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Information on Forthcoming Books can be found on the benjamins.com website.
61 - 80 of 4105 results
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Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom
More LessThis volume explores a relational pattern that occurs during one type of speech event — classroom “participant examples.” A participant example describes, as an example of something, an event that includes at least one person also participating in the conversation. Participants with a role in the example have two relevant identities — as a student or teacher in the classroom, and as a character in whatever event is described as the example. This study reports that in some cases speakers not only discuss, but also act out the roles assigned to them in participant examples. That is, speakers do, with each other, what they are talking about as the content of the example. Participants act as if events described as the example provide a script for their interaction. Drawing on linguistic pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics, the author describes the linguistic mechanisms that speakers use to act out participant examples. He focuses on the role of deictics, and personal pronouns in particular, in establishing and organizing relationships. The volume also presents a new methodological technique — “deictic mapping” — that can be used to uncover interactional organization in all sorts of speech events. Drawing on the philosophy and sociology of education, the volume discusses the social and educational implications of enacted participant examples. Educational theorists generally find participant examples to be cognitively useful, as devices to help students understand pedagogical content. But enacted participant examples have systematic relational consequences as well. The volume presents and discusses enacted participant examples that have clear, and sometimes undesirable, social consequences. It also discusses how we might adjust educational theory and practice, given the relational implications of classroom participant examples.
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Action and Agency in Dialogue
More LessWhat happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal, that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics.
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Action Research
More LessSupported bilaterally by Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavian Action Research Development Program (ACRES — Action Research in Scandinavia) emphasized conceptualizing research questions and self-conscious writing processes for experienced action researchers. Participants came from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States.
A learning experiment in the tradition of Scandinavian industrial democracy, ACRES had both intellectual and organizational tensions common to action research projects. This book includes theoretical and historical overviews of action research, reflections on the writing process, narratives about the design and difficult internal processes of ACRES, and a selection of the participants’ writings. A particularly unique feature of the book is the discussion of the problematic relationship between action research and conventional modes of research writing and an analysis of the complex social processes collaboratively managed projects create, in combination with a set of participant cases.
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Action Research in Workplace Innovation and Regional Development
More LessThe 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.
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Actualization
More LessThis collection of papers consolidates the observation that linguistic change typically is actualized step by step: any structural innovation being introduced, accepted, and generalized, over time, in one grammatical environment after another, in a progression that can be understood by reference to the markedness values and the ranking of the conditioning features. The Introduction to the volume and a chapter by Henning Andersen clarify the theoretical bases for this observation, which is exemplified and discussed in separate chapters by Kristin Bakken, Alexander Bergs and Dieter Stein, Vit Bubenik, Ulrich Busse, Marianne Mithun, Lene Schøsler, and John Charles Smith in the light of data from the histories of Norwegian, English, Hindi, Northern Iroquoian, and Romance. A final chapter by Michael Shapiro adds a philosophical perspective. The papers were first presented in a workshop on “Actualization Patterns in Linguistic Change” at the XIV International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. in 1999.
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Adapting Health Communication to Cultural Needs
More LessThe 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.
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Address Variation in Sociocultural Context
More LessThis study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian—with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and power dynamics between waiters and customers in a wide range of restaurant types. This book marks the introduction of Italian to the field of regional pragmatic variation and it will be of interest to linguists, Italianists and researchers more broadly working on service encounters. The author offers a new dimension to the understanding of social interaction and language use in contemporary Italy, uncovering cultural and linguistic differences between even adjacent geographical areas within a modern European nation state.
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Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
More LessWithin the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.
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Adjective Complementation
More LessThis 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.
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Adjectives
More LessAdjectives are comparatively less well studied than the lexical categories of nouns and verbs. The present volume brings together studies in the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Four of the contributions investigate the syntax of adjectives in a variety of languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Serbocroatian). The theoretical issues explored include: the syntax of attributive and predicative adjectives, the syntax of nominalized adjectives and the identification of adjectives as a distinct lexical category in Mandarin Chinese. A further four contributions examine different aspects in the semantics of adjectives in English, French, and Spanish, dealing with superlatives, comparatives, and aspect in adjectives. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.
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Adjectives in Germanic and Romance
More LessAlthough 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?
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Admiral von Hipper
More LessThis work aims to constitute an objective analysis of a German World War I naval combat commander within his proper context, by closely defining both the military-technical and military-political milieux in which Franz Hipper operated. The description of Hipper’s actions in the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland and his handling of communications, airships, and the new technologies of war demonstrate the importance of the military environment. The volume also provides a glimpse into the decision-making process involved in the construction of German battle cruisers and the impact these decisions had in combat.
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Adolf Glassbrenner
More LessAdolf 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.
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Adpositions
More LessThis book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.
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Advancedness in Second Language Spanish
More LessThis book analyzes the construct of advanced proficiency in second language learning by bringing together empirical research from numerous linguistic domains and methodological traditions. Focusing on the dynamic nature of language use, the volume explores diverse manifestations of high-level second language Spanish, including performance on standardized proficiency assessments, acquisition of late-acquired linguistic structures, sophisticated language use in context, and individual differences. Chapters relate empirical findings to current definitions of advancedness, challenging scholars and practitioners to re-consider existing conceptualizations, and propose possible directions for future research and teaching with second language speakers of Spanish. By addressing larger issues in the field of second language learning, the volume is a valuable reference for language teachers, scholars, professionals and students with an interest in second language acquisition generally, and second language Spanish, more specifically.
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Advances in Clinical Phonetics
More LessAdvances 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.
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Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax
More LessThe present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 21st and 22nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Stuttgart. The contributions provide insightful discussions of several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of contemporary and historical Germanic languages. The theoretical issues explored include: the left periphery, with a number of contributions touching on the pros and contras of cartographic accounts; different aspects of word order and how it arises from movement and clause structure; the interplay of thematic relations and case theory with the realization of DPs; and the treatment of finiteness and modal structures. This book is of interest to syntacticians working in a comparative perspective and to advanced undergraduates.
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Advances in Contact Linguistics
More LessIssues 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.
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Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics
More LessContrastive 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.
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Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing
More LessThis 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.
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