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Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics showcases recent trends in the co-development of theory and empiricism in Chinese linguistics. The volume tackles a wide range of theoretical and empirical problems in multiple subfields including sociolinguistics discourse analysis lexical semantics pragmatics phonetics and phonology corpus linguistics and Chinese second language acquisition. The contributions do not fall neatly into two sections traditionally labeled “theoretical” and “empirical”. Rather theoretical discussions are buttressed by empirical evidence and empirical analyses lead to theoretical generalizations. Furthermore the volume transcends the functional-formal division showing that empiricism not only empowers functional-typological and sociolinguistic research but can also have a place in formally oriented linguistic analysis.

Rapidly increasing migration flows contribute to the development of multiple forms of social and cultural differentiation in urban areas – or to ‘super-diversity’. Language diversity is an important part of the resulting new social and cultural constellations. Although linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon per se the response of individuals or education systems to it is still largely based on a monolingual habitus associating one nation (or a region within a nation) to one language. Building on the top-quality expertise of researchers from different academic fields the volume offers insights into the study of linguistic diversity from linguistic and education science perspectives. The studies derive from different countries different disciplines different research traditions and methodological approaches all aiming towards a better understanding of actual linguistic reality and its consequences for individual language development and for education.The book addresses an academic readership and experts who are interested in learning more about linguistic diversity as an inevitable effect of globalisation and on ways to deal with this reality in research as well as practise in urban areas.

It is generally assumed that Creole languages form a separate category from the rest of the world’s languages. The papers in this volume written by internationally renowned scholars in the field of Creole studies seek to explore more deeply this commonly held assumption by comparing the linguistic properties of specific Creole languages to each other and also to non-Creole languages. Using a variety of methodological and analytical approaches the contributions to this volume show that the linguistic classification of Creole languages continues to be a topic of intense debate that requires the re-examination of the premises of linguistic typology. What is the linguistic motivation for considering that languages are related or unrelated? How and why do common linguistic properties arise? Are Creoles indeed exceptional? This volume examines these questions and provides a strong foundation for continued research into the phonological morphological syntactic and semantic features found in Creole languages. Most of these articles were previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26:1 (2011). The article by Jeff Good was previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27:1 (2012).

Language and Power in Blogs systematically analyses the discursive practices of bloggers and their readers in eight English-language personal/diary blogs. The main focus is thereby placed on ties between these practices and power. The book demonstrates that the exercise of power in this mode can be studied via the analysis of conversational control (turn-taking speakership and topic control) coupled with research on agreements and disagreements. In this vein it reveals that control of the floor is strongly tied not solely to rates of participation but more strikingly to the types of contributions interlocutors make. With its detailed linguistic analyses and comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of language use and power the book is interesting for researchers and students working within the domains of pragmatics discourse analysis text linguistics and corpus linguistics in both offline and online settings.

The notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued however that "Old" and "New" used traditionally for characterising information refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects as attention-driven phrases are also related to aboutness the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English German French Polish Russian Greek Latin and Japanese the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns their permutations and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.

This volume complements earlier work on English as a lingua franca (ELF) by providing an in-depth study of the phenomenon from a decidedly European perspective. Distancing itself from more traditional approaches to the study of English in Europe (linguistic imperialism and “Euro-English”) the study is theoretically grounded in more recent approaches namely the ELF paradigm and the postmodernist conceptualisation of “English”. Methodologically speaking the study analyses language use in Eurovision Song Contest press conferences as a community of practice of European salience. The ethnographically based analyses focus on various linguistic levels thereby producing a comprehensive picture of European ELF as a discursive formation. Various qualitative and quantitative methods are used to shed light on the following aspects: code-choice practices in ELF talk participants’ metalinguistic comments on the use of ELF complimenting behaviour via ELF and relativisation patterns. On the basis of this data the concluding section advances discussions revolving around the conceptualisation of ELF in general the connection between ELF and Europeanness and implications for European language policies.

This volume presents some of the latest research in Frame Semantics including work in computational lexicography as developed within the FrameNet project. Using varied material from English Italian and Japanese the contributions collectively expand the theoretical conceptual and computational apparatus of Frame semantics by studying a range of issues concerning not only lexical structure associated with cognitive frames but also the less studied interactional frames and their relationship to grammatical organization. While addressing a number of linguistic phenomena such as verbs of visual perception metaphoric language subordinating connectives paraphrasing honorifics certain pragmatic particles basic speech acts and the semantic structuring of legal texts the analyses also highlight the broader question of integrating frames within rich lexical and grammatical descriptions whether in the context of lexicon-building resources models for knowledge representation experimental modeling of language acquisition and processing conceptual metaphor theory paraphrase research or the communicative grounding of linguistic structure.

Originally published in Constructions and Frames Vol. 3:1 (2011) and Vol. 2:2 (2010).

Les ressources lexicales (dictionnaires bases de données thesaurus etc.) rassemblent des connaissances sur les mots leurs sens et leurs usages. Si pendant des siècles elles ont été tributaires de l'imprimerie et du format textuel il existe de nos jours une grande variété d'outils et de ressources accessibles sous des formats électroniques divers. Ainsi la façon de considérer les ressources lexicales a changé considérablement ces dernières décennies. On a vu notamment apparaître des ressources non plus conçues en tant qu'entités statiques mais modélisées sous forme de bases de données ou de graphes dans lesquelles les informations sont liées et accessibles dynamiquement. Le domaine des ressources lexicales au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines dont la linguistique la lexicologie la lexicographie et le traitement automatique des langues est sans nul doute en pleine effervescence. Le but de ce volume est d'en dresser un panorama général qui rend compte de l’existant et des évolutions en cours.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Lexical resources store knowledge concerning words their meanings and uses. While dictionaries were confined to printed media there are now a variety of tools available in electronic form for different purposes. The way we look at these resources (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Indeed there is hardly any task in Natural Language Processing which can be conducted without them. While being built by hand in the past lexical resources are nowadays built with the help of machines more or less automatically. Also rather than being conceived as static entities (data-base view) lexical resources are often viewed as graphs whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly properties concerning topology clustering and evolution known from other disciplines also apply to lexical resources: everything is linked hence accessible and everything is evolving. While the field is still in evolution a snapshot may nevertheless be useful to reveal where we stand. This is precisely one of the goals of this volume.

What is the range of diversity in linguistic types what are the geographical distributions for the attested types and what explanations based on shared history or universals can account for these distributions? This collection of articles by prominent scholars in typology seeks to address these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology. The phenomena considered range from the phonological to the morphosyntactic the areal coverage ranges in scale from micro-areal to worldwide and the types of historical contingency range from contact-based to genealogical in nature. Together the papers argue strongly for a view in which although they use distinct methodologies linguistic typology and historical linguistics are one and the same enterprise directed at discovering how languages came to be the way they are and how linguistic types came to be distributed geographically as they are.

There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German Irish Spanish French Japanese Yaqui Tepehua (Totonacan) Persian and English and they offer new data on the role of constructions within the RRG theory in these languages. Further this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions.