Books

There are indications that interest in the study of adverbs has been growing steadily in recent years, largely due to the so-called Chomskyan revolution in linguistics which put much emphasis on the study of syntax, but probably also because of the position these adverbs and other particles take within a syntactic string has proved to be much more difficult to determine than had previously been thought. Still another reason for the increase of interest in this topic may be found in the recent trend in linguistics which focusses on communicative competence and actual language use in daily discourse. Although this bibliography has no claim to exhaustiveness, it should nonetheless be useful to researchers working on adverbs and comparatives. The titles selected relate in one way or another to the problems the linguist faces with respect to the adverb.

This multi-faceted collection of research papers on Advice in Discourse focuses on advisory practices in different contexts. Data is drawn from academic, educational and training settings, health-related practices, and computer-mediated communication. The languages involved are Cantonese, English, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The chapters treat professional and institutional practices, practices that contain peer interaction within an institutional framework, and non-institutional peer interaction, as well as solicited and non-solicited advice in written and spoken form. The work reported on clearly demonstrates the complexity of the advisory activity, which needs to be studied in its cultural framework and interactional context. The richness and diversity of this practice is studied from different methodological angles, covering qualitative and quantitative as well as theoretical and empirical analyses. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the research field, thought-provoking theoretical discussions and extensive references for future research. It is essential for linguists, advice-practitioners and for those who want to learn more about the discourse of advice.

Obwohl nach der Verurteilung von 1277 der Lateinische Averroismus als eigenständige Schule verschwand, entstanden dennoch in den Jahren zwischen 1280 und 1300 in Paris neue Aristoteles-Kommentare, die ein lebhaftes Interesse für heterodoxe aristotelische Lehren bezeugen. Heute kennen wir mehr als zehn handschriftlich überlieferte Texte, die von diesem Geist geprägt sind. Nur zwei Autoren sind bisher namentlich bekannt: Ferrandus Hispanus und Aegidius von Orleans; keine einzige der genannten Schriften wurde bisher ediert. Die Quaestiones super De generatione et corruptione des Aegidius von Orleans sind somit der erste der averroistischen Kommentare des späten 13. Jahrhunderts, der in einer textkritischen Edition erscheint. Die Quaestionen enthalten eine eingehende Analyse der Frage nach der ersten Materie (prima materia). Daneben beschäftigen sie sich mit klassischen Problemen, die den Kern der Kontroverse um den Averroismus bildeten: die Lehre von der Ewigkeit der Welt (aeternitas mundi) und damit verbunden die Frage nach der Möglichkeit einer Schöpfung (creatio ex nihilo, creatio in tempore). Neben diesen traditionell averroistischen Problemen werden bei Aegidius auch Fragen erörtert, die mit der Lehre von den Sakramenten zusammenhängen und, gerade kurz nach 1277, ein besonders heikles Thema waren.

This volume presents papers on issues in African linguistics, covering a variety of African languages and ranging from phonology to lexicology.

The articles in the present volume offer an updated view of the breadth of theoretical and empirical research being carried on in the different subgroups of the Afroasiatic phylum. They are written by leading specialists and are representative of widely different perspectives and interests, from the analysis of data from scarcely known varieties to the reappraisal of old debates (such as the value of the Classical Arabic verbal forms).

Reflecting a great diversity of language structures and functions, the articles are grouped into three broad areas: the phylum as such in its classificatory and typological aspects; the analysis of the intricate morphology of Afroasiatic and its developments; and the syntax of Afroasiatic in its widest sense, from the clause to the sentence and beyond. They witness how Afroasiatic, with its unsurpassed historical depth and immense geographical breadth, keeps representing a constant source of fascinating data and implications for linguistic theory.

In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.

Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests.
The articles describe Francisco Miranda, the “precursor” of Venezuelan independence, who promoted translations of works on the French Revolution and American independence; 19th century Brazilian translations of articles taken from the Révue Britannique about England; Ahmed Midhat, a late 19th century Turkish journalist who widely translated from Western languages; Henry Vizetelly , who (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce the works of Zola to a wider public in Victorian Britain; and Henry Bohn, who, also in Victorian Britain, (successfully) published a series of works from the classics, many of which were expurgated; Yukichi Fukuzawa, whose adaptation of a North American geography textbook in the Meiji period promoted the concept of the superiority of the Japanese over their Asian neighbours; Samuli Suomalainen and Juhani Konkka, whose translations helped establish Finnish as a literary language; Hasan Alî Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education, who set up the Turkish Translation Bureau in 1939; the Senegalese intellectual, Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work showed that the Ancient Egyptians had African rather than Indo-European roots; the Centro Cultural de Évora theatre group, which introduced Brecht and other contemporary drama into Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution; 20^th century Argentine translators of poetry; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who have brought translation to the forefront of literary activity in Brazil; and, finally, translators of Bosnian poetry, many of whom work in exile.

Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.

I denne bog foretager forfatteren en undersøgelse af de fire afsnit i kong Alfreds The Old English Orosius, hvori gammelt dansk område beskrives.Efter en forskningsoversigt imødegås de forestillinger, som flere tidligere forskere har dannet sig om, at kong Alfred – navnlig i Skandinavien – har anvendt en nordretning, som afviger fra den astronomiske. Ud fra tværfaglige synspunkter følger forfatteren den opfattelse, at forholdet mellem sprog og omverden ikke nødvendigvis er vilkårligt, og der stilles mere indtrængende spørgsmål til de forekommende lokaliteters geografiske beliggenhed end i den hidtidige historiske litteratur.

Ved gennemgangen af teksten følges det system, som først er opstillet af Laborde i 1925, og det vises, at beskrivelsen af østfrankernes og oldsaksernes naboer samt af de nordiske folk kunne være resultatet af rejser, som er foretaget af to af de medarbejdere ved værket, som vi kender navnene på fra de skriftlige kilder (Grimbald og Johannes).

Efter en gennemgang af de to afsnit, der sædvanligvis omtales som 'Ottars og Wulfstans rejsebeskrivelser', vises det, at disse tekster snarere er resultatet af kong Alfreds redaktion af værket.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology.

The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

The authors present a comprehensive overview of past research in ambiguity in the field of psycholinguistics. Experimental results have often been equivocal in allowing a choice between the single-reading hypothesis and the multiple-reading hypothesis of processing of ambiguous sentences. This text reviews the arguments and experimental results in support of each of these views, and further investigates the contributions of context and thematic constraints in the process of ambiguity resolution. Commentary is also made on the possible hierarchical ordering of difficulty in the treatment of ambiguity, as well as critically related considerations like bias, individual differences, general cognitive strategies for dealing with multiphase representations, and the inherent differences between lexical and syntactic ambiguity.

This is a revised version of Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America (1994), the post-World-War-II history of the emergence of sociolinguistics in North America that was described in Language in Society as “a heady combination of detailed scholarship, mordant wit, and sustained narrative designed to persuade even the skeptical reader that these myriad, often simultaneously emergent, ways of thinking about language are indeed interrelated. . . . This is an outspoken, engaging, rollicking, occasionally aggravating adventure in the history of these sciences as related to their practice. . . not to be missed by anyone who cares about the intellectual underpinnings of the study of language in society,” in Language as providing “the closest approximation” to how sociolinguists came together and developed the field, and in Lingua as providing “the most comprehensive overviews of the various and varied approaches to [American] linguistic research.” American Sociolinguistics examines both theory groups (such as the ethnography of speaking and ethnoscience), and sociolinguistic scholars (such as William Labov, Einar Haugen, and Erving Goffman) whose widely-known and often-emulated work was not pursued by organized groups.

Lance Hewson's book on translation criticism sets out to examine ways in which a literary text may be explored as a translation, not primarily to judge it, but to understand where the text stands in relation to its original by examining the interpretative potential that results from the translational choices that have been made. After considering theoretical aspects of translation criticism, Hewson sets out a method of analysing originals and their translations on three different levels. Tools are provided to describe translational choices and their potential effects, and applied to two corpora: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and six of the English translations, and Austen's Emma, with three of the French translations. The results of the analyses are used to construct a hypothesis about each translation, which is classified according to two scales of measurement, one distinguishing between "just" and "false" interpretations, and the other between "divergent similarity", "relative divergence", "radical divergence" and "adaptation".

This book introduces beginning students and non-specialists to the diversity and richness of African languages. In addition to providing a solid background to the study of African languages, the book presents linguistic phenomena not found in European languages. A goal of this book is to stimulate interest in African languages and address the question: What makes African languages so fascinating? The orientation adopted throughout the book is a descriptive one, which seeks to characterize African languages in a relatively succinct and neutral manner, and to make the facts accessible to a wide variety of readers. The author’s lengthy acquaintance with the continent and field experiences in western, eastern, and southern Africa allow for both a broad perspective and considerable depth in selected areas. The original examples are often the author’s own but also come from other sources and languages not often referenced in the literature. This text also includes a set of sound files illustrating the phenomena under discussion, be they the clicks of Khoisan, talking drums, or the ideophones (words like English lickety-split) found almost everywhere, which will make this book a valuable resource for teacher and student alike.

This is the first text book to offer a comprehensive approach to Old Frisian. Part One begins with a succinct survey of the history of the Frisians during the Middle Ages, their society and literary culture. Next follow chapters on the phonology, morphology, word formation and syntax of Old Frisian. This part is concluded by a chapter on the Old Frisian dialects and one on problems regarding the periodization of Frisian and the close relationship between (Old) Frisian and (Old) English. Part Two consists of a reader with a representative selection of twenty-one texts with explanatory notes and a full glossary. A bibliography and a select index complete the book. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher in the field, An Introduction to Old Frisian is an essential resource for students and researchers of Frisian, Old English and other ‘Old’ Germanic languages and cultures, and for medievalists working in this area. The second unrevised 2011 reprint of the original edition contains several corrections.

It has been eight years since An Introduction to the Grammar of English was first published. The second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, especially where texts, example sentences, exercises, and cartoons are concerned. It continues to provide a very lively and clearly written textbook. The book introduces basic concepts of grammar in a format which inspires the reader to use linguistic arguments. The style of the book is engaging and examples from poetry, jokes, and puns illustrate grammatical concepts. The focus is on syntactic analysis and evidence. However, special topic sections contribute sociolinguistic and historical reasons behind prescriptive rules such as the bans on split infinitives, dangling participles, and preposition stranding. The book is written for undergraduate students and structured for a semester-long course. It provides exercises, keys to those exercises, and sample exams. It also includes a comprehensive glossary. A basic website will be kept up at http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/grammar.htm.

The present text is a re-edition of Volume I of Formal Grammars in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, a three-volume work published in 1974. This volume is an entirely self-contained introduction to the theory of formal grammars and automata, which hasn’t lost any of its relevance. Of course, major new developments have seen the light since this introduction was first published, but it still provides the indispensible basic notions from which later work proceeded. The author’s reasons for writing this text are still relevant: an introduction that does not suppose an acquaintance with sophisticated mathematical theories and methods, that is intended specifically for linguists and psycholinguists (thus including such topics as learnability and probabilistic grammars), and that provides students of language with a reference text for the basic notions in the theory of formal grammars and automata, as they keep being referred to in linguistic and psycholinguistic publications; the subject index of this introduction can be used to find definitions of a wide range of technical terms. An appendix has been added with further references to some of the core new developments since this book originally appeared.

This basic bibliography of analogy aims to be a useful tool for linguistic research. The compilers have emphasized the years from 1868 onwards, starting with Scherer’s statement, but a few important premonitory works have been included as well.

Cet essai prolongue l’esquisse d’analyse distributionelle que l’on trouvera dans Un grammaire en chaîne du français (Salkoff, 1973). Dans ce livre ici, l’auteur presente quelques aspects additionels de la grammaire et du programme associé, necessaire pour analyser un texte scientifique. Le chapitre 1 donne un aperçu du fonctionnement de la conjonction dans la phrase. Déterminer quelles structures et quelles sous-classes peuvent se lier les unes aux autres pare une conjonction est assurément l’une des questions les plus difficiles à résoudre dans le detail. Le chapitre 2 contient les définitions de toutes les sous-classes des catégories principales utilisées dan le lexique. Dans le chapitre 3 l’auteur présente une description de la grammaire en chaîne en tent que language formel, comme une variante context-sensitive. Le chapitre 4 présente les premiers résultats de l’application effective du programme d’analyse syntaxique.

Citizenship talk refers to various types of discourse initiated to make citizens take part in politically and socially contested decision-making processes (‘citizen participation’). ‘Citizenship’ has, accordingly, become one of the dazzling key words whenever the democratic deficit of modern societies is moaned about. Asking for citizenship to be conceived of as a communicative achievement, the present book shows that sociolinguistics and pragmatics can essentially contribute to this interdisciplinary up-to-date issue of research: the volume offers a theoretically innovative concept of communicated citizenship and it presents a set of methodological approaches suited to deal with this concept at an empirical level (including contributions from Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Positioning Theory, Speech Act Theory and Ethnography). Furthermore, concrete data and empirical analyses are provided which take up the case of decision-making processes around the application of modern ‘green’ biotechnology (‘GMO field trials’). The volume thus illustrates the kind of findings and results that can be expected from this new and promising approach towards citizenship talk.

An understanding of genres in communication (written and spoken) is essential to professional success. This volume studies situationally appropriate responses in professional communication in face-to-face interaction and distance communication, from a socio-cognitive point of view. A traditional rhetorical approach does not give much insight in the ways in which genres are embedded in communicative activity or how actors draw upon genre knowledge to perform effectively. However, if genres are considered as embedded in social interaction “as typified forms of typified circumstances”, the rich dynamic aspects of genre knowledge can be disclosed.
The chapters deal with genre knowledge in various settings, illustrating the impact of time, place, medium, skills and purpose, and some chapters deal with genre analysis in a broader sense giving ideas for applied genre analysis.
The book is of interest to professionals and scholars in communication studies, discourse analysis, and social and cognitive science.

Featuring contributions by leading specialists in the field, the volume is a survey of cutting edge research in genres in political discourse. Since, as is demonstrated, “political genres” reveal many of the problems pertaining to the analysis of communicative genres in general, it is also a state-of-the-art addition to contemporary genre theory. The book offers new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights in both the long-established genres (speeches, interviews, policy documents, etc.), and the modern, rapidly-evolving generic forms, such as online political ads or weblogs. The chapters, which engage in timely issues of genre mediatization, hybridity, multimodality, and the mixing of discursive styles, come from a broad range of perspectives spanning Critical Discourse Studies, pragmatics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and media studies. As such, they constitute essential reading for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary yet coherent research agenda within the vast and complex territory of today’s forms of political communication.

Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering.
This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies.
The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.

The continuing debate over the existence or non-existence of formal verbal aspect in Gothic triggered the author to write this monograph whose aim is to provide a completely new foundation for a theory of aspect and related features. Gothic, with its limited corpus, representing a translation of the Greek, and showing interesting parallels with Slavic verbal constructions, serves and an illustrative model for the theory. In Part I the author argues that a unified theory of aspect, actional types, and verbal velocity presented there possesses an internal logic and is not at variance with observed facts in various Indo-European languages. In Part II an analysis is presented of the Gothic verb system which seeks to explain the much-disputed function of ga- and to solve the problem of Gothic aspect and actional types which does no violence either to the Gothic text or the Greek original.