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Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness
Editor(s): Marcel Bax and Dániel Z. KádárPublication Date November 2012More LessExploring a largely uncharted territory of cultural history and linguistic ethnography, Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness offers in-depth analyses and perceptive interpretations of the conveyance of social-relational meaning in times (long) past and across historical cultures.
A collection of essays from the pens of authoritative historical (pragma)-linguistics researchers, the volume examines the forms and functions of historical (im)politeness, varying from single utterances and act sequences to fully-fledged (im)polite speech encounters and genres, with a focus on their period- and culture-bound appraisal. What is more, the book sheds light on what is still very dimly seen: diachronic trends in ‘relational work’ and the cultural-societal factors behind patterns of sociopragmatic change.
The volume reviews theoretical concepts, methods and analytical approaches to improve our present-day understanding of the historical understanding of relational practices of the distant as well as the more recent past. Since it includes newly established themes and positions and breaks new ground, this collection furthers considerably the field of historical (im)politeness research.
This volume was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12:1/2 (2011).
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Understanding Interfaces
Author(s): Laura DomínguezPublication Date June 2013More LessBy combining theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, this monograph investigates the status of interfaces in Minimalist linguistic theory, second language acquisition and native language attrition. Two major questions are currently under debate: (1) what exactly makes a linguistic phenomenon an ‘interface phenomenon’, and (2) what is the specific role that the interfaces play in explaining language loss and persistent problems in second language acquisition? Answers to these questions are provided by a theoretical examination of the role that economy and computational efficiency play in recent Minimalist models of the language faculty, as well as by evidence obtained in two empirical studies examining the acquisition and attrition of two interface phenomena: Spanish subject realization and word order variation. The result is a new definition of ‘interface phenomena’ which deemphasizes syntactic complexity and focuses on the effect of interface interpretive conditions on syntactic structure. This work also shows that representational deficits cannot be ruled out in the acquisition and attrition of interface structures.
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Understanding L2 Proficiency
Editor(s): Eun Hee Jeon and Yo In'namiPublication Date August 2022More LessThis edited volume is a collection of theoretical and empirical overviews of second language (L2) proficiency based on four skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Each skill is reviewed in terms of how it has been conceptualized, measured, and studied over the years in relation to relevant (sub-) constructs of the language skill under discussion. This is followed by meta-analyses of correlation coefficients that examine the relationship between the L2 skill in question and its component variables. Unlike most meta-analyses that have a limited range of variables under investigation, our meta-analyses are much larger in scope to better clarify such relationships. By combining theoretical and empirical approaches, the book is helpful in deepening the understanding of how subcomponents or various variables are related to a particular L2 skill.
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Understanding Language and Cognition through Bilingualism
Editor(s): Gigi Luk, John A.E. Anderson and John G. GrundyPublication Date June 2023More LessBilingualism is a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Beyond being a language experience, bilingualism also entails a social experience, and it interacts with development and learning, with cognitive and neural consequences across the lifespan. The authors of this volume are world renowned experts across several subdisciplines including linguistics, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. They bring to light bilingualism’s cognitive, developmental, and neural consequences in children, young adults, and older adults. This book honors Ellen Bialystok, and highlights her profound impact on the field of bilingualism research as a lifelong experience. The chapters are organized into four sections: The first section explores the complexity of the bilingual experience beyond the common characterization of “speaking multiple languages.” The next section showcases Ellen Bialystok’s earlier impact on psychology and education; here the contributors answer the question “how does being bilingual shape children’s development?” The third section explores cognitive and neuroscientific theories describing how language experience modulates cognition, behavior, and brain structures and functions. The final section shifts the focus to the impact of bilingualism on healthy and abnormal aging and asks whether being bilingual can stave off the effects of dementia by conferring a “cognitive reserve.”
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Understanding Patients' Voices
Author(s): Marta Antón and Elizabeth M. GoeringPublication Date April 2015More LessThis volume illustrates the process of conducting interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research into the relationship between patient language use and chronic disease management. The ten chapters in this book provide a model for interdisciplinary research in health discourse from start to finish. Part I describes in detail the conceptualization and design of a multi-year research project exploring language use among people living with diabetes. Part II offers a sampler of a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and contrastive methodologies that have considerable potential in the study of health discourse. Part III brings the research process full circle by discussing issues related to adapting research protocols to diverse cultural contexts, translating results into practice, and working in interdisciplinary teams.
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Understanding Second Language Processing
Author(s): Bronwen Patricia Dyson and Gisela HåkanssonPublication Date May 2017More LessThis book aims to help researchers and teachers interested in language processing and Processability Theory (PT) to understand this theory and its applications. PT is an influential account of second language processing which hypothesizes that, due to the architecture of language processing, learners acquire second languages in developmental stages. This book lays out PT’s predictions and research on the development of diverse target languages – particularly English and Scandinavian languages – by learners of various categories. It discusses the typological issues facing PT and its contribution to an understanding of variation and cognitive constraints on pedagogy. However, the book also raises a critical eye to the literature which, after almost twenty years of evolution, requires explanation, clarification and, in some cases, extension. Why do some phenomena belong to different stages in different languages? Why are important types of variation under-represented? Is teaching as constrained as proposed in PT?
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Understatements and Hedges in English
Author(s): Axel HüblerPublication Date January 1983More LessThe goal of this monograph is a comprehensive analysis of understatements and other forms of non-direct speech (hedges) in modern English. It is based on a multi-level approach, including philosophical, cultural, and socio-psychological arguments. The main part consists of an investigation of the linguistic restrictions for understatements and hedges to be formed by means of the following grammatical categories: negation of predicates, gradation of predicates, modalization of affirmative sentences by means of parenthetical verbs, modal adverbs, modal verbs, and questions.
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Unfolding Perceptual Continua
Editor(s): Liliana AlbertazziPublication Date July 2002More LessThe book analyses the differences between the mathematical interpretation and the phenomenological intuition of the continuum. The basic idea is that the continuity of the experience of space and time originates in phenomenic movement. The problem of consciousness and of the spaces of representation is related to the primary processes of perception. Conceived as an interplay between cognitive science, linguistics and philosophy, the book presents a conceptual framework based on a dynamic and experimental approach to the problem of the continuum. Besides presenting the primitives of a theory of cognitive space and time, it presents a theory of the observer, analyzing the relationship among perspective, points of view and unity of consciousness. The book's chapters deal with the dynamic elaboration and recognition of forms from the lower to the higher processes in the various perceptual fields. Experimental analysis from visual, auditory and tactile perception outline the basic structures of intentionality and its counterpart in language and gesture. (Series B)
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Uniformitarianism in Linguistics
Author(s): T. Craig ChristyPublication Date January 1983More LessThis study examines specific implications of the considerable overlap in methodology and theory of 19th-century geology and philology. Recognition of this overlap is indispensable to a complete understanding of philology’s development into the more empirical science of linguistics, especially as this empiricism culminates in the neogrammarian doctrine of exceptionless sound laws.
The study consists of three major parts: I Uniformitarianism in the Palaetiological Sciences [i.e., geology and other natural sciences studying life in earlier periods of the earth]; II The Rise of Uniformitarianism in Linguistics; and III The Uniformitarian Basis of Neogrammarian Linguistics.
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Unique Focus
Author(s): Marina StoyanovaPublication Date April 2008More LessThis monograph focuses on an interesting typological property shared by four languages: the ungrammaticality of multiple wh-questions in Irish, Berber, Italian and Somali. It contains a broad discussion of data related to the grammar of wh-questions, a comparative analysis of wh-constructions in the four languages, and a theoretical account for the observed phenomenon. The analysis is based on the minimalist syntax theory as developed by Chomsky since 1995. It takes up the standard assumption that wh-phrases are typical representatives of elements bearing new information, in theoretical terms referred to as information focus. Most importantly, in the languages without multiple wh-questions the information focus is licensed in a unique syntactic position. The basic claim is that languages with unique focus are languages without multiple wh-questions. The analysis makes possible the classification of the languages without multiple wh-questions into the crosslinguistic typology of wh-constructions. Furthermore, this book is a contribution to the better understanding of information structure in natural languages, especially of focusing phenomena.
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Units in Mandarin Conversation
Author(s): Hongyin TaoPublication Date May 1996More LessThis book provides a new way of studying grammar. The basic thrust of the book is to investigate grammar based on a prosodic unit, the intonation unit (IU), in spontaneous speech. The author challenges the dominant practice in the study of syntax, which has been to focus on the unit of the artificially constructed sentence. The book shows that some basic notions developed from sentence-level data often do not account well for speech data. For example, in many versions of syntactic theory, the basic syntactic structure of any sentence is assumed to comprise both an NP and a VP (with variations in terminology). However the author shows that a Mandarin sentence in spoken discourse can consist of a lone NP or a transitive verbal expression without any explicit argument (which is not due to anaphora). Although the book concerns Mandarin discourse and grammar, it will be of interest to students of a wide range of fields, including discourse analysis, syntax, conversation analysis, prosodic studies, and typological studies.
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Units of Talk – Units of Action
Editor(s): Beatrice Szczepek Reed and Geoffrey RaymondPublication Date October 2013More LessIn this volume leading academics in Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis consider the notion of units for the study of language and interaction. Amongst the issues being explored are the role and relevance of traditionally accepted linguistic units for the analysis of naturally occurring talk, and the identification of new units of conduct in interaction. While some chapters make suggestions on how existing linguistic units can be adapted to suit the study of conversation, others present radically new perspectives on how language in interaction should be described, conceptualised and researched. The chapters present empirical investigations into different languages (Danish, English, Japanese, Mandarin, Swedish) in a variety of settings (private and institutional), considering both linguistic and embodied resources for talk. In addressing the fundamental question of units, the volume pushes at the boundaries of current debates and contributes original new insight into the nature of language in interaction.
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Unity and Diversity of Languages
Editor(s): Piet van SterkenburgPublication Date July 2008More LessThe Permanent International Committee of Linguists (Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, CIPL) has organized the 18th Congress of Linguists in Seoul (July 21-26, 2008), in close collaboration with the Linguistic Society of Korea. In this book one finds the invited talks which address hot topics in various subdisciplines presented by outstanding and internationally well known experts. In addition, the state-of-the-art papers provide an overview of the most important research areas of contemporary linguistics.
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The Unity of Movement
Author(s): Tommy Tsz-Ming LeePublication Date April 2024More LessDisplacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories can be unified. Specifically, I address issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this book is to show that this is an unwarranted assumption. Based on a number of case studies on verb displacement phenomena in Cantonese, I attempt a unified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction in movement theories. These case studies converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bears a minimal role in theorizing displacement phenomena in natural language. This volume represents a minimalist pursuit of a unified theory of movement.
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Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition
Author(s): Lydia WhitePublication Date January 1989More LessThis book explores the relationship between linguistic universals and second language acquisition. Although no knowledge of generative grammar is presupposed, the theoretical framework underlying the work is the principles and parameters approach to Universal Grammar (UG), as realized in Chomsky's Government and Binding theory.
In recent research, the question has arisen as to whether the principles and parameters of UG remain available in language acquisition that is non-primary. Within second language acquisition theorizing, hypotheses have ranged from UG playing no role at all to UG operating exactly as in primary language acquisition. In this work the theoretical arguments and data from the whole spectrum are reviewed.
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Universal Grammar in Child Second Language Acquisition
Author(s): Usha LakshmananPublication Date August 1994More LessThis book examines child second language acquisition within the Principles and Parameters theory of Universal Grammar (UG). Specifically, the book focuses on null-subjects in the developing grammars of children acquiring English as a second language. The book provides evidence from the longitudinal speech data of four child second language (L2) learners in order to test the predictions of a recent theory of null-subjects, namely, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP). Lakshmanan argues that the child L2 acquisition data offer little or no evidence in support of the MUP’s predictions regarding a developmental relation between verb inflections and null-subjects. The evidence from these child L2 data indicates that regardless of the status of null subjects in their first language, child L2 learners of English hypothesize correctly from the very beginning that English requires subjects of tensed clauses to be obligatorily overt. The failure on the part of these learners to obey this knowledge in certain structural contexts is the result of perceptual factors that are unrelated to parameter setting. The book demonstrates the value of child second language acquisition data in evaluating specific proposals within linguistic theory for a Universal principle.
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Universal History of Linguistics
Author(s): Esa ItkonenPublication Date December 1991More LessThis wide-ranging book presents the linguistic achievements of four major cultures to readers presumably conversant with modern theoretical linguistics. The chapter on India discusses in detail Pāṇini's (c. 400 B.C.) grammar Ast-adhy-ay-i as well as the work of his commentators Kātyāyana, Patanjali, and Bhartṛhari. In the Chinese tradition, the Confucian doctrine of the Rectification of Names' is singled out for treatment. Arabic linguistics is represented by Sibawaihi's (d. 793) grammar al-Kitāb, in particular its syntax, as well as the subsequent commentary tradition. The chapter on Europe, which is the most comprehensive of the four, covers the time span from antiquity to the 20th century; special attention is devoted to the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Varro, Apollonius Dyscolus, and the Modistae. The achievements of the cultures in linguistics are treated throughout from a deliberately value-laden point of view. The achievements of Western antiquity and the Middle Ages are shown to be much more than the average linguist is inclined to believe. Even more importantly, it is shown that the Indian and the Arab traditions have been superior to the European tradition at least until the 20th century. The fact that a linguistic theory created some 2,400 years ago is fully as adequate as our best theories today must have far-reaching implications for the notion of 'scientific progress'. More precisely, it proves necessary to distinguish between 'progress in the human sciences' and 'progress in the natural sciences'. These issues, which pertain to the general philosophy of science, are treated in the final chapter of the book.
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Universals in Second Scholasticism
Author(s): Daniel HeiderPublication Date March 2014More LessThis study aims to present a comparative analysis of philosophical theories of universals espoused by the foremost representatives of the three main schools of early modern scholastic thought. The book introduces the doctrines of Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617), the Thomist John of St. Thomas, O.P. (1589–1644), and the Scotists Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola, O.F.M. Conv. (1602–1673) and Bonaventura Belluto, O.F.M. Conv. (1600–1676). The author examines in detail their mutual doctrinal delineation as well as the conceptualist tenet of the Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), whose thought constitutes an important systematic point of comparison especially with Suárez’s doctrine. The book offers the first comparative elaboration of the issue of universals, in both its metaphysical and its epistemological aspects, in the era of second scholasticism.
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University Language
Author(s): Douglas BiberPublication Date June 2006More LessUniversity students must cope with a bewildering array of registers, not only to learn academic content, but also to understand course expectations and requirements. While many previous studies have investigated academic writing, we know comparatively little about academic speech; and no linguistic study to date has investigated the range of academic and advising/management registers that students encounter. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. Based on analysis of the T2K-SWAL Corpus, the book describes university registers from several different perspectives, including: vocabulary patterns; the use of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features; the expression of stance; the use of extended collocations ('lexical bundles'); and a Multi-Dimensional analysis of the overall patterns of register variation. All linguistic patterns are interpreted in functional terms, resulting in an overall characterization of the typical kinds of language that students encounter in university registers: academic and non-academic; spoken and written.
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Unlocking the History of English
Editor(s): Luisella Caon, Moragh S. Gordon and Thijs PorckPublication Date April 2024More LessThis volume brings together contributions selected from papers delivered at the 21st International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Leiden 2021). The chapters deal with aspects of language use throughout the history of English, including efforts to prescribe and regulate language in texts that share specific forms, functions and audiences. They feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses of changing language use, often in relation to trends of language advice in such metalinguistic works as grammars, spelling books and usage guides. The authors showcase work on pragmatics and prescriptivism (understatement between Middle and Late Modern English, capitalization of common nouns from Early to Late Modern English and the use of stigmatized grammatical variants in eighteenth-century plays), specific text types (case studies of political, legal and medical English) and the language of late modern letters (diachronic stylistic changes, letter-copying practices, the role of letter-writing manuals and changing spelling practices). This volume will be of interest to those working on pragmatics, prescriptivism and sociolinguistics of English, historical linguistics, language change, computational historical linguistics and related sub-disciplines.
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Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens
Author(s): Philipp WegenerEditor(s): E.F.K. KoernerPublication Date July 1991More LessNewly edited by Konrad Koerner (University of Ottawa), with an introduction by Clemens Knobloch (Universitat Siegen)The importance of Wegener's Untersuchungen uber die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens can only be compared to that of Karl Buhler's Sprachtheorie. Even now, however, Wegener's work remains virtually unknown to the English speaking world. Wegener's main work was published in 1885. It has its origin in two lectures given in 1883 and 1884 at school teacher meetings held in the Magdeburg area and it still recalls those original occasions and maintains much of the oral style. Part of the volume treats the subject in a systematic and theoretical manner; other sections contain vivid examples and are characterized by a considerable didactic effort. The book is held together by leitmotif-questions, such as 'How do we understand language?' and 'How does language function as a means of everyday communication?'. We witness the experiences of the talented school teacher and the observations of the innovative dialect researcher combined, condensed, and conceptually ordered.In spite of the relatively unsystematic form of presentation, the book remains thoroughly consistent in thought and argument. In the Untersuchungen we have before us the outline of a communicative and functional view of language structure, of the analysis of speech, and of semantics.
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Untersuchungen zu den Gründungsdokumenten der färöischen Rechtschreibung
Author(s): Christer LindqvistPublication Date May 2018More LessDie färöische Gegenwartsorthographie ging nicht wie die moderne Rechtschreibung vieler Sprachen aus einer jahrhundertelangen Schrifttradition hervor, sondern wurde im Wesentlichen im 19. Jh. neu erschaffen. Ihre Gründungsdokumente bestehen aus vier färöischen Zaubersprüchen, die in einer bis Mitte des 19. Jh. üblichen, relativ orthophonen Schreibweise gefasst sind. Als die Zaubersprüche 1846 veröffentlicht werden sollten, wurden sie schrittweise in eine stark historisierende Schreibweise überführt, die in der färöischen Gegenwartsorthographie resultiert hat. Diese Orthographie ist bemerkenswert, weil mit ihr synchron gesehen ein sehr großer Abstand zwischen Graphemik und Phonemik sprachplanerisch erfolgreich eingeführt werden konnte, obwohl gerade solche Verhältnisse ansonsten vielfach als reformbedürftig gelten. Das vorliegende Buch enthält eine Edition aller relevanten Handschriften und ordnet diese in ihren kulturhistorischen Kontext ein.
Unlike the modern orthography of many other languages, Modern Faroese spelling did not emerge from centuries of literary tradition, but was re-created mainly in the 19th century. Its founding documents consist of four Faroese spells written in a relatively orthophone spelling that was common up until the middle of the 19th century. Prior to their publication in 1864, the spells were converted step by step into a spelling with orthographic depth along diachronic lines which eventually resulted in Modern Faroese spelling. This spelling is remarkable, since it represents the successful normative implementation of an orthographic system which, seen from a synchronic point of view, maintains a vast gap between graphemes and phonemes, a state of affairs that in most cases would be a reason for, not a result of spelling reforms. The present book contains an edition of all relevant manuscripts, and situates them in their cultural and historical context.
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Up and down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization
Editor(s): Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry PerridonPublication Date May 2004More LessThe basic idea behind this volume is to probe the nature of grammaticalization. Its contributions focus on the following questions: (i) In how far can grammaticalization be considered a universal diachronic process or mechanism of change and in how far is it conditioned by synchronic factors? (ii) What is the role of the speaker in grammaticalization? (iii) Does grammaticalization itself provide a cause for change or is it an epiphenomenon, i.e. a conglomeration of causal factors/mechanisms which elsewhere occur independently? (iv) If it is epiphenominal, how do we explain that similar pathways so often occur in known cases of grammaticalization? (v) Is grammaticalization unidirectional? (vi) What is the nature of the parameters guiding grammaticalization? The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization does or does not entail via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions.
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Uralic Essive and the Expression of Impermanent State
Editor(s): Casper de GrootPublication Date November 2017More LessThis volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume presents large sets of new data and insights into the use of the essive in nineteen Uralic languages on the basis of a typological linguistic questionnaire. The typological variation is discussed within the linguistic domains of non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The descriptions and analyses are presented in such a way that they are accessible to linguists in general, descriptive and theoretical linguists, and specialists in Uralic and/or linguistic typology. The data and approach offer many starting points for further investigations within but also outside the Uralic language family.
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Urban Bahamian Creole
Author(s): Stephanie HackertPublication Date July 2004More LessThis volume, a detailed empirical study of the creole English spoken in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, contributes to our understanding of both urban creoles and tense-aspect marking in creoles. The first part traces the development of a creole in the Bahamas via socio-demographic data and outlines its current status and functions vis-à-vis the standard in politics, the media, and education. The linguistic chapters combine typological and variationist methods to describe exhaustively a comprehensive grammatical subsystem, past temporal reference, offering a discourse-based approach to such controversial categories as the preverbal past marker. The quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, finally, tests not only well-known constraints, such as stativity or social class, but also ethnographically determined ones, such as narrative type. Its results are relevant not only to the study of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American English, but also to variation and change in urban dialects generally.
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Urban Jamaican Creole
Author(s): Peter L. PatrickPublication Date June 1999More LessA synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum.
One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory.
The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions.
Drawing on a year’s fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community’s history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.
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Urban Matters
Editor(s): Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg OberdorferPublication Date December 2021More LessThe city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication.
Focusing on the latter, the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, and attitudes, but also spatial factors including mobility, urbanisation/counterurbanisation, and diffusion processes.
The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics, but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields, especially sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work, combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.
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Urban Panamanian English
Author(s): Catherine LalibertéPublication Date August 2023More LessUrban Panamanian English presents the first detailed account of the English used by the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean builders of the Panama Canal. It offers an up-to-date sociolinguistic account of the Panamanian West Indian community of Panama City and Colón, including empirical coverage of the advanced state of language shift taking place among bilinguals. The book also showcases spoken interview data and takes stock of the variety’s grammatical features. In particular, it provides an advanced quantitative study of variation in the use of verbal -s which contributes to longstanding discussions regarding the principles constraining this variable in Englishes world-wide. This work of documentation and description richly complements existing research on Panamanian Creole English and spotlights Panama as part and parcel of the English-speaking Caribbean. As such, this book is of interest to all scholars and students of language contact, variation, and change.
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Us and Others
Editor(s): Anna DuszakPublication Date August 2002More LessIt is natural for people to make the distinction between in-group (Us) and out-group members (Others). What is it that brings people together, or keeps them apart? Ethnicity, nationality, professional expertise or life style? And, above all, what is the role of language in communicating solidarity and detachment?
The papers in this volume look at the various cognitive, social, and linguistic aspects of how social identities are constructed, foregrounded and redefined in interaction. Concepts and methodologies are taken from studies in language variation and change, multilingualism, conversation analysis, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, as well as translation studies and applied linguistics. A wide range of languages is brought into focus in a variety of situational, social and discursive environments. The book is addressed to scholars and students of linguistics and related areas of social communication studies.
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Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units
Editor(s): Tsuyoshi Ono, Ritva Laury and Ryoko SuzukiPublication Date April 2021More LessThe chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin, engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units, especially their static understanding as a priori entities, and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.
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Usage-based Approaches to Japanese Grammar
Editor(s): Kaori Kabata and Tsuyoshi OnoPublication Date June 2014More LessThis volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language, with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies, with topics ranging from phonology, modality, and grammatical morphemes, to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking, speech register, and language change. As a whole, they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical, methodological, and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years, the papers contained in this volume, both individually and collectively, have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular, as we as Japanese language teaching.
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Usage-Based Approaches to Language Change
Editor(s): Evie Coussé and Ferdinand von MengdenPublication Date July 2014More LessUsage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.
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Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew
Editor(s): Ruth A. BermanPublication Date March 2020More LessThe goal of the volume is to shed fresh light on Modern Hebrew from perspectives aimed at readers interested in the domains of general linguistics, typology, and Semitic studies. Starting with chapters that provide background information on the evolution and sociolinguistic setting of the language, the bulk of the book is devoted to usage-based studies of the morphology, lexicon, and syntax of current Hebrew. Based primarily on original analyses of authentic spoken and online materials, these studies reflect varied theoretical frames-of-reference that are largely model-neutral in approach. To this end, the book presents a functionally motivated, dynamic approach to actual usage, rather than providing strictly structuralist or formal characterizations of particular linguistic systems. Such a perspective is particularly important in the case of a language undergoing accelerated processes of change, in which the gap between prescriptive dictates of the Hebrew Language Establishment and the actual usage of educated, literate but non-expert speaker-writers of current Hebrew is constantly on the rise.
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Usage-inspired L2 Instruction
Editor(s): Andrea E. Tyler, Lourdes Ortega, Mariko Uno and Hae In ParkPublication Date February 2018More LessThis book presents a set of compelling essays collectively making a persuasive case for why a usage-based perspective on language is fast becoming a leading theoretical framework for investigating second language (L2) learning and the foundation for effective, innovative, engaging pedagogy. Drawing on 20 years of research in psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and linguistic theory, including discourse analytic approaches, the combined contributions paint a picture of theoretically-informed L2 pedagogy which emphasizes all facets of language as meaningful, embodied, and socially situated. The introduction and conclusion offer an outline of five foundational tenets essential to a usage-inspired pedagogy and a heuristic for developing usage-inspired L2 research and pedagogy. Each essay provides a unique vantage on usage-inspired L2 instruction and a demonstration of the efficacy of usage-based pedagogy. This volume will be invaluable for SLA researchers, graduate students, and classroom teachers interested in exploring usage-inspired L2 pedagogy.
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Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation
Editor(s): Randi Reppen, Susan Fitzmaurice and Douglas BiberPublication Date November 2002More LessUsing Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation illustrates the ways in which linguistic variation can be explored through corpus-based investigation. Two major kinds of research questions are considered: variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature, and variation across dialects or registers. Part 1: “Exploring variation in the use of linguistic features” focuses on the study of specific words, expressions, or grammatical constructions, to study variation in the use of a particular linguistic feature. Part 2: “Exploring dialect and register variation” describes salient characteristics of dialects or registers and the patterns of variation across varieties. Part 3: “Exploring Historical Variation” applies these same two major perspectives to historical variation. One recurring theme is the extent to which linguistic variation depends on register differences, reflecting the importance of register as a key methodological and thematic concern in current corpus linguistic research.
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Using the Lamp instead of Looking into the Mirror
Author(s): Ingrid Ljungberg van BeinumPublication Date July 2000More LessThis book focuses on the enigmatic relationship between men and women, and in particular on the subordination of women by men in the work place. The main points of departure are that subordination is a relational phenomenon and should therefore be approached in a relational context and that the dynamics of relational behaviour primarily evolve through dialogue. The project facilitated and encouraged women and men to engage in more than 100 discussions about their daily relationships, carried out in the context of an intra- and inter-organizational action research project involving three organizations: a nuclear power plant, a school district and a postal district in a province of Sweden. The object was to allow for better mutual understanding and respect from an Irigarayan view where a substrate allows men and women to regard each other in their subjectivity without ‘reducing the other to same’. The reflective and analytical nature of this study shows the dynamics of the discussions and their effects on the interpersonal and organizational level.Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum, D. Soc. Sc., studied at the universities of Uppsala and Leiden. She has lived and worked in Sweden, England, Holland, India and Canada.
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Using Tonal Data to Recover Japanese Language History
Author(s): Elisabeth M. de BoerEditor(s): J. Marshall UngerPublication Date August 2024More LessThis book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork, premodern texts, and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010, this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim, explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language, and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.
This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Ute Dictionary
Author(s): T. GivónPublication Date March 2016More LessThis third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our Ute Reference Grammar (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute words is then given in the Ute-English part. The English-Ute part, next, serves primarily as a search-and-reference tool. A short section on traditional semantic-cultural fields follows. Ute is a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Numic sub-family. Together with its northern dialects (Southern Paiute, Uintah, White River), it should be considered a single language, Núuchi ("of the people") or Núu-'apaghapi ("the people's speech"). While our work was done primarily in the southern dialects (Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Uncompaghre), we have included as many words as could be safely extracted from Powel's and Smith's work on the northern dialects, as well as some from Sapir's work (1931) on Northern Ute, adjusting them to Southern-dialect pronunciation. This brings the work as close as one could hope, at this time, to a comprehensive all-Ute dictionary, a task that yet remains to be done. We have tried to emphasize in the Ute-English entries the historical and derivational connectivity of Ute vocabulary and its gradual growth and expansion. This is also underscored in the introductory chapter on word derivation. While this work remains incomplete, we hope it can be some day expanded into an all-inclusive Ute dictionary, and will help the people – Núuchiu – preserve their language and culture.
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Ute Reference Grammar
Author(s): T. GivónPublication Date May 2011More LessUte is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch, currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America, Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically, Ute offers a cluster of intriguing features, best viewed from the perspective of diachronic change and grammaticalization. The book presents a comprehensive synchronic description of grammatical structures and their communicative functions, as well as a diachronic account of a grammar in the midst of change. The book is the first of a 3-volume series which also includes a collection of oral texts and a dictionary. Ute speakers and tribal members may find in the present volume a step-by-step description of how words are combined into meaningful communication. Linguists may find a detailed account of one language, an account that is unabashedly informed by universals of grammar, communication and change.
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Ute Texts
Publication Date July 2013More LessThis second volume of our Ute trilogy contains a collection of Ute oral texts. Ute oral literature reflects the life experience of a small-scale hunting-and-gathering Society of Intimates and its tight connection to the local terrain, flora and fauna that supported the hunter-gatherer life. Ute story-telling tradition is the people's literary heritage, with the narrative style allowing considerable artistic freedom and diversity in contents and style. Stories were not memorized verbatim, and story-tellers took creative liberty in elaborating and re-inventing the 'same' tale. The core cultural contents of each story are nevertheless preserved across tellers. Ute stories were most likely told at night around the fire, in front of or inside the lodge, to a mixed audience of children and adults who had heard the tale many time before. The stories aimed to both instruct and entertain. Their underlying themes are stoic and oft-cynical reflections on the vagaries of human behavior and harsh existence. They are the foundational literary tradition of The People--Núuchi-u.
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Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation
Author(s): K.K. LukePublication Date January 1990More LessUtterance particles, also known as modal particles or sentence-final particles, form a class of words in Cantonese which is of great descriptive and theoretical interest to students of language. Most utterance particles do not have any semantic content (truth-conditional meaning), and few can be said to have a consistent grammatical function. They are notorious for being extremely resistant to conventional syntactic and semantic analysis. The aim of this book is to seek a better understanding of utterance particles by concentrating analytical attention on three of them; namely, LA (la55), LO (lo55), and WO (wo44). Adopting a set of theoretical assumptions and analytical methods in the tradition of Conversation Analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, an attempt is made to approach these objects by examining them in the context of interactional details in naturally occurring conversations. This book presents original accounts of, and fresh insights into these utterance particles in Cantonese. But it also raises theoretical and methodological questions of more general interest. These include, among other things, the status of data and evidence in the analysis of language, and the possibility of a socially constituted linguistics.
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Utterance Structure
Author(s): Wolfgang Klein and Clive PerduePublication Date August 1992More LessThis volume presents the results of part of the ESF project 'Second language acquisition by adult immigrants'. The present study deals specifically with structure of utterances in learner varieties. The authors have attempted to find general principles which determine the form of utterances from the very beginning to relatively advanced stages. Chapter 1 and 2 provide the framework for the study and here the guiding hypotheses are sketched on the basis of a pilot analysis. The empirical part of the study is contained in Chapters 3-6, in which data are given for the acquisition of, respectively, English (by Punjabi and Italian learners), German (Italian and Turkish learners), Dutch (Turkish and Moroccon learners) and French (Moroccon and Spanish learners), thus allowing for crosslinguistic comparisons in various ways. For each data-set the learner's linguistic repertoire is established, and then the utterance patterns recurrent in his/her production and the constraints these patterns are subject to. In Chapter 7 the general and theoretical implications are discussed.
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Vagueness as an Implicitating Persuasive Strategy
Author(s): Giorgia MannaioliPublication Date January 2025More LessThe book presents an integrated model of vagueness as an implicit and persuasive strategy, pervasive in everyday language use and public discourse. It considers three macro-dimensions of the phenomenon: linguistic-theoretical, psychological, and social-discursive.
It shows how vagueness can be strategically employed to elude recipients’ critical evaluation of intended contents, to deresponsibilize the source and make their arguments unchallengeable.
It explores the semiotic, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic nature of vagueness, and looks at its use in contemporary public (with a focus on Italian) discourse.
It also delves into under-explored aspects of the phenomenon such as: the continuum of intentionality in the use of vague expressions; the evolutionary significance of vagueness; its implicitating and persuasive functions; the phenomenon of vagueness by implicature; the interaction between vague expressions and context precisation; the cognitive functioning of vague expressions; the use of vagueness in contemporary persuasive vs. non-persuasive text types; gender-based differences in the use of vagueness in public discourse.
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Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest
Editor(s): Ilaria Fiorentini and Chiara ZanchiPublication Date October 2024More LessThis book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity, as well as on their differences and similarities, both in synchrony and diachrony, and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts, which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective, with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Medieval Latin, and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad, encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines, including pragmatics, spoken discourse, conversation analysis, discourse genres (political, commercial, notarial discourse), corpus studies, language change, pragmaticalization, and language typology.
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Valence Changes in Zapotec
Editor(s): Natalie Operstein and Aaron Huey SonnenscheinPublication Date December 2015More LessZapotec languages present a wide range of lexical, morphological, phonological, and syntactic means of indicating valence changes. Despite their significant theoretical interest, detailed descriptions of valence-changing phenomena in Zapotec are rare, comparative studies are practically non-existent, and Zapotec contributions to the general typology of valence-changing phenomena still remain largely untapped. The present volume addresses this imbalance by being the first to explore Zapotec valence-changing constructions in depth, and to highlight their broad comparative, typological, and theoretical significance. This book contains both write-ups of contributions to the Special Session on Valence-Changing Devices in Zapotecan (annual meeting of SSILA, 2012) and specially commissioned chapters. It will be of interest to Zapotecanists, Otomangueanists, Mesoamericanists, typologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, and general linguists with an interest in valence-changing phenomena, and may also be used as supplementary reading in field methods and typology courses.
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Valence, Semantic Case, and Grammatical Relations
Editor(s): Werner AbrahamPublication Date January 1978More LessThe papers in this volume have been grouped in three thematic parts: Valence which plays a key concept in the syntactic classification of verbs and adjectives, provides a necessary link for decoding and encoding grammatical relations, and is an important requisite for the evaluation of formal languages for the purpose of describing and explaining phenomena of natural language. The second group of papers concerns the notion of (deep) case and the implications of tracing a grammatical theory on semantic case. The final series of papers is distinguished by the degree of accent it puts on the link between linguistic surface phenomena, including semantic case, and grammatical relations, in the sense that it has been postulated by Universal Grammar.
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Variation and Change
Editor(s): Mirjam Fried, Jan-Ola Östman and Jef VerschuerenPublication Date November 2010More LessThe ten volumes of the Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker’s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at explaining variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models.
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Variation and Change in Morphology
Editor(s): Franz Rainer, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Dieter Kastovsky and Hans Christian LuschützkyPublication Date February 2010More LessThe papers in this volume derive from the 13th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 2008). They all address the main topic of the meeting, viz. variation and change in morphology. Inflectional and derivational morphology are represented on equal terms. The focus is on cases of language-internal variation, such as pattern competition, base variation, form–function mismatches, or morphological pleonasm. Other recurring themes are language contact as a cause of variation, the output-orientedness of morphological patterns, and linguistic economy.The contributions cover a wide variety of languages, both Indo-European (Romance, Germanic and Slavic; Latin, Lithuanian and Romani) and non-Indo-European (Hungarian, Maay, Chinese).
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Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse
Editor(s): Julia Bamford, Silvia Cavalieri and Giuliana DianiPublication Date October 2013More LessThis book focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change. The sixteen contributions included in this volume represent a variety of diverse views and approaches, but all share the common goal of throwing light on a crucial dimension of discourse: the dialogic interactivity between the spoken and written. Their foci range from papers addressing general issues related to corpus analysis of spoken dialogue to papers focusing on specific cases employing a variety of analytical tools, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of small and large corpora. The present volume constitutes a highly valuable tool for applied linguists and discourse analysts as well as for students, instructors and language teachers.
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