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This book provides a cutting-edge exploration of the social meaning of phonetic variation in the Spanish-speaking world. Its 11 chapters elucidate the ways in which listeners process perceive and propagate phonetically motivated social meaning across monolingual and contact varieties including the Spanish spoken in Spain (Asturias Catalonia and Andalusia) Ecuador Colombia Argentina Chile Mexico and the United States. The book presents a wide variety of new and innovative research by renowned scholars and the chapters examine issues like the influence of visual cues bilingualism contact geographic mobility and phonotactic predictability on social and linguistic perception. Additionally the volume engages in timely discussions of intersectionality replicability and the future of the field. As the first unified reference on Spanish sociophonetic perception this volume will be useful in graduate and undergraduate classrooms in libraries and on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in Spanish sociophonetics.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches variation and change address in digital and audiovisual media nominal address and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French Czech Dutch English (from the US UK Australia and Canada) Finnish Italian Mongolian Palenquero Creole Portuguese Slovak and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists sociolinguists typologists and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.

This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting ‘more than one’ entity from collective and aggregate nouns (with the first-ever typology) to count plurals partly substantivised adjectives and conjoined NPs. This semantic feature approach to plurality which cuts across number the count/non-count distinction and lexical/NP levels reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns and accommodates cases such as three elephant cattle or a chain of islands. The study also offers a refined understanding of aggregate nouns (a category nearly as large as that of collective nouns) and quantification in pseudo-partitives develops Guillaume’s notion of ‘internal plurality’ and proposes the innovative concept of ‘hyperonyms of plural classes’ (e.g. furniture). The Animacy Hierarchy is also found to be influential beyond hybrid agreement. The book aims to be accessible to scholars of any theoretical background interested in these topics.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies historical perspectives and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Literary writers through their handling of deixis evaluative and modal expressions tellability politeness norms and genre expectations activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account human beings are profoundly influenced by society but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals” who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.<br/>As well as explaining these theoretical positions the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns both from a historical and present-day perspective and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public such as letters newspapers parliamentary debates and online communication in the form of reader comments discussion pages and tweets. In addition to English the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.

If as we believe the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and as a consequence has made the ancient intrinsic diversity of all languages visible at least to the extent that this is still possible. <br/>Nowadays then the old linguistic diversity of dialects of parlances of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet) the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs the development of the Germanic word order and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages Proto-Germanic was in intensive contact with Punic a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.

In 2016 the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective others from a diachronic perspective or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French Italian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian Gallo and Sardinian.

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers representing a wide spectrum of frameworks approaches and methods from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects to corpus-based discussions of language and gender to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes to laboratory experiments and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics and Southeast Asian languages more generally.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis syntax semantics morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts such as year of publication sex of the author geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories as well as the above-mentioned metadata information can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) purpose-designed software by IrLab is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849

The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival” acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn this particular case of language-shift which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew alongside general theoretical discussion with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.

The books we’ve read the films we’ve seen the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually rather than how it can be identified described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism neuroscience linguistics and sociology this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.

This book offers a broad-based account of bilingual processing drawing on research findings and current thinking from various domains across cognitive science. The theoretical approach adopted is the Modular Cognition Framework in which language processing is characterized as an interaction between dedicated linguistic systems and the other modules of the human mind. The latter provide the 'internal context' of bilingual processing. This internal context involves goals value emotion self and representations of the external context. The book combines all these elements into a coherent picture of the bilingual's internal context and the way it shapes processing. It then shows how some central concepts in cognitive science and bilingualism fit in with – and follow from – this view. These concepts include working memory consciousness attention effort codeswitching and the possible cognitive benefits of being bilingual. The book should be of interest to professionals in the field as well as postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Inspired by Marcelo Dascal’s theory of controversies this volume includes studies in the theory of controversies studies of the history of controversy forms and their evolution and case-studies of particular historical and current controversies.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The purpose of this volume is to identify a taxonomy of controversies and also to sense a line of development for the phenomenon of controversies itself. <br/>At the same time we want to ask ourselves about the impact and the spread of controversies in the contemporary world eminently intended as a heuristic element facilitating knowledge.<br/>For all these reasons the fundamental aim of the volume is to provide the reader with a selection of current theoretical and practical perspectives on controversies and to offer a broad picture of the complex range of definitions meanings and practices connected to them.

This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis experimentation or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages range from mechanisms through which information structure connection and discourse organization are realized to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.

This collection is one of the first in-depth studies of video calling in family and domestic life. It explores the reasons that people themselves provide to explain their video calling investigates how these reasons make that calling accountable and how in turn these reasons come to be things talked about in the calls themselves. The research shows how video calling is part of the currency of contemporary family affection: such calls are not just about keeping in touch they are a way of loving too; and they are sometimes a way of fighting as well. 'Skyping' or 'Facetiming' might be frequent and can seem mundane – just a question of routine – but what they entail is a measure of important things to families. This makes this collection of interest to anyone concerned with family life and the evolving ways in which technology has a role in it.

Originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics 27:3 (2017).

Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages with focus on South America examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions their internal and external syntax and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade to shape expectations to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics political entities and political issues. Yet the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation including features of political leaders (e.g. their age and gender) countries and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.

This volume contains selected papers from the Thirtieth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics that was held at Stony Brook University in 2016 as well as two articles that are based on papers presented at the Thirty-First Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. The chapters are theoretical and experimental explorations of a variety of linguistic topics and engage ideas ranging over three broad areas of research: phonetics and phonology syntax and experimental and computational linguistics. They deal with Classical and Modern Standard Arabic as well as a variety of dialects including Iraqi Egyptian Moroccan and Syrian Arabic.

Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English such as long-distance dependencies coordination ellipsis valency etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG yet despite this simplicity it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.

This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology sociolinguistics and pragmatics and language acquisition. Including data from North African Levantine and Gulf varieties of Arabic as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia dialect contact and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986 1991) work on static prepositions. However interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space whose syntactic properties were related to specific semantic distinctions such as the opposition between “movement” and “displacement”. This volume provides an overview of recent studies on the semantics of dynamic space in French and addresses important questions about motion expression among which “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion the status of locative PPs the expression of manner fictive or non-actual motion. Descriptive experimental and formal or computational analyses are presented providing complementary perspectives on the main issue. The volume is intended for researchers and advanced students wishing to learn about both spatial semantics in French and recent debates on the representation of motion events in language and cognition.

Storytelling in the Digital World explores new emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon Facebook Twitter and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narratives; the effects of digital anonymity and pseudonymity on narrative practices; the strategies through which virtual communities discursively work together to solidify and negotiate their sociocultural identities; the tensions between the affordances that characterize different online media and the communicative needs of users; the structures and modes in which virtual users construct and enact participatory practices in these environments; and the significance of different spatiotemporal dimensions in the encoding sharing and appreciation of stories. More generally the volume engages with some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that the growing presence of digital technologies and media poses to narrative analysis.



Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017)

Teachability and Learnability across Languages addresses key issues in second foreign and heritage language acquisition as well as in language teaching. Focusing on a Processability Theory perspective it brings together empirical studies of language acquisition language teaching and language assessment. For the first time a research timeline for the role of instruction in language learning is presented showing how the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research has developed over the last four decades since Pienemann’s work on learnability and syllabus construction over the 1980s. The book includes studies of child and adult second as well as foreign language acquisition research covering a wide range of target languages including English German Hungarian Japanese Norwegian Polish Spanish Swedish and Turkish. In addition future extensions of PT are discussed. This volume is designed for advanced students in international programs of SLA and Applied Linguistics as well as for SLA researchers and second and foreign language teachers.

Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss rise and restructuring of morphonological marking periphrastic verbal constructions auxiliary variation and evolution as well as changing word order options. Favouring corpus-linguistic frequency-based and statistical approaches the studies are firmly empirically grounded. The book is aimed at scholars interested in the history of the English language and in language variation and change.