Books

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.

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.

This volume presents research on major issues in syntactic theory within Role and Reference Grammar. This theory was first presented in detail in Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar [FSUG], and these papers represent both expansions and applications of the theory to a wide range of phenomena. The first section contains an introduction to the theory which is the most thorough statement of it since FSUG, summarizing the features of Role and Reference Grammar established there and developing new theoretical components and analyses of syntactic phenomena not discussed in the earlier work. Throughout the discussion features of RRG are compared and contrasted with comparable features of other syntactic theories. The remainder of the volume is devoted to detailed analyses of specific problems, e.g. control, case marking, in a wide variety of languages, e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Nootka, Mparntwe Arrernte and Turkish. Thus the works presented here illustrate well the strong cross-linguistic approach to syntactic theory and description in Role and Reference Grammar.

Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis – both phonetic and statistical – it is possible to extrapolate the role of individual factors (socio-cultural, physiological, communicative-interactional, etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.
This book investigates the fundamental relationship between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory, acoustic, dialectological, and conversational perspectives, thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to language variation. Although presuming some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics, the book is addressed to all readers with an interest in speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction.

Any behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

This monograph provides an in-depth investigation of the structural integration and the licensing of adverbs in relation to clause structure, with special emphasis on the structural implementation of the relation between the position and interpretation of adverbs. The book substantiates the hypothesis that the licensing of adverbs within and across the three layers of the clause is contingent on specifier-head agreement and that variation in the linear order of adverbs and other elements of the clause follows from the interplay of a small number of factors. The central claims made are: functional projections hosting adverbs are not confined to the inflectional and complementizer layer of the clause, but also play a central role in the shaping of the lexical layer; postverbal adverbs are realized within a semantically empty verbal projection and licensed under specifier head agreement by proxy; and adverbs that occur within the complementizer layer of the clause do so by either move or merge.

Adverbials have become an important testing ground for research on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The articles selected for this volume present recent research on this topic. Among the issues addressed are the occurrence of adverbials in various domains of the sentence Mittelfeld, left and right periphery, adverbials in front of gaps, and the influence of the discourse context on the interpretation and position of adverbials. Particular classes of adverbials that are discussed include domain, locative, temporal, manner, transparent, and degree adverbials. Beyond the exploration of these topics, the volume reflects the current debate between proponents of semantic-driven approaches to the positioning of adverbials which assume adverbials to be adjuncts and approaches that claim a primacy of syntax in conceiving of adverbials as specifiers in a universally valid hierarchy of functional projections.

Adverbs as a word class are notoriously difficult to define. The volume deals with the delimitation of this category, its internal structure, the morphological make-up of adverbs and their positions in syntactic structures. A closer look at diachronic developments sheds light on the characteristics of adverbial word-formation. Taking into account adverbs in German, English, Dutch, French and Italian, the contributions to this volume provide new insights into the characteristics of this heterogeneous and multi-faceted category and will be of interest to linguists working in the fields of morphology, syntax and language change.