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Why do some languages wither and die while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume their proposal is reassessed by linguists investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut Quechua Aymara Bantu Indo-European Transeurasian Turkic Japano-Koreanic Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal even if subsistence played a role in their expansion.

The news we see daily is selected from among alternatives by journalists. Argumentation in the Newsroom uses ethnographic data from Swiss television and print newsrooms to shed light on how journalists make decisions regarding the selection and presentation of news items in their daily professional practice. The evidence illustrates that contrary to the standard view journalistic decisions are not limited to the influence of standardized production patterns instinct or editors’ orders. Rather in their attempt to produce the best news possible journalists carefully ponder and discuss their choices utilizing full-fledged critical discussions at all stages of the newsmaking process. By employing the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion in conjunction with the Argumentum Model of Topics this study provides a detailed reconstruction of how journalists make use of argumentative reasoning basing their decisions on a complex set of material premises and on recurrent procedural premises.

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified ranging from languages rich in compounds such as German Saami Estonian and Finnish to languages poor in compounds such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech like Russian Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

The volume provides original research and analyses of the multi-faceted conceptual and verbal process(es) of irony. Key topics explored include interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of irony. Collectively the papers examine irony from psychology embodiment studies philosophy cognitive linguistics the connection and impact of irony on culture and (media) communication different approaches to verbal irony and others—ultimately attempting to model the mechanisms underlying ironic forms and the psycholinguistic motivations for their investigation. The comprehensive treatment of these issues is fundamental for future research on irony and related phenomena particularly on questions of its usage the diversity and/or unity of irony and ultimately the interrelationships between figurative thought and language.

This title is in pledging for Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023

With its roots deep in ancient narrative and in various reworkings from the late medieval and early modern period Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has left a lasting trace on modern European culture. This volume aims to chart the main outlines of this reception process in the broadest sense by considering not only critical-scholarly responses but also translations adaptations performances and various material and digital interventions which have from the standpoint of their specific local contexts contributed significantly to the consolidation of Romeo and Juliet as an integral part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Moving freely across Europe’s geography and history and reflecting an awareness of political and cultural backgrounds the volume suggests that Shakespeare’s tragedy of youthful love has never ceased to impose itself on us as a way of articulating connections between the local and the European and the global in cases where love and hatred get in each other’s way. The book is concluded by a selective timeline of the play’s different materialisations.

Metaphor and metonymy appeal to us because they evoke mental images in unique but still recognisable ways. The potential for figurative thought exists in everyone and it pervades our everyday social interactions. In particular advertising offers countless opportunities to explore the way in which people think creatively through metaphor and metonymy. The thorough analysis of a corpus of 210 authentic printed advertisements shows the central role of multimodal metaphor metonymy and their patterns of interaction at the heart of advertising campaigns. This book is the first in-depth research monograph to bring together qualitative and quantitative evidence of metaphor-metonymy combinations in real multimodal discourse. It combines detailed case study analyses with corpus-based analysis and psycholinguistic enquiry to provide the reader with a prismatic approach to the topic of figurative language in multimodal advertising. Besides its theoretical contribution to the field of multimodal figurative language this monograph has a wide number of practical applications due to its focus on advertising and the communicative impact of creative messages on consumers. This book will pave the way for further qualitative and quantitative research on the ways in which figurative language shapes multimodal discourse and how it relates to our everyday creative thinking.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering ranging from differentiation to discrimination that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British Polish French Czech Italian Hungarian Spanish and Estonian contexts the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions nations ethnicities communities cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’ as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language media and social issues.

Nordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland continental Scandinavia (Sweden Norway Denmark and Sápmi) and the insular region (Iceland Greenland and the Faroe Islands) each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume Spatial nodes devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.

This collection advances the study of context-dependent characteristics of argumentative discourse by examining a variety of media genres in which text and image (and other semiotic modes) combine to create meaning. The chapters have been written by an international group of senior and junior scholars researching multimodal argumentation in the last two decades. In each chapter a specific approach to argumentation and rhetoric is combined with insights from visual studies metaphor theory scientific visualization cognitive science semiotics conversation analysis or (documentary) film theory in order to explain how multimodal genres function argumentatively and rhetorically. Together the chapters present a state-of-the-art in the analysis of multimodal argumentation in such diverse genres as print advertisements news photographs scientific illustrations political cartoons documentaries film trailers political TV advertisements public debates and political speeches. The volume will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in argumentation studies rhetoric and multimodal communication.

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated and the use of new methodologies. Moreover the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.