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The present volume focuses on complimenting behavior including the awarding of (self-)praise as manifested on social media. These commonplace activities have been found to fulfil a wide range of functions in face-to-face interaction discoursal and relational amongst others. However even though the giving of compliments and praise has become a pervasive practice in online environments it remains a largely underexplored field of study within pragmatics. Self-praise is an activity that appears at the present time to be rapidly gaining ground online and the various functions it performs clearly also need further investigation. The different contributions to this ground-breaking volume – 12 in total – aim to address this gap in research by exploring and shedding light on a number of aspects of these phenomena in a range of languages and language varieties. New socio-digital contexts are examined supported in some cases by social networking sites not previously studied in complimenting behavior research. These include Facebook Instagram Renren Twitter as well as web forums message boards and live text commentary.

This book examines the linguistic and interactional mechanisms through which people bond or feel bonded with one another by analyzing situated discourse in Japanese contexts. The term “bonding” points to the sense of co-presence belonging and alignment with others as well as with the space of interaction. We analyze bonding as established not only through the usage of language as a foregrounded code but also through multi-layered contexts shared on the interactional corporeal and socio-cultural levels. The volume comprises twelve chapters examining the processes of bonding (and un-bonding) using situated discourse taken from rich ethnographic data including police suspect interrogations Skype-mediated family conversations theatrical rehearsals storytelling business email correspondence and advertisements. While the book focuses on processes of bonding in Japanese discourse the concept of bonding can be applied universally in analyzing the co-creation of semiotic pragmatic and communal space in situated discourse.

This book sheds new light on the puzzle of psychological predicates in a cross-linguistic perspective by looking at them from a variety of angles at the interfaces between event structure lexical and viewpoint aspect syntax and information structure. The individual chapters focus on Polish and Spanish psych verbs which manifest new overt contrasts that often remain covert in languages such as English e.g. aspectual distinctions the peculiarities of dative constructions or the role of information structure in determining the word order. One of the main contributions of the book lies in positing a new typology of basic event types enriched with the initial boundary events. Moreover due attention is devoted to dative experiencers as compared to accusative experiencers. Although couched in the generative tradition the main insights presented in this collection are theory neutral and may be of interest to linguists of all persuasions.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual cognitive or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity identity and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways the topic remains under-researched though across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language with respect to its connection to cognition and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions diagnostics for mass and count the distribution and role of numeral classifiers abstract mass nouns and object mass nouns (furniture police force clothing).

While translation history literary translation and periodical publications have been extensively analyzed within the fields of Translation Studies Comparative Literature and Communication Sciences the relationship between these three topics remains underexplored. Literary Translation in Periodicals argues that there is a pressing need for an analytical focus on translation in periodicals a collaborative network of researchers and a transnational and interdisciplinary approach. The book pursues two goals: (1) to highlight the innovative theoretical and methodological issues intrinsic to analyzing literary translation in periodical publications on a small and large scale and (2) to contribute to a developing field by providing several case studies on translation in periodicals over a wide range of areas and periods (Europe Latin America and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries) that go beyond the more traditional focus on national and European periodicals and translations. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis as well as hermeneutical and sociological approaches this book reviews conceptual and methodological tools and proposes innovative techniques such as social network analysis big data and large-scale analysis for tracing the history and evolution of literary translation in periodical publications.

Language Policy in Business: Discourse ideology and practice provides a critical sociolinguistic and discursive understanding of language policy in a minority language context. Focusing on Welsh-English bilingualism in private sector businesses in Wales the book unpacks the circulating discourses ideologies and practices of promoting bilingualism as a sociocultural and economic resource in the globalised knowledge economy. It sheds light on businesses as ideological sites for struggles over language revitalisation which has been characterised by tensions and discursive shifts from essentialist ideologies about language identity nation and territory to an increased commodification of bilingualism.

The book is premised on the understanding that language is a focal point for articulating and living out historical power relationships and inequalities and that language policy processes are never apolitical. It adds to a body of literature about bilingualism in minority language contexts and more broadly about how the fields of politics business and society are inextricably related.

The current volume aspires to add to previous research on the connection between writing and language learning from a dual perspective: It seeks to reflect current progress in the domain as well as to foster future developments in theory and research. The theoretical postulations contained in Part I identify and expand in novel ways the diverse lenses through which the varied multi-faceted dimensions of the connection between writing and language learning can be explored. The methodological reflections put forward in Part III signal theoretically-grounded and pedagogically-relevant paths along which future empirical work can grow. The empirical studies reported in Part II illuminate the myriad of individual educational and task-related variables that (may) mediate short-term and long-term language learning outcomes. These studies examine diverse forms of writing performed in varied environments (including pen-and-paper and digital writing) conditions (writing individually and/or collaboratively) and instructional settings (academic settings – including secondary school and college level institutions – as well as out-of-school contexts).

This volume brings together linguistic psychological and neurological research in a discussion of the Cognitive Dualism Hypothesis whose central idea is that human cognitive activity in general and linguistic cognition in particular cannot reasonably be reduced to a single monolithic system of mental processing but that they have a dualistic organization. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks that account for how language users mentally represent process and produce linguistic discourse the studies in this volume provide a critical examination of dualistic approaches to language and cognition and their impact on a number of fields. The topics range from formulaic language the study of reasoning and linguistic discourse and the lexicon–grammar distinction to studies of specific linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles comment adverbs extra-clausal elements in spoken discourse and the processing of syntactic groups.

From Twitter to Reddit Facebook and WhatsApp – social media is a part of modern everyday life. Studying the language used on social media platforms presents great opportunities as well as challenges to corpus linguists. The contributions in Corpus Approaches to Social Media address technical ethical and methodological issues by showcasing in-depth social media studies as conducted by corpus scholars. The chapters are based on a variety of social media platforms and include corpus perspectives on the language of online communities linguistic variation in short media texts and the role of images in computer-mediated communication. A particularly strong point of the collection are the detailed accounts of the methodological aspects of working with social media corpora. The volume features research applying traditional corpus linguistic methods to social media data as well as novel and innovative research methods for the analysis of multimodal material and atypical corpus texts.

As traced by Roger D. Sell literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy literature flourishes as an enjoyable though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences.

These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.

Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers ranging from Shakespeare Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period through Wordsworth and Coleridge to Dickens Pinter and Rushdie.