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Information on Forthcoming Books can be found on the benjamins.com website.
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Dialogue – The Mixed Game
Dec 2010
Book
The ‘Mixed Game Model’ represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings’ competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means mainly verbal perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or ‘the mixed game’ with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings’ nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games.
As of July 2024 this e-book is available as Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
As of July 2024 this e-book is available as Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
Prosody in Interaction
Dec 2010
Book
Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be of major interest to everyone studying spoken interaction. The collection brings together an impressive range of internationally renowned scholars from different yet closely related and compatible research traditions which have made a significant contribution to the field. They cover issues such as the units of language the contextualization of actions and activities conversational modalities and genres the display of affect and emotion the multimodality of interaction language acquisition and aphasia. All contributions are based on empirical audio- and/or video-recorded data of natural talk-in-interaction including languages such as English German and Japanese. The methodologies employed come from Ethnomethodology Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.
Discourses in Interaction
Dec 2010
Book
The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics interactional linguistics conversation analysis discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction dialogue discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages representing a variety of interactions: private and public written and spoken historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points goals and aims engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected parallel but also varying and even divergent.
The Chain of Being and Having in Slavic
Dec 2010
Book
The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts be and have can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian Czech Polish Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas non-verbal have expressions and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics be and have are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model wherein existence/copula for be and possession/relationship for have are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors including give take get become make and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of be and have occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy suppletion tense/mood auxiliaries modality causatives evidentiality function words contact phenomena syntactic calques and idiomatic constructions.
Language Acquisition across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems
Dec 2010
Book
How and why do all children learn language? Why do some have difficulties while others are early language learners? What are the consequences of early bilingualism? Is it possible to reach native-like competence in a foreign language? Although we still cannot fully answer these questions research during the last two decades has begun to solve some pieces of the puzzle. This book proposes an interdisciplinary collection of writings from some of the best specialists across several fields in cognitive science offering a wide sample of recent advances in the study of first language acquisition bilingualism second language acquisition and disorders of oral language. It is addressed to all researchers and students interested in language acquisition as well as to teachers clinicians and parents who will find therein many new findings and varied methodological approaches as well as challenging questions that are still debated and in need of further research.
Research in Second Language Processing and Parsing
Dec 2010
Book
This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g. Arabic Spanish Japanese French German English) and structures (e.g. relative clauses wh-gaps gender number) to examine various issues in second language processing: first language influence whether or not non-natives can achieve native-like processing the roles of context and prosody the effects of working memory and others. The researchers include both established scholars and newer voices all offering important insights into the factors that affect processing and parsing in a second language.
Gestures in Language Development
Dec 2010
Book
Gestures are prevalent in communication and tightly linked to language and speech. As such they can shed important light on issues of language development across the lifespan. This volume originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture Volume 8:2 (2008) brings together studies from different disciplines that examine language development in children and adults from varying perspectives. It provides a review of common theoretical and empirical themes and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically and atypically developing children and in second language learners what gestures reveal about discourse and how all languages that adult second language speakers know can influence each other. The papers exemplify a vibrant new field of study with relevance for multiple disciplines.
Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms
Dec 2010
Book
This volume explores a highly topical issue in second and foreign language education: the spreading practice in mainstream education to teach content subjects through a foreign language. CLIL has been enthusiastically embraced as a language enrichment measure in many contexts and finally research can offer principled insights into its dynamics and potentials. The editors’ introductory and concluding chapters offer a synthesis of current CLIL research as well as a critical discussion of unresolved issues relating both to theoretical concerns and research practice. The individual contributions by authors from a range of European contexts report on current empirical research in this dynamic field. The focus of these chapters ranges from theoretical to empirical from learning outcomes to classroom talk examining both the written and spoken mode across secondary and tertiary educational contexts. This volume is a valuable resource not only for researchers and teachers but also for policy makers.
Mood in the Languages of Europe
Dec 2010
Book
This book is the first comprehensive survey of mood in the languages of Europe. It gives readers access to a collection of data on mood. Each article presents the mood system of a specific European language in a way that readers not familiar with this language are able to understand and to interpret the data. The articles contain information on the morphology and semantics of the mood system the possible combinations of tense and mood morphology and the possible uses of the non-indicative mood(s). The papers address the explanation of mood from an empirical and descriptive perspective. This book is of interest to scholars of mood and modality language contact and areal linguistics and typology.
Austronesian and Theoretical Linguistics
Dec 2010
Book
The Austronesian language family is the largest language family in the world yet its members are relatively little studied particularly from a formal perspective. Interestingly because these languages exhibit typologically unusual properties they pose important challenges to linguistic theory. Any theory that postulates a grammar that is common to all languages must take into account the particular characteristics of this language family. The contributions to this volume comprise five chapters on phonology and twelve chapters on syntax all addressing aspects of these Austronesian challenges. The volume presents new data new analyses of old data and comparisons of closely related languages as well as comparisons to languages outside of the language family. Taken together they form a unique picture of Austronesian linguistics. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics phonology morphology syntax and language typology as well as scholars of Austronesian languages.
The Morphology and Syntax of Topic and Focus : Minimalist inquiries in the Quechua periphery
Nov 2010
Book
This book presents an innovative analysis that relates informational structure syntax and morphology in Quechua. It provides a minimalist account of the relationship between focus topic evidentiality and other left-peripheral features and sentence-internal constituents marked with suffixes that have been previously considered of a pragmatic nature. Intervention effects show that these relationships are also of a syntactic nature. The analysis is extended to morphological markers that appear on polarity sensitive items and wh-words. The book also provides a brief overview of the main characteristics of Quechua syntax as well as additional bibliographical information.
Formal Evidence in Grammaticalization Research
Nov 2010
Book
This collective volume focuses on the crucial role of formal evidence in recognizing and explaining instances of grammaticalization. It addresses the hitherto neglected issue of system-internal factors steering grammaticalization and also revisits formal recognition criteria such as Lehmann and Hopper’s parameters of grammaticalization. The articles investigate developments of such phenomena as modal auxiliaries attitudinal markers V1-conditionals nominalizers and pronouns using data from a wide range of languages and (in some cases) from diachronic corpora. In the process they explore finer mechanisms of grammaticalization such as modification of coding means structural and semantic analogy changes in frequency and prosody and shifts in collocational and grammatical distribution. The volume is of particular interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and general linguists working on the interface between syntax semantics and pragmatics as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.
Narrative Revisited : Telling a story in the age of new media
Nov 2010
Book
The volume examines the role of narratives in old and new media. Its ten contributions firstly center on the various forms and functions narratives assume in computer-mediated environments e.g. websites weblogs message boards etc. In this light past and present approaches to the description of narratives are presented and reevaluated based on their ability to capture the conceptual and methodological exigencies of new media. Secondly the volume sheds new light upon the multimodal composition of new media narratives which typically feature multiple co-occurring semiotic modes such as speech sound text static or moving images. In this vein each paper explores a wide array of authentic examples from text genres as diverse as political speeches real-time narratives and contemporary feature films. Its wide scope should not only appeal to linguists interested in the discursive and pragmatic dimension of narratives but also to scholars and students in other scientific disciplines.
Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy : Syntax and pragmatics
Nov 2010
Book
This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining conjunctive conjugations converbial constructions masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax pragmatics and semantics of clause-linking and subordination in relation to informational structure to referential hierarchy and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems which may also interact with informational hierarchy via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax pragmatics and semantics.
Sentential Form and Prosodic Structure of Catalan
Nov 2010
Book
This monograph presents an experimental and theoretical inquiry into the role of sentential form and variation in the prosodic structure of Catalan. The empirical section examines intonational phrasing across sentence forms including SVO structures with either nominal or sentential objects and structures involving clitic left- and right-dislocations. The results show variation in phrasing that depends on syntactic factors and non-syntactic factors such as topic-hood and prosodic binarity. The theoretical section uses Stochastic Optimality Theory to model the variation and frequency distributions associated with the observed prosodic patterns. Various syntactic and non-syntactic factors are represented by alignment constraints which play a major role in Catalan and by constraints that limit size and those that limit the overall amount of prosodic structure. This study represents a combined approach to prosody and syntax and is of particular relevance for theoretical and empirical linguists interested in the relationship between these domains both in Catalan and other languages.
Romance Linguistics 2009 : Selected papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Tucson, Arizona, March 2009
Nov 2010
Book
This volume contains a selection of twenty-four peer-reviewed papers from the 39th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Arizona in 2009. Contributions cover a wide variety of topics in the areas of phonology phonetics syntax morphology and diachronic Romance linguistics with an emphasis on language variation and change. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are Spanish French Italian Portuguese Romanian Catalan Old French Old Occitan and Hispano-Romance.The research in this volume points to a cohesiveness in Romance linguistics that lies in the integration of up-to-date linguistic research with a comparative tradition and the in-depth study of a language family. The work presented will be of interest to scholars of Romance linguistics and of linguistics alike.
Language Documentation : Practice and values
Nov 2010
Book
Language documentation also often called documentary linguistics is a relatively new subfield in linguistics which has emerged in part as a response to the pressing need for collecting describing and archiving material on the increasing number of endangered languages. The present book details the most recent developments in this rapidly developing field with papers written by linguists primarily based in academic institutions in North America although many conduct their fieldwork elsewhere. The articles in this volume — position papers and case studies — focus on some of the most critical issues in the field. These include (1) the nature of contributions to linguistic theory and method provided by documentary linguistics including the content appropriate for documentation; (2) the impact and demands of technology in documentation; (3) matters of practice in collaborations among linguists and communities and in the necessary training of students and community members to conduct documentation activities; and (4) the ethical issues involved in documentary linguistics.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2008 : Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Groningen 2008
Nov 2010
Book
This volume assembles a significant number of selected papers that were presented at the 22nd edition of Going Romance held at the University of Groningen in December 2008. Though it contains a variety of topics 'tense mood and aspect' is represented most extensively. This volume contains a rich variety of Romance languages: Cape Verdean European Portuguese French Italian Romanian and Spanish. The collection of papers is representative of the research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and shows the vitality of this research.
Social Structure, Space and Possession in Tongan Culture and Language : An ethnolinguistic study
Nov 2010
Book
This interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between culture language and cognition based on the aspects of social structure space and possession in Tonga Polynesia. Grounded on extensive field research Völkel explores the subject from an anthropological as well as from a linguistic perspective. The book provides new insights into the language of respect an honorific system which is deeply anchored in the societal hierarchy spatial descriptions that are determined by socio-cultural and geocentric parameters kinship terminology and possessive categories that perfectly express the system of social status inequalities among relatives. These examples impressively show that language is deeply anchored in its cultural context. Moreover the linguistic structures reflect the underlying cognitive frame of its speakers. Just as several cultural practices (sitting order access to land and gift exchange processes) the linguistic means are not only expressions of stratified social networks but also tools to maintain or negotiate the underlying socio-cultural system.
Body, Language and Meaning in Conflict Situations : A semiotic analysis of gesture-word mismatches in Israeli-Jewish and Arab discourse
Nov 2010
Book
This original research applies semiotics to linguistic and non-linguistic segments in a text in search of potential correlations between them. The resultant mapping is applied to cases of gesture-word mismatches that are evident in conflict situations. The current study adopts the word systems approach a sign-based theory that is naturally designed for the analysis of linguistic signs and extends it to non-linguistic units borrowing analytical tools from the field of dance movement therapy. The variety of interdisciplinary metaphorical and literal interpretations of the analyzed signs enriches the theoretical framework and facilitates examination of the instances of mismatches. Hence this study makes a meaningful contribution to the understanding of linguistic/non-linguistic mismatches in situations of conflict. Further it makes more general claims: the semiotic system underlying this study paves the way for further research of correlations (or lack thereof) between a range of phenomena cutting across sociology sociolinguistics psycholinguistics and political science.