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.

Contrastive studies have experienced a dramatic revival in the last decades. By combining the methodological advantages of computer corpus linguistics and the possibility of contrasting texts in two or more languages, the structure and use of languages can be explored with greater accuracy, detail and empirical strength than before. The approach has also proved to have fruitful practical applications in a number of areas such as language teaching, lexicography, translation studies and computer-aided translation. This volume contains twelve studies comparing linguistic phenomena in English and seven other languages. The topics range from comparisons of specific lexical categories and word combinations to syntactic constructions and discourse phenomena such as cohesion and thematic structure. The studies highlight similarities and differences in the use, semantics and functions of the compared items, as well as the emergence of new meanings and language change. The emphasis varies from purely linguistic studies to those focusing on practical applications.

This volume presents some of the latest research in Frame Semantics, including work in computational lexicography as developed within the FrameNet project. Using varied material from English, Italian, and Japanese, the contributions collectively expand the theoretical, conceptual, and computational apparatus of Frame semantics, by studying a range of issues concerning not only lexical structure, associated with cognitive frames, but also the less studied interactional frames and their relationship to grammatical organization. While addressing a number of linguistic phenomena, such as verbs of visual perception, metaphoric language, subordinating connectives, paraphrasing, honorifics, certain pragmatic particles, basic speech acts, and the semantic structuring of legal texts, the analyses also highlight the broader question of integrating frames within rich lexical and grammatical descriptions, whether in the context of lexicon-building resources, models for knowledge representation, experimental modeling of language acquisition and processing, conceptual metaphor theory, paraphrase research, or the communicative grounding of linguistic structure.
Originally published in Constructions and Frames Vol. 3:1 (2011) and Vol. 2:2 (2010).

This collection of original research focuses on various lesser studied aspects of Greek syntax. The articles combine a sound empirical coverage within current developments of generative theory and cover a wide spectrum of areas. The syntax of sentential structure is dealt with by two articles, one is an extensive analysis of the distribution of goal and beneficiary dative DPs in Greek (and cross-linguistically) and the other addresses the relation agree in small clauses (and between adjectives and nouns). Two articles study the acquisition of the left periphery and of eventivity and one focuses on the historical evolution of participles in Greek, out of which gerunds emerged. The syntax and semantics of wh-clauses in DP positions and of the non-volitional verb θelo are the focus of two articles situated in the syntax–semantics interface. The DP domain is approached by two theoretical articles, one on a Greek possessive adjective and another on determiner heads. The final contribution studies the acquisition of the Greek definite article.

This volume on nonverbal communication studies, the most multi- and interdisciplinary contribution to this field in almost twenty years, offers numerous suggestions for further research in many hitherto unexplored areas. The twenty contributions include the most recent theoretical and empirical crosscultural studies of gestures from historical, communicative and sociopsychological perspectives. In addition the volume presents novel psychological and clinical studies of nonverbal behaviors in connection with, for instance, aphasias and children's experience of artificial limbs. A whole section is devoted to nonverbal communication in literature and literary translation, and a discussion of art and literature, which opens new avenues for literary analysis and a better understanding of reading as a recreational experience. A unique feature is a discussion of Nonverbal Communication Studies as an academic area (including detailed outlines of three current courses), complemented by an extensive bibliography.