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The contributions to this volume focus on what language and language use reveals about cognitive structure and underlying cognitive categories. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays from linguists and psychologists within this volume investigate the insights conceptual categorization can give into the organization and structure of the mind and specific mental states. Topics and linguistic phenomena discussed include narratives and story telling language development figurative language linguistic categorization linguistic relativity and the linguistic coding of mental states such as perceptions and beliefs. With contributions at the forefront of current debate this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in language and the cognitive structures that support it.

Collecting the work of linguists psychologists neuroscientists archaeologists artificial intelligence researchers and philosophers this volume presents a richly varied picture of the nature and function of mental states. Starting from questions about the cognitive capacities of the early hominin homo floresiensis the essays proceed to the role mental representations play in guiding the behaviour of simple organisms and robots thence to the question of which features of its environment the human brain represents and the extent to which complex cognitive skills such as language acquisition and comprehension are impaired when the brain lacks certain important neural structures. Other papers explore topics ranging from nativism to the presumed constancy of categorization across signed and spoken languages from the formal representation of metaphor actions and vague language to philosophical questions about conceptual schemes and colours. Anyone interested in mental states will find much to reward them in this fine volume.

This book is about dictionaries and dictionary making. In six thematic sections it presents nineteen contributions covering a wide field within lexicography: Online Lexicography Dictionary Structure Phraseology in Dictionaries LSP Lexicography Dictionaries and the User plus Etymology History and Culture in Lexicography. Some chapters focus on theoretical aspects others report on dictionary work in the making and still others compare and analyze existing dictionaries. Common to all authors however is the concern for the dictionary user. Trivial as it may seem the fact that dictionaries are meant to fulfill the needs of specific user groups has only recently achieved widespread recognition in the lexicographical literature. This volume shows the many ramifications of this functional approach to lexicography by presenting twenty-two authors representing the state of the art in eleven countries: Canada Denmark Germany Great Britain Iceland Israel Latvia The Netherlands Poland South Africa and Spain.

This is a corpus-based study of lexicalization of motion events in Serbo-Croatian and English with contrasting examples from Spanish French Italian Mandarin Chinese and Albanian. Talmy’s typology (1985) provides the backdrop for the analysis and the focus is on intratypological differences that affect habitual presence or absence of information in motion expressions crosslinguistically as well as “pattern clashing” in translation. This fresh look at issues regarding linguistic typology lexical and construction meaning and spatio-temporal construals in language and experience results in a more finely grained classification of verbalized motion events. The study offers an eclectic overview of different theoretical approaches and insists on theoretically unbiased set of tools and principles that can be used in studies of any cognitive domain in any language. It provides an in-depth discussion of current issues in cognitive linguistics in particular and suggests systematic implementation of the research findings in applied and interdisciplinary studies of language.

Recent developments in the generative tradition have created new interest in matters of argument structure and argument projection giving prominence to the discussion on the role of lexical entries. Particularly the more traditional lexicalist view that encodes argument structure information on lexical entries is now challenged by a syntactic view under which all properties of argument structure are taken up by syntactic structure. In the light of these new developments the contributions in this volume provide detailed empirical investigations of argument structure phenomena in a wide range of languages. The contributions vary in their response to the theoretical questions and address issues that range from the role of specific functional heads and the relation of argument projection with syntactic processes to the position of argument structure within a broader clausal architecture and the argument structure properties of less studied categories.

Controversies may be particularly prominent in one or another culture. Yet there is hardly any culture where they do not exist. This book assumes that the practice of controversy along with its theorization constitutes – in each of the cultures and disciplines where it develops – a tradition. Whether there are enough shared elements in these traditions to consider them as fundamentally universal or not is something that can only be determined on the basis of a rich sample of controversies and theorizations thereof belonging to different traditions. This is what this volume provides to the reader. By presenting side by side controversies from the East and from the West from the ancient past up to the present from different domains of scholarship and action the reader is in a position not only to admire the widespread nature role and richness of the phenomenon but also to begin to evaluate its variety as well as universality. While the editors have purposefully avoided comparative studies of traditions of controversy in order to focus on each tradition so to speak from its practitioners’ point of view some of the chapters take a bird’s eye view and exemplify how such studies can be systematically conducted. In a world that is globalizing itself at a fast pace the awareness of the multiplicity of traditions of controversy is fundamental for ensuring both that the integration of the various perspectives is harmonious and that each one of them is granted its place in a plural universe.

The conference series Going Romance is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages are put in an interactive perspective giving space to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume features a selection of 18 articles (out of 28) that were presented during the 19th meeting at Utrecht University December 8-10 2005. Included in this volume are four papers that were presented by invited speakers: Belletti Delais-Roussarie & Rialland Notley & Van der Linden & Hulk and Ordóñez; these reflect both issues discussed in the general session as well as themes of the workshop on acquisition. A number of reknown Romance linguists (Saltarelli di Sciullo Zubizarreta) also contributed to the volume. In general contributions bear on a variety of topics in the field of morphology syntax semantics and pragmatics and include the perspective from acquisition.

This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics phonology psycholinguistics sociolinguistics. The volume contains scholarly research in areas such as parenthetical null topic construction expletives number and language change performative verbs in colonial court Spanish aspect shift palatilization in Romanian melodic contours in Majorcan Catalan variation in verb type and position and deviance in early child bilingualism among many others. It is a well-rounded selection of research topics that will enrich and widen our understanding of Romance languages.

This book is a sociolinguistic study of children’s talk and how they interact with one another and their teachers in multilingual multicultural and multiethnic schools. It is based on tape recordings and ethnographic observations of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children at an Athens primary school. It offers the reader a unique look into the ways in which children draw upon their rich interactional histories and share transform and recontextualize linguistic and other semiotic resources in circulation to construct play frames and explore adopt resist available as well as novel social roles and identities. Drawing on ethnographically informed approaches to discourse the book shows the ways in which verbal phenomena such as teasing joking language play music making and chanting can provide a productive locus for the study of the negotiation of social identities and roles at school. This book will be of interest to scholars researchers and students of sociolinguistics discourse analysis cultural studies and multicultural education. It will also be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.

This volume offers a thorough examination of the syntactic semantic pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases in a wide variety of creole (and non-creole) languages including Cape Verdean Creole Santome Papiamentu Guinea-Bissau Creole Mindanao Chabacano Réunionnais Creole Lesser Antillean Haitian Creole Mauritian Creole Seychellois Sranan Jamaican Creole Berbice Dutch Creole and African American English. Comparative studies also consider the determiner systems of Middle and Modern French European Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Spanish Ewe Fon and Gun. This compilation of 16 chapters brings together descriptive theoretical diachronic and synchronic studies that focus on the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in creoles. The contributions demonstrate the variety and complex nature of determiner systems in creoles and their widespread use of bare nouns in comparison to their source languages. This volume is evidence of the relevance of creole languages to theories of language creation language change and linguistic theory in general.