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In the world today bilingualism is more common than monolingualism. Thus the default mental lexicon may in fact be the bilingual lexicon. More than ever social and technological innovation have created a situation in which lexical knowledge may change dramatically throughout an individual’s lifetime. This book offers a new perspective for the understanding of these phenomena and their consequences for the representation of words in the mind and brain. Contributing authors are leaders in the field who provide a re-analysis of key assumptions and a re-focusing of research. They bring new insights and new findings that advance the understanding of both bilingualism and the mental lexicon. This volume serves to generate new directions and advances in bilingualism research.

The book explores eleven debates held at the Bahraini Council of Representatives (or the Parliament) over 2007-2010 to comprehend how parliamentary discourse contributes towards identity formation within Bahraini society. Within the framework of critical discourse studies the book traces the ideological struggle over power in the linguistic content of legislative discourse through a range of discursive strategies and devices.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The authors contend that the discursive choices across the political spectrum in the legislative debates reflected strong sectarian characteristics which contained in it the seeds of political unrest of 2011 the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of Bahrain. Parliamentary rhetoric and its resonance in the public sphere the authors argue revealed the underlying contradictions in Bahraini society. The book highlights the significance of legislative discourse as a platform of social cohesion and its instability being symptomatic of contradictions within society.

The purpose of this book is to contribute to our understanding of genre and genre variation in the Japanese language in order to bring to consciousness the nature of Japanese culture and the presuppositions norms and values found within Japanese society. This type of knowledge enables interventions and agency as knowing how language works within a culture makes it possible to consciously accept it or to influence and shape it into the future. The various chapters seek to explore social contexts and the norms values and practices of Japanese culture through the language choices in analysed texts in literature education the workplace and in print-based media. These genres collectively form part of the cultural fabric of Japan. The book represents a first step in documenting a selected set of Japanese genres from a social semiotic perspective. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese descriptive linguistics pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis systemic functional linguistics and applied linguistics. It should also appeal to teachers and learners of Japanese and to media commentators students of literature cultural studies and journalism.

Research on the development on written language and literacy is inherently multidisciplinary. In this book leading researchers studying brain cognition and behavior come together in revealing how children develop written language and literacy why they may experience difficulties and which interventions may help those who struggle. Each chapter provides an overview of a specific area of expertise focusing on typical and atypical development providing steps for future research and discussing practical implications of the work. The book covers areas of bilingualism dyslexia reading comprehension learning to read atypical populations intervention and new media. Thus the book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of affairs in this field of research. The various book chapters have been written by researchers who all have collaborated at some point in their careers with Ludo Verhoeven whose research sets the example for the importance of crossing disciplinary borders to research to take the next important steps. The combination of the research in this book sets the stage for future research that connects various fields and hopes to inspire anyone interested in the development of written language and literacy.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is an English-lexified Atlantic expanded pidgin/creole spoken in some form by an estimated 50% of Cameroon’s population primarily in the anglophone west regions but also in urban centres throughout the country. Primarily a spoken language CPE enjoys a vigorous oral presence in Cameroon and the linguistic examples illustrating this description are drawn from a spoken corpus consisting of a range of text types including oral narratives radio broadcasts and spontaneous conversation. The authors’ typologically-framed investigation of the features of the language from its phonetics phonology and lexicon to its syntax and discourse structure allows the reader a clear view of the linguistic character of CPE offering a comprehensive description of the language that will be of interest to creolists as well as linguists interested in African languages contact linguistics and comparative linguistics.

This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch Finnish and different varieties of English and are based on data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. Paying tribute to Terttu Nevalainen’s pioneering work the book highlights the wide range and complexity of the field of historical sociolinguistics and presents achievements and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. The book is of interest to a wide readership ranging from scholars of historical linguistics sociolinguistics corpus linguistics and digital humanities to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.

Language Acquisition in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings builds a bridge between Second Language Acquisition and Learner Corpus Research (LCR) methodologies to take the evaluation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to a new level. The study innovates in two main ways. First it is based on a highly diversified L2 database which includes learner corpus data as well as experimental data from the same learners. These linguistic components of the database are complemented with extensive information on learner variables including cognitive and affective factors which are rarely studied in LCR. Second the study relies on multifactorial statistical analyses to assess the effectiveness of CLIL itself as well as the impact of the selectivity inherent in the CLIL system which has frequently been ignored. The linguistic focus of the study is the English passive which is investigated in CLIL and non-CLIL teaching materials and subsequently related to learner output.

Les unités linguistiques ayant pour fonction (paradoxale) de signifier une relation entre d’autres unités de discours suscitent depuis l’Antiquité un intérêt toujours renouvelé. Défi pour le grammairien dont ils subvertissent les « parties du discours » ces « mots-outils » que l’on peut prendre pour des « mots vides » obligent le linguiste à interroger les rapports entre syntaxe et sémantique logique et linguistique système et discours signe et implicite. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Les onze études réunies dans ce livre s’attachent à décrire les processus de fonctionnement de morphèmes appartenant à des langues diverses (allemand français italien latin vietnamien) qui marquent une relation de liaison ou d’intégration. Ces études de cas détaillées menées selon différents cadres théoriques (typologie cognitivisme psycho-mécanique grammaire fractale linguistique de l’énonciation argumentation dans la langue linguistique textuelle) du point de vue synchronique ou diachronique mettent en valeur le caractère premier de la variation dans les systèmes linguistiques. <br/>Un chapitre introductif pose les repères terminologiques historiques et théoriques pour l’étude de catégories de signes linguistiques – prépositions conjonctions connecteurs – marqués par la transcatégorialité et la polyfonctionalité.

This volume features a set of selected peer-reviewed articles which represent research by some very prominent scholars and some promising researchers in the field. The articles cover a wide range of areas in Arabic linguistics namely Sociolinguistics Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax and Language Acquisition. They also feature research on a number of Arabic dialects namely Egyptian Arabic Emirati Arabic Jordanian Arabic Lebanese Arabic Sudanese Arabic and Syrian Arabic. Some of the contributions engage prominent issues that relate to current development in the Arabic speaking world. For example Reem Bassiouney’s paper is a significant contribution in that regard. Other contributions such as the ones by Stuart Davis Abdel-khalig Ali Lababidi & Park Ntelitheos & Idrissi present innovative studies in Arabic Morphology Phonetics Phonology and Language Acquisition respectively. How Arabic can serve as a testing ground for some theoretical constructs and approaches is exemplified by Peter Hallman Phil Crone and Youssef Haddad’s contributions in the area of Syntax and its interface with other fields.

The Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1000 years. Like the landscape the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland an early form of Frisian was spoken until very roughly 1100 and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology in all its geographic and diachronic variation and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.

This volume presents an in-depth analysis of language variation in Jamaican radio newscasts and talk shows. It explores the interaction of global and local varieties of English with regard to newscasters’ and talk show hosts’ language use and listeners’ attitudes. The book illustrates the benefits of an integrated approach to mass media: the analysis takes into account radio talk and the perception of the audience it is context-sensitive paying close attention to variation within and between genres and it combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate the complexity of language in the media. The book contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of World Englishes in the 21st century and endonormative stabilization processes in linguistically heterogeneous postcolonial speech communities and shows how mass media both challenge and reproduce sociolinguistic stratification. This volume will be relevant for researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics language attitudes and language in the media.

Expanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach: Investigating learners instructors and other interlocutors demonstrates why investigating the individual differences of all interlocutors with whom learners interact – including peer and heritage learners instructors researchers and native speakers – is critical to understanding how second and foreign languages are taught and learned. Through state-of-the-art syntheses detailing what is known about learners and instructors and novel empirical studies highlighting new avenues of inquiry the volume articulates the most pressing needs for individual difference research. The book concludes with a scoping review which reveals the many interlocutors still yet to be empirically considered and outlines next steps for this research. Uniquely combining linguistic theory research synthesis and empirical study this book encourages students and established scholars alike to expand their conceptualization of individual differences. By demonstrating the importance of considering the individual differences of all interlocutors the studies are also highly relevant to those teaching second and foreign languages in diverse contexts.

Sonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.

In recent years an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax historical linguistics neurolinguistics biolinguistics and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities constraints of cognitive processing together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements explored from different approaches both formal and functional and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based sociolinguistic and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

This book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic fields namely autobiography stylistics narratology and translation studies. It shows that foregrounding is manifested in the language of autobiography alerting readers to an authorial tone with certain ideological affiliations. In refuting the presumed conflation between the author narrator and character in autobiography the study emphasizes readers’ role in constructing an implied author. The issues of implied translator assumed translation and rewriting are explored through a comparative analysis of the English and Chinese autobiographies by Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. The analysis identifies different foregrounding practices and attributes these differences to an implied translator. Further evidence derived from narrative-communicative situations in the two autobiographies underscores divergent personae of the implied authors. The study aims to establish a deeper understanding of how translation and rewriting have a far-reaching impact on the self- and world-making functions of autobiography. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics literature translation and political science.

This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences continuities and discontinuities outward hatred and the “politics of denial” the use of collective symbols and construction of individual identities. Multiple genres are taken under scrutiny including blogs forums internet websites and newspaper coverage political speeches and debates news reports and broadcast interactions with a view to capturing the themes and pragma-rhetorical strategies within texts abundant with radical and hateful messages. In addition to examining discourse dynamics and the underlying logic of such texts the contributors to this monograph explore the ideological motivations and the consequences they might have for social actions on both an individual and collective level.

Highly relevant in the contemporary world divided by conflicts power and resource struggles right-wing extremism and crusades against the imaginary Other the book presents state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that should be of interest to specialists in pragmatics rhetoric sociolinguistics discourse analysis corpus linguistics as well as media and communication studies.

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3:1 (2015).

Featuring multidisciplinary and transcultural investigations this volume showcases state-of-the-art scholarship about the impact of argumentation-based discourses and field-specific argumentation practices in a wide range of communities of practice belonging to the media social legal and political spheres. The investigations make use of integrative wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and empirical research methodologies with a focus on argumentation strategies in real-life environments both private and public and in constantly growing virtual environments. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book brings together linguists argumentation scholars philosophers and communication specialists who convincingly show how interpersonal and/or intergroup interactions shape challenge or change the argumentative practices of users what argumentation skills and strategies become critical and consequential how argumentative discourse contexts may stimulate or prevent critical reflection and debate and what are the wider implications at personal institutional and societal levels. Reaching beyond the boundaries of linguistics and argumentation sciences this book should be a valuable resource for researchers as well as practitioners in the fields of pragmatic linguistics argumentation studies rhetoric discourse analysis political sciences and media studies.

This 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.

This book combines scholarship in pragmatics linguistic anthropology and philosophy to address the problem of violence in language. How do words wound? What is the relation between physical and linguistic violence? How do racial invectives misogynous language homophobic slurs among other forms of hate speech affect the body and make us vulnerable to conditions of injurability that language brings about? While investigating the limits that violence poses for everyday speech action understanding representation and our shared frameworks of intelligibility this collective volume theoretically bridges knowledge from canons in linguistic pragmatics continental philosophy and linguistic/semiotic anthropology and the dialogic perspective of subjects who are located in the peripheries of South America and Europe. The scholarship gathered here intends to offer a perspective on the violence of words that is attentive to practices and sensibilities that do not always fit into hegemonic ideologies of self and language.

Focusing on objects this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English Polish and Hungarian) a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow first and foremost from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers since even though its focus is theoretical a detailed discussion of the empirical facts including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements is also offered.

Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish Lithuanian Swedish German Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar not only within the same language but also across languages. Finally several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis genre corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

Text comprehension is a critical area of psychological and educational research and has particular relevance to educational context. The general aim of this international volume Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings is to encourage excellence in research and to bring together teachers students researchers and other professionals from different disciplines (e.g. psychology linguistics neuroscience education information technology and communication) as well as all those members of the general public who have an interest in the study of reading. The specific objectives of the different chapters in this volume are to analyze existing methods of studying the various aspects of reading comprehension disseminate results already obtained by research groups working in the field and debate current and future trends in the study of reading.

Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia Brazil Hong Kong Japan Melanesia Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics pragmatics cultural discourse studies linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.

This ground-breaking book marks a milestone in the history of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. The most authoritative book in the field to date it outlines the theoretical and analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics elaborating on its key theoretical/analytical notions of cultural cognition cultural schema cultural category and cultural metaphor. In addition it brings to light a wide array of cultural conceptualisations drawn from many different languages and language varieties. The book reveals how the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics can produce in-depth and insightful investigations into the cultural grounding of language in several domains and subdisciplines including embodiment emotion religion World Englishes pragmatics intercultural communication Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL) and political discourse analysis. By presenting a comprehensive survey of recent research in Cultural Linguistics this book demonstrates the relevance of the cultural conceptualisations encoded in language to all aspects of human life from the very conceptualisations of life and death to conceptualisations of emotion body humour religion gender kinship ageing marriage and politics. This book in short is a must-have reference work for scholars and students interested in Cultural Linguistics.