Books

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century. He devoted his entire life to a thorough-going study of language, its structure and its use, summed up in masterly fashion in his book Language (1933). After his premature death at the age of 62, his work was at first acclaimed as an exemplary application of the scientific method to linguistics, but then fell into unjustified neglect. Now that the centenary of his birth has passed, the time has come for the story of Bloomfield's life and work to be recounted in a biography. Accordingly, basing his discussion on all available materials (including some information not accessible until recently), Professor Hall has presented Bloomfield's life history in its intellectual and cultural setting. This book is not only a biography, but also a personal memoir, in which Hall draws on his contacts with Bloomfield, who was his teacher at Chicago and a senior colleague at Yale. There emerges from this study a fuller picture than we have had heretofore, presenting both Bloomfield's recognized achievement in establishing the study of language as a scientific discipline, and the less-known aspects of his character and of his personal life, which in certain respects was very tragic and sad.

This volume is the outcome of 25 years of research into the neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. In addition to reviewing the world literature and providing a state-of-the-art account, including a critical assessment of the bilingual neuroimaging studies, it proposes a set of hypotheses about the representation, organization and processing of two or more languages in one brain. It investigates the impact of the various manners of acquisition and use of each language on the extent of involvement of basic cerebral functional mechanisms. The effects of pathology as a means to understanding the normal functioning of verbal communication processes in the bilingual and multilingual brain are explored and compared with data from neuroimaging studies. In addition to its obvious research benefits, the clinical and social reasons for assessment of bilingual aphasia with a measuring instrument that is linguistically and culturally equivalent in each of a patient’s languages are stressed. The relationship between language and thought in bilinguals is examined in the light of evidence from pathology. The proposed linguistic theory of bilingualism integrates a neurofunctional model (the components of verbal communication and their relationships: implicit linguistic competence, metalinguistic knowledge, pragmatics, and motivation) and a set of hypotheses about language processing (neurofunctional modularity, the activation threshold, the language/cognition distinction, and the direct access hypothesis).

Since the advent of the computer, terminology management can be carried out by almost anyone who has learnt to use a computer. Terminology management has proved to be an efficient tool in international communications in industry, education and international organisations. Software packages are readily available and international corporations often have their own terminology database. Following these developments, translators and terminologists are confronted with a specialised form of information management involving compilation and standardisation of vocabulary, storage, retrieval and updating.A Practical Course in Terminology Processing provides the key to methods of terminology management for the English language, for general and specific purposes. This unique course has been developed on the basis of years of teaching experience and research at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST, UK) and is particularly suitable for translation courses, freelance translators, technical writers, as well as for non-linguists who are confronted with terminology processing as part of their profession.
The 1996 reprint of the paperback edition includes an index.

A Practical Guide to Localization was written for technical translators, localization engineers, testing engineers, desktop publishers, project managers, and anyone else who may be involved in the release of multilingual products.In this second edition, translators can learn more about localizing software, online help and documentation files, and the latest translation technology tools. Localization engineers can learn all about developing, engineering, and testing multilingual software and online help projects. For project managers, there is all the information needed for planning translation and localization projects, finding resources, and ensuring product quality. New to this second, fully updated and revised edition are chapters on internationalization, multilingual desktop publishing, and software quality assurance. The book has been designed both as a reference work and a teaching tool. Visit the www.locguide.com web site for additions and updates to the book, as well as references and links relevant to technical translation and localization. The web site also contains extracts from the book, reviews, and ordering information.
Bert Esselink has been active in localization for over a decade. After graduating in technical translation and taking university classes in programming and computational linguistics he worked for several years as software localizer, localization engineer, and technical project manager at International Software Products. In 1996 he joined ALPNET in Amsterdam as localization manager before taking on the role of globalization manager, developing internal production quality standards. In January 2000 Bert joined Lionbridge to head up their European globalization consulting services.

In recent years the language of Shakespearean drama has been described in a number of publications intended mainly for the undergraduate student or general reader, but the studies in academic journals to which they refer are not always easily accessible even though they are of great interest to the general reader and essential for the specialist. The purpose of this collection is therefore to bring together some of the most valuable of these studies which, in discussing various aspects of the language of the early 17th century as exemplified in Shakespearean drama, provide the reader with deeper insights into the meaning of Shakespearean text, often by reference to the social, literary and linguistic context of the time.

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

This collection presents a balanced yet vivid picture of many of the domains of activity of lexicography. Ten contributors from eight countries discuss monolingual dictionaries (for learners and native speakers), bilingual dictionaries, an original approach to computer-aided lexicography, and the use of lexical material in language teaching. The collection of data; the inclusion, exclusion and ordering of material; definition and translation; and the provision of adequate information about grammatical valency, these are among the special topics treated, with many examples of the problems encountered and suggestions as to how they may be solved. A general introduction highlights the shared concerns that characterize the international discipline of contemporary dictionary-making.

The eleven contributions to this volume, written by expert corpus linguists, tackle corpora from a wide range of perspectives and aim to shed light on the numerous linguistic and pedagogical uses to which corpora can be put. They present cutting-edge research in the authors’ respective domain of expertise and suggest directions for future research. The main focus of the book is on learner corpora, but it also includes reflections on the role of other types of corpora, such as native corpora, expert users corpora, parallel corpora or corpora of New Englishes. For readers who are already familiar with corpora, this volume offers an informed account of the key role that corpus data play in applied linguistics today. As for readers who are new to corpus linguistics, the overview of approaches, methods and domains of applications presented will undoubtedly help them develop their own taste for corpora. This volume has been edited in honour of Sylviane Granger, who has been one of the pioneers of learner corpus research.

Language is always generated and interpreted in a certain context, and the semantic, syntactic, and lexical properties of linguistic expressions reflect this. Interactive language understanding systems, such as language-based dialogue systems, therefore have to apply contextual information to interpret their inputs and to generate appropriate outputs, but are in practice very poor at this. This book contains a number of studies in Computational Pragmatics, the newly emerging field of study of how contextual information can be effectively brought to bear in language understanding and generation. The various chapters center around the conceptual, formal and computational modeling of context in general, of the relevant beliefs of dialogue participants in particular, and of the reasoning that may be applied to relate linguistic phenomena to aspects of the dialogue context.
These issues are discussed both from a theoretical point of view and in relation to their roles in prototypical language understanding systems.