in which writers’ life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;<br/> an interview-based study of issues of ownership and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;<br/> linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple often contradictory interests values beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.<br/>The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.<br/>The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity literacy discourse analysis rhetoric and composition studies and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.
Writing Development : An interdisciplinary view
Nov 1997
Book
This 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”.
The Whorf Theory Complex : A critical reconstruction
Jun 1996
Book
At last — a comprehensive account of the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf which not only explains the nature and logic of the linguistic relativity principle but also situates it within a larger ‘theory complex’ delineated in fascinating detail. Whorf’s almost unknown unpublished writings (as well as his published papers) are drawn on to show how twelve elements of theory interweave in a sophisticated account of relations between language mind and experience. The role of language in cognition is revealed as a central concern some of his insights having interesting affinity with modern connectionism. Whorf’s gestaltic ‘isolates’ of experience and meaning crucial to understanding his reasoning about linguistic relativity are explained. A little known report written for the Yale anthropology department is used extensively and published for the first time as an appendix. With the Whorf centenary in 1997 this book provides a timely challenge to those who take pleasure in debunking his ideas without bothering to explore their subtlety or even reading them in their original form.
Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese
Dec 1995
Book
This 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.
Writings in General Linguistics : On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883)
Nov 1995
Book
This 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.
Word Order in Discourse
Jun 1995
Book
This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However as the papers in this collection show word order variation is not random but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation and to those interested in discourse syntax.
The Wedding Report : A prototypical approach to the study of traditional text types
Sept 1993
Book
Traditional text types (or genres) are complex linguistic sociocultural and cognitive phenomena that can only be analysed in flexible interdisciplinary frameworks fusing structural and process-oriented approaches and combining quantitative description with qualitative interpretation and evaluation. The theoretical and methodological implications of the prototypical text type concept which is developed in this book are explored in an exhaustive case study of a representative (ie prototypical) genre: the wedding report a conventional type of news report published in local English newspapers. The distinctive contextual and textual features — situational context text production processes function thematic structure and form on the macro- and microlevel — are analysed synchronically and diachronically. The linguistic findings are integrated into a comprehensive view of the interplay between the genre as a linguistic frame and its sociocultural context. The study puts special emphasis on addressing the methodological problems arising from the inherent fuzziness of traditional text types and can thus serve as a detailed working model of genre analysis designed to be adapted to the specific requirements of similar studies.
Writing History as a Prophet : Postmodernist innovations of the historical novel
Dec 1991
Book
This is a postmodernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>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.<br/>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.
Written Language Revisited
Jan 1989
Book
Josef 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.
William Bathe, S.J., 1564–1614 : A pioneer in linguistics. English translation from the Irish edition, Dublin, 1981
Jan 1986
Book
William Bathe S.J. (1564-1614) was a pioneer in linguistics. The present book deals with Bathe's family background his life and service as a courtier diplomat and finally Jesuit educator and in particular his contribution to the study of language and his most important publication Ianua Linguarum (1611).
Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s : Selected papers
Jan 1985
Book
The general objective of this volume is to present and discuss different modes of existence in women’s texts and feminist identity in political and poetic discourse on the one hand and to analyze the factors which determine differing relationships between women and society and which result in specific forms of identity on the other. The essays in this volume explore language gender mass media sexuality class and social change women’s identity as Blacks and in the Third World as well as the nature of domination feminine criticism and female creativity. The volume opens with a challenging question by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich ‘Who is We?’
Whose Language? : A study in Linguistic Pragmatics
Jan 1985
Book
"For the colonized person objectivity is always directed against him" (Frantz Fanon). Colonized persons do not live on what we call (or used to call) the "colonies" alone. In general objective reality or the "facts of life" are very different depending on the kind of life you can afford. This goes for language as well; and it explains both the title of this book and gives it its "raison d'être". It deals with power in language and asks: Who is really in command when we use "our" language? And why does it make sense to talk about a language of power (or lack of it)? The powerful are the colonizers the colonized are the powerless in language as in geopolitics. Colonizers and colonized alike however are subject to the social and economic conditions prevailing in society and therefore a thorough analysis of these conditions is a must for any socially-oriented theory of language use.
Word Order Typology and Comparative Constructions
Jan 1983
Book
This monograph discussing various aspects involved with a typology of word order strives to take a next step towards a better understanding of the profound unity underlying languages. The volume is divided into five sections: 1) Word order typology; 2) A critical analysis of word order typology; 3) Word order within comparative constructions; 4) Word order in the comparative construction in the Rigveda; 5) Diachronic aspects of word order withing comparative constructions.
What is Meaning? : Studies in the Development of Significance (1903)
Jan 1983
Book
In "What is Meaning" (1903) the author elaborates on the fundamental tenets of her theory of sign to which she gave the overall term ‘significs’. One of the main obstacles to an adequate theory of meaning in Lady Welby’s opinion is the unfounded assumption of fixed sign meaning. "There is strictly speaking no such thing as the Sense of a word but only the sense in which it is used – the circumstances state of mind reference ‘universe of discourse’ belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey – the intention of the user. The Significance is always manifold and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning by expressing its importance its appeal to us its moment for us its emotional force its ideal value its moral aspect its universal or at least social range."<br/>This facsimile of the 1903 edition of "What is Meaning" is accompanied by an essay on "Significs as a Fundamental Science" by Achim Eschbach and "A Concise History of Significs" by G. Mannoury.
What Do We Talk About When We Talk? : Speculative grammar and the semantics and pragmatics of focus
Jan 1981
Book
This monograph deals with the ‘aboutness’ of language. First the sense in which language ‘is about’ or ‘reflects’ both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a reflectionist or ‘Speculative Grammarian’ semantics and pragmatics. Second the ‘Speculative Grammar’ idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language ‘is about’ the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts ‘are about’ their subjects topics and foci.
The (w)hole of the doughnut : Syntax and its boundaries
Jan 1979
Book
From the author’s preface: "I once facetiously stated: 'Syntax is to semantics as the hole of the doughnut is to the whole of the doughnut.' Semantics without syntax thus is like a doughnut without a hole. This was in the heyday of generative semantics and having heard that my major interest was syntax someone was able perhaps also facetiously to respond: 'Does it exist?' Most of the papers collected here originated in those days and previously appeared in various linguistic journals and anthologies. The reader may note that the topics dealt with in these papers all have their roots in syntax but in most cases relate to its boundary areas. The boundary areas are not restricted to semantics but the above analogy of the doughnut might still apply to what syntax is to those boundary areas. Hence the title of the book."
Western Histories of Linguistic Thought : An annotated chronological bibliography, 1822–1976
Jan 1978
Book
The present bibliography suggests that there has been a constant flow of publications which survey the discipline of linguistics in its various stages of development. It attempts to offer a comprehensive coverage of general accounts of the history of linguistic thought in the western world over the last 150 years.