Books

The past is an increasingly unreliable guide to the future.
European workplaces and the regions in which they are located face unprecedented pressures and challenges. Whereas in recent decades incremental adaptation has largely been sufficient to cope with external change, it is no longer clear that this remains the case. Globalisation, technological development and dissemination, political volatility, patterns of consumption, and employee expectations are occurring at a rate which is hard to measure. The rate of change in these spheres is far outstripping the rate of organisational innovation in both European enterprises and public governance, leading to a serious mismatch between the challenges of the 21st Century and the organisational competence available to deal with them.
In this context, there is no clear roadmap. The contributors to this volume address these issues and demonstrate that building the knowledge base required by actors in this volatile environment requires continuous dialogue and learning – a context in which social partners, regional policy makers and other participants share diverse knowledge and reflect on experience rather than seeking and imitating any notion of ‘best practice’. Action Research has a crucial role to play, embedding shared learning within the process of innovation.

The question of what constitutes effective health communication has been addressed mainly by scholars working in American and European cultural contexts. Many people who could benefit most from effective health communication, however, come from different cultures. A prime example is the threat posed by HIV/AIDS to the people of South Africa. Although it is generally acknowledged that health communication needs to be tailored to the target audience’s characteristics with cultural background being one of the most salient ones, little research has been done on how to achieve this. In this book, we bring together leading scholars in the field of health communication as well as communication scholars from South Africa. As such, it can serve as an example of the promises and the limitations of general health communication theories to local praxis as well as provide guidelines for the development of better health communication in South Africa.

This is the first empirical study to focus on adjectives complemented by that-clauses. The in-depth analysis of more than 50,000 cases taken from the British National Corpus gives comprehensive insights into hitherto neglected relations of lexis and grammar. The result of this corpus-driven study is a novel classification of adjectives based on co-occurrence patterns and corroborated with the help of statistical means. The inductive analysis of corpus data offers new perspectives on and innovative descriptions of well-known phenomena of English grammar, such as extraposition or the resultative construction so…that. It is based on a new methodological approach, which looks at mutual relations of both lexis and grammar in unprecedented ways.

Although the Germanic and Romance languages are two branches of the same language family and although both have developed the adjective as a separate syntactic and morphological category, the syntax, morphology, and interpretation of adjectives is by no means the same in these two language groups, and there is even variation within each of the language groups. One of the main aims of this volume is to map the differences and similarities in syntactic behavior, morphology, and meaning of the Germanic and Romance adjective and to find an answer to the following question: Are the (dis)similarities the result of autonomous developments in each of the two branches of the Indo-European language family, or are they caused by language contact?

Adolf Glassbrenner (1810–1876) was a German humorist and satirist. The aim of this study is to show that Glassbrenner’s writings were rooted within the abstract idealism of the Young Germans. Special focus lies on the period between 1840 and 1849, Glassbrenner’s most active writing period, and representing most closely the elements of Humor and Tendenz. This study is of interest to everyone who wants to know more about the ideas behind the writings of Adolf Glassbrenner, but also to those who want to make a first acquaintance with this famous German writer.

Advances in Clinical Phonetics focuses on important developments in phonetic description. Recent years have seen increasing developments in phonetic description, in both instrumental and impressionistic approaches. Not restricted to the phonetics of normal speech, clinical phoneticians and speech scientists working with disordered speech, have been at the forefront of recent work. Some instrumental developments (such as electropalatography), and some transcription developments (such as extIPA symbols), have been spearheaded by clinical phoneticians. The present collection describes and explores these developments. Part one consists of major accounts of advances in clinical phonetics contributed by major international researchers: Raymond D. Kent; William Hardcastle; Martin J. Ball and John Local; and Wolfram Ziegler and Erich Hartmann. The second part comprises six chapters where such advances are illustrated in the context of specific case studies, by authors from America and Europe: Fiona Gibbon, William Hardcastle, Hilary Dent and Fiona Nixon; Marie-Thèrése Le Normand and Claude Chevrie-Muller; Kate Moore and Anna-Maja Korpijaakko-Huuhka; Martin J. Ball and Joan Rahilly; P. Dejonckere and G. Wieneke; Nigel Hewlett, Nicola Topham and Catherine McMullen; and Shaween Awan.
Demonstrating the wideranging and lively nature of the field of clinical phonetics the current contributions offer building blocks for further developments in phonetic description — both improvements in instrumentation and refinements in impressionistic transcription, leading to an increase in our understanding of the speech production process, both in normal and atypical speakers.

Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field.

This volume showcases some of the latest research on academic writing by leading and up-and-coming corpus linguists. The studies included in the volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first and second language academic writing at different levels of writing expertise, containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines) and of different academic registers. Particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis, studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical bundles, phrase-frames, constructions), and work that is based on corpora of English as an academic lingua franca. Going beyond merely summarizing their findings, the authors also discuss what their research means for academic writing practice and pedagogical settings. The volume will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers who would like to expand their knowledge of how academic writing functions and what it looks like in a variety of contexts.

This collection carries the functionalist Columbia School of linguistics forward with contributions on linguistic theory, semiotics, phonology, grammar, lexicon, and anthropology. Columbia School linguistics views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users, and considers contextual, pragmatic, physical, and psychological factors in its analyses. This volume builds upon three previous Columbia School anthologies and further explores issues raised in them, including fundamental theoretical and analytical questions. And it raises new issues that take Columbia School “beyond its origins.” The contributions illustrate both consistency since the school’s inception over thirty years ago and innovation spurred by groundbreaking analysis. The volume will be of interest to all functional linguists and historians of linguistics. Languages analyzed include Byelorussian, English, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Swahili.

With the growing emphasis on scholarship in interpreting, this collection tackles issues critical to the inquiry process — from theoretical orientations in Interpreting Studies to practical considerations for conducting a research study. As a landmark volume, it charts new territory by addressing a range of topics germane to spoken and signed language interpreting research. Both provocative and pragmatic, this volume captures the thinking of an international slate of interpreting scholars including Daniel Gile, Franz Pöchhacker, Debra Russell, Barbara Moser-Mercer, Melanie Metzger, Cynthia Roy, Minhua Liu, Jemina Napier, Lorraine Leeson, Jens Hessmann, Graham Turner, Eeva Salmi, Svenja Wurm, Rico Peterson, Robert Adam, Christopher Stone, Laurie Swabey and Brenda Nicodemus. Experienced academics will find ideas to stimulate their passion and commitment for research, while students will gain valuable insights within its pages. This new volume is essential reading for anyone involved in interpreting research.