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This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questions polar questions are the most common occurring with greater frequency in all studied languages. This volume presents a collection of conversation analytic studies into responses to polar questions across ten different typologically diverse languages in a range of action environments and social contexts. The studies explore different ways in which speakers can respond to polar questions and the relationships between response design the action implemented by the response and the context in which it occurs. Taken together the studies assembled in the volume present a nuanced view of polar responses as a situated social action.

Differential marking as applied to direct objects has long been discussed as one of the characterizing traits of many Romance languages. There is however wide consensus that a detailed investigation into the nature of this phenomenon raises numerous challenges both at the empirical and theoretical level. Many questions are still being raised regarding which precise morpho-syntactic strategies count as differential object marking whether the data can be unified and subsequently how they are to be unified formally and theoretically. Additionally a thorough investigation of this phenomenon is still needed for many Romance languages and especially at the micro-variation level. This volume brings together original papers addressing various aspects of differential object marking in Romance languages focusing on micro-variation from both a descriptive and formal perspective touching on diachrony language contact synchrony and using a large set of methodologies.

This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible inclusive and sustainable healthcare systems.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication 2) Intercultural and mediated communication 3) Negotiation and meaning construction 4) Expertise and common ground 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients and the macro-level of institutional communication. <br/>In the variety of its contributions it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts common ground ambiguity implicitness) with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.

This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation) between vowels (monophthongization) or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology and to phonologists in general and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.

As the legislative bodies of democratic nations parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics big data parliamentary discourse and historical linguistics in a truly interdisciplinary exploration at the vanguard of big data and corpus methods with the aim to investigate the intersection between linguistic and social change. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods the studies included in this volume range from a focus on explicitly linguistic phenomena to topics that contribute to our understanding of language and society more generally. It breaks new ground in its critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using large corpora of parliamentary discourse to study both the specialised language of parliamentary speech and the societies that the parliaments in question represent and govern.

Text and Wine: Approaches from terminology and translation collects part of the results of the research project WeinApp: Multilingual System of Information and Winegrowing-Resources (MINECO Ref. FFI2016-79785-R) carried out by researchers from the universities of Cordoba and Cadiz (Spain) on wine production the wine sector and its language and terminology in English French German and Spanish. The editors principal investigators of the project begin the volume which contains works on phytopathology lexical domains and subdomains wine tourism agro-legal texts Indo-European languages labelling tasting metaphors wine and literature interpretation wine and medicine oenological websites and lexical and morphosyntactic formation around the language of wine.

The genesis of this book was the 9th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies held in Stellenbosch South Africa in September 2019 – the first time the event took place outside Europe. “Living Translation – People Processes Products” was the Congress theme. A common thread whether as a methodological or analytical basis as a descriptive framework or as a subject in itself was that of “flows” and the “flowing” nature of translation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> The contributions included here draw on a productive framework of networks and flows and foreground the inherent spatial and temporal diversity of Translation Studies. Translation as a social practice is the golden thread throughout the volume – not just “translation” in the conventional sense between languages and cultures but over artificial borders into new spaces between non-traditional agents and actors and through various genres and mediums. Chapters are clustered loosely based on the temporality of the topic under discussion. Work on and from the Global North constitutes the first section and the second complements this by bringing the Global South into the picture as well.<br/>This state-of-the-art research will stimulate robust scholarly discussions as we map our way forward as a living discipline.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic Romance Uralic and Mayan.

This e-book is made available as Open Access under the CC BY 4.0 license.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics broadly conceived as the cognitive social and cultural study of language and communication i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop