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Creolization and Contact
Dec 2001
Book
This volume contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the papers presented at “The Amsterdam Workshop on Language Contact and Creolization.” These studies apply the concept of relexification to creoles as well as other contact languages; highlight the relevance of strategies of second language learning for theories of pidgin/creole genesis; critically discuss the notions levelling (koine formation) and convergence; the relation between types of contact situations and processes of crosslinguistic influence; as well as the linguistic consequences of the social structure of the plantation system. In addition to discussing English- French- and Dutch-related creoles the papers cover a wide range of contact languages spoken throughout Africa Asia and Europe. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for research in the field of contact linguistics.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
Circum-Baltic Languages : Volume 2: Grammar and Typology
Dec 2001
Book
The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages we find three major branches of Indo-European —Baltic Germanic and Slavic the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological areal and historical perspective trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume II selected phenomena in the grammars of the circum-Baltic languages are studied in a cross-linguistic perspective.
Getting Started in Interpreting Research : Methodological reflections, personal accounts and advice for beginners
Dec 2001
Book
What sets this collection apart in the literature is its direct personal style. Experienced supervisors as well as younger scholars speak to beginning researchers in interpreting and more generally in Translation Studies. The contributors who are very familiar with the difficulties beginners experience focus on their needs and anticipate their questions. They reflect analyze and advise with illustrations from their own experience.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Issues discussed include topic selection project planning time management ‘doctoral stress’ the use of the literature critical reading and book reviews supervisor-supervisee relations institutional frameworks for research training issues in empirical research theoretical analysis and the role of small projects. Readers will thus find answers to many personal institutional and methodological questions which are common to beginners in many disciplines and in many paradigms.<br/>
Languages Within Language : An evolutive approach
Dec 2001
Book
There is little hope of reconstructing by means of comparative or typological studies a lingua adamica essentially different from present-day languages. The distant preverbal past is however still present in live speech. Phonetic syntactic and semantic rule transgressions far from being products of a deficient output are governed by a universal iconic apparatus a sort of ‘anti-grammar’ or ‘proto-grammar’ which enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of the grammar of any language. Secondary messages generated by the proto-grammar are integrated into the primary grammatical message. The two messages whose structural and semantic divergence represents a chronological distance of hundreds of thousands of years constitute a dialectic unity which characterize natural languages. The evolutive approach offers a different perhaps better understanding of questions related to dynamic synchrony vocal and verbal style poetic language language change.Chapters on: Diversity of the lexicon; Dual encoding: vocal style; Syntactic gesturing; Syntactic regressions; Prosodic expression of emotions; Poetry and vocal art; Situation and meaning; A hidden presence: verbal magic; Playing with language: joke and metaphor; Metaphor: a research instrument; Dynamics of poetic language; Semantic structure of possessive constructions; Semantic structure of punctuation marks; Why gestures?; Between acts and words; Language within language: dynamics change and evolution.
Language and National Identity : Comparing France and Sweden
Dec 2001
Book
This book re-examines the relationship between language and national identity. Unlike many previous studies it employs a comparative approach: France and Sweden have been chosen as case studies both for their<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>similarities (e.g. both are member states of the European Union) as well as their important differences (e.g. France subscribes in principle to a civic model of national identity whereas the basis of Swedish identity is<br/>undeniably ethnic). It is precisely differences such as these which allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the ethnolinguistic implications of some of the major challenges currently facing France Sweden and other European countries: regionalism immigration European integration and globalization.The present volume benefits from the use of a multidisciplinary approach and differs from others on the market because of the variety of methods of inquiry used. A series of societal analyses is complemented by an empirical<br/>component bringing a more grounded understanding to the issue of language and national identity.
Features and Interfaces in Romance : Essays in honor of Heles Contreras
Dec 2001
Book
This volume brings together new research on theoretical Romance Linguistics; its intended audience is scholars in the field of formal grammar especially those specializing in Romance languages. It represents the latest work on the structure of Romance languages with relevant comparisons to other languages such as English and Basque. As the volume's title indicates two related themes recur in these studies: the role of grammatical features in sub-modules of the grammar and the interaction of sub-modules with each other and with external systems at the “interfaces”. The contributions to this volume all framed within current theoretical models explore these and related problems in the analysis of Romance. The volume contains studies on morphology phonology syntax and semantics and includes language and subject indices.
Culture in Communication : Analyses of intercultural situations
Dec 2001
Book
This volume is dedicated to questions arising in linguistic sociological and anthropological analyses of intercultural encounters. It aims at presenting new theoretical and methodological aspects of Intercultural Communication focusing on issues such as ideology and hegemonial attitudes communicative genres and culture specific repertoires of genres the theory of contextualization and nonverbal (prosodic gestural mimic) contextualization cues. The collected articles which share an interactive view of language focus on the methodological possibilities of explanatory analyses of intercultural communication. They address the question of how participants in inter-cultural communication (re)construct cultural differences and cultural identities. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Empirical analyses go hand-in-hand with the discussion of methodological and theoretical aspects of interculturality and the relationship of language and culture.<br/>
Circum-Baltic Languages : Volume 1: Past and Present
Dec 2001
Book
The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic Germanic and Slavic the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological areal and historical perspective trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.
Evidentials and Relevance
Dec 2001
Book
This book uses Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials presents speech-act theory and examines Grice’s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? The second part examines those assumptions of Relevance theory that bear on the study of evidentials offers an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials and introduces three distinctions relevant to the issues discussed in this book: between explicit and implicit communication truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials including sentence adverbials parenthetical constructions and hearsay particles. This book offers convincing evidence that not all evidentials behave similarly with respect to the above distinctions and offers an explanation for why this is so.
Narrative Development in a Multilingual Context
Dec 2001
Book
In this volume the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories such as temporality perspective connectivity and narrative coherence. Moreover a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally the effects of input on narrative construction in children’s first and second language are examined in several studies. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
Responding in Conversation : A study of response particles in Finnish
Dec 2001
Book
This book concerns particles that are used as responses in conversations. It provides much needed methodological tools for analyzing the use of response particles in languages while its particular focus is Finnish. The book focuses on two Finnish particles nii(n) and joo which in some of their central usages have “yeah” and “yes” as their closest English counterparts. The two particles are discussed in a number of sequential and activity contexts including their use as answers to yes-no questions and directives as responses to a stance-taking by the prior speaker and in the midst of an extended telling by the co-participant. It will be shown how there is a fine-grained division of labor between the particles having to do with the epistemic and affective character of the talk and the continuation vs. closure-relevance of the activity. The book connects the interactional usages of the particles with what is known about their historical origins and in this fashion it is also of interest to linguists doing research on processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.
The Psychology and Sociology of Literature : In honor of Elrud Ibsch
Dec 2001
Book
The Psychology and Sociology of Literature is a collection of 25 chapters on literature by some of the leading psychologists sociologists and literary scholars in the field of the empirical study of literature. Contributors include Ziva Ben-Porat Gerry Cupchik Art Graesser Rachel Giora Norbert Groeben Colin Martindale David Miall Willie van Peer Kees van Rees Siegfried Schmidt Hugo Verdaasdonk and Rolf Zwaan. Topics include literature and the reading process; the role of poetic language metaphor and irony; cathartic and Freudian effects; literature and creativity; the career of the literary author; literature and culture; literature and multicultural society literature and the mass media; literature and the internet; and literature and history. An introduction by the editors situates the empirical study of literature within an academic context.
The chapters are all invited and refereed contributions collected to honor the scholarship and retirement of professor Elrud Ibsch of the Free University of Amsterdam. Together they represent the state of the art in the empirical study of literature a movement in literary studies which aims to produce reliable and valid scientific knowledge about literature as a means of verbal communication in its cultural context. Elrud Ibsch was one of the pioneers in Europe to promote this approach to literature some 25 years ago and this volume takes stock of what has happened since.
The Psychology and Sociology of Literature presents an invaluable overview of the results promises gaps and needs of the empirical study of literature. It addresses social scientists as well as scholars in the humanities who are interested in literature as discourse.
The chapters are all invited and refereed contributions collected to honor the scholarship and retirement of professor Elrud Ibsch of the Free University of Amsterdam. Together they represent the state of the art in the empirical study of literature a movement in literary studies which aims to produce reliable and valid scientific knowledge about literature as a means of verbal communication in its cultural context. Elrud Ibsch was one of the pioneers in Europe to promote this approach to literature some 25 years ago and this volume takes stock of what has happened since.
The Psychology and Sociology of Literature presents an invaluable overview of the results promises gaps and needs of the empirical study of literature. It addresses social scientists as well as scholars in the humanities who are interested in literature as discourse.
Essays in Speech Act Theory
Dec 2001
Book
Any study of communication must take into account the nature and role of speech acts in a broad context. This book addresses questions such as:<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>- What do we mean?<br/>- How do we say it? and<br/>- How is it understood?<br/>in the broad context of universal socio-cultural and psychological issues that bear on human communication. It presents an overview of current issues in speech act theory that are at the center of human and social sciences dealing with language thought and action building on John Searle’s famous article ‘How Performatives Work’ (included in this book). <br/>The contributions by linguists psychologists computer scientists and philosophers thus address issues of communication that are crucial in conversation analysis cognitive science artificial intelligence psychology and philosophy and a general understanding of how we communicate.<br/>The book is suitable for courses with an extensive bibliography for further reading and an Index.
Text Representation : Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects
Dec 2001
Book
This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguistic and discourse psychology point of view. Consequently this book presents various research methodologies: linguistic analysis text analysis corpus linguistics computational linguistics argumentation analysis and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. The authors compare test and evaluate linguistic and processing theories of text representation.<br/>A state of the art volume in an emerging field of interest located at the very heart of our communicative behavior: the study of text and text representation.<br/>
Ideophones
Dec 2001
Book
The present volume represents a selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Ideophones held in January 1999 in St. Augustin Germany. They center around the following hypotheses: Ideophones are universal; and constitute a grammatical category in all languages of the world; ideophones and similar words have a special dramaturgic function that differs from all other word classes: they simulate an event an emotion a perception through language. In addition to this unique function a good number of formal parallels can be observed. The languages dealt with here display strikingly similar patterns of derivational processes involving ideophones. An equally widespread common feature is the introduction of ideophones via a verbum dicendi or complementizer. Another observation concerns the sound-symbolic behavior of ideophones. Thus the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound-symbolism. Finally it is made clear that ideophones are part of spoken language — the language register where gestures are used — rather than written language.
Hausa
Dec 2001
Book
Hausa is a major world language spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger in addition to diaspora communities of traders Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa e.g. southern Nigeria Ghana and Togo and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which together with Semitic Cushitic Omotic Berber and Ancient Egyptian is a coordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar consists of sixteen chapters which together provide a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms thus guaranteeing its on-going accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.
Dimensions of Conscious Experience
Dec 2001
Book
It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde Sweden provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy psychology cognitive neuroscience linguistics cognitive and computer science biology physics art and the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity nonconceptuality vs conceptuality language evolutionary aspects neural correlates microphysical level creativity visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (Series A)<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
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/"/>
Self-Reference and Self-Awareness
Dec 2001
Book
Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’ the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege brings four classic contributions together in one place and offers five new studies. (Series A)<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
Mediating Criticism : Literary Education Humanized
Dec 2001
Book
In the twentieth century literature was under threat. Not only was there the challenge of new forms of oral and visual culture. Even literary education and literary criticism could sometimes actually distance novels poems and plays from their potential audience. This is the trend which Roger D. Sell now seeks to reverse. Arguing that literature can still be a significant and democratic channel of human interactivity he sees the most helpful role of teachers and critics as one of mediation. Through their own example they can encourage readers to empathize with otherness to recognize the historical achievement of significant acts of writing and to respond to literary authors’ own faith in communication itself. By way of illustration he offers major re-assessments of five canonical figures (Vaughan Fielding Dickens T.S. Eliot and Frost) and of two fascinating twentieth-century writers who were somewhat misunderstood (the novelist William Gerhardie and the poet Andrew Young).