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This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis actualization and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology word order and constructional syntax.

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

As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history structure meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’ ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’ this book offers a fresh look at the PSC in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC being low in transitivity serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.

This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie a 33000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.

Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). The two books slipped into the Jewish--and eventually Christian--Canon by a series of misrepresentations. The first Song of Songs is linguistically the latest book along the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum perhaps as late as 300-100 BC to judge by its language which closely resembles Mishnaic Hebrew (2nd Cent. AD). The book is a lush carnal poetic account of an illicit love affair where lusty exchanges between the female beloved and her male lover are interspersed with rustic love songs. The ultimate provenance of the text may be older than the time it was recruited into the Canon or the time suggested by its late dialect.The second book Qohelet is linguistically earlier on the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum though still following the return from the Babylonian exile (ca. 550 BC). Unlike Song of Songs which is linguistically coherent and bears all the marks of having been produced by a native speaker (or speakers) Qohelet is replete with non-native lexical and grammatical usage and was most likely produced by a speaker (or speakers) of Aramaic the lingua franca of the Persian empire and the returning exiles. Multiple English translations of the two books exist. Nonetheless in one way or another all previous translations suffer from two main drawbacks: First their interpretation of the grammar – and on occasion also the vocabulary – of Biblical Hebrew is sometimes questionable. And second the poetic quality of their English leaves much to be desired paling in comparison with the stark beauty of the Hebrew original.This book attempts to do justice to both the contents and form of these two magnificent deliciously subversive poetic works.

This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies symbols cultural models stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical monomodal and multimodal discourses including politicians’ discourse presidential speeches newspapers TV series Catholic homilies colonialist discourse and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science international relations cultural studies and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor with clear sociocultural grounding and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis metaphor studies media studies nationalism studies and political science.

This volume explores new frontiers in the linguistic study of iconic lexemes known as ideophones mimetics and expressives. A large part of the literature on this long-neglected word class has been dedicated to the description of its sound symbolism marked morphophonology and grammatical status in individual languages. Drawing on data from Asian (especially Japanese) African American and European languages the twelve chapters in this volume aim to establish common grounds for theoretical and crosslinguistic discussions of the phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics acquisition and variation of iconic lexemes. Not only researchers who are interested in linguistic iconicity but also theoretical linguists and typologists will benefit from the updated insights presented in each study.

How has convergence affected news and translation? Convergence is a chameleon taking a new colour in each new context from the integrated bilingual newsroom of a legacy broadcaster to a newsroom in an outlet that has embraced multimodality from the very start. And yet translation scholars studying the news have ignored convergence while media scholars studying convergence have ignored translation. They have missed the fact that convergence is intrinsically linked to language and culture. This volume brings together translation and media scholars to investigate different modes of convergence across platforms as they shape how journalists frame stories and understand their role in a multilingual convergent world. It opens a dialogue with scholars and students in applied linguistics communication journalism languages and translation as well as translators interpreters and ultimately journalists.

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio Beja Maa). In conclusion the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages prepositions verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting their argument structure in the complement of the verbal root and that their meaning is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions enriched with the CAUSE operator. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs based on the operation of predicate transfer. It also offers a uniform analysis of cases. Prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the agreement operation whereat the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore it examines prepositions from a diachronic perspective and argues that they can be grammaticalised as future markers under certain circumstances.

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan Henk van Riemsdijk Alain Rouveret and scholars in Chinese Linguistics this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages computational and semantic aspects of resumption the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials system repairing strategies at interfaces the v-copy construction in Chinese the scope of disjunction interactions between focus negation and event quantification null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis child language acquisition of nominal structure word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax semantics theoretical linguistics and language acquisition as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

The Pragmatics of Executive Coaching is the first linguistic monograph on executive coaching a recent not fully professionalized yet booming helping professional format in the organizational realm. The book is positioned at the interface between applied linguistic analysis and the activity of coaching coupled with its structuring professional theory. It presents the Basic Activity Model of coaching a model for the qualitative analysis and description of the discursive co-construction of coaching by coach and client within and across individual coaching sessions and whole processes. The analysis is based on 150 hours of authentic data from the coaching approach Emotionally Intelligent Coaching and presents coaching as hybrid and interdiscursive helping professional format. The gained insights into the discursive layout of coaching interactions advance our linguistic understanding of helping professions as such contribute to the theoretical and methodological underpinning of coaching and help promote the coaching practice.

While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles both empirical and theoretical. Empirically the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated and inversely superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically the questions of whether stable variation is possible and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change and to scholars working on the history of Germanic Romance and Sinitic languages.

Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties argument selector as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates referential properties of arguments as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

Pomeranian is the West Germanic language spoken by European emigrants who went from Farther Pomerania (present-day Poland) to Brazil in the period 1857–1887. This language is no longer spoken in cohesive societies in Europe but the language has survived and is in remarkably good shape on this language island in the tropical state of Espirito Santo. This monograph offers the first synchronic grammar of this language. After a historical introduction the book offers a systematic description of its phonology morphology and syntax. The language is contrasted with its European sisters more particularly High German Dutch and Frisian. It highlights various phenomena that will presumably contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate on the Germanic verbal system. It provides new data on cluster V2 do-support and the two infinitives. As to the infinitival syntax the language shows remarkable parallels to the system of Frisian. As to the rich Pomeranian system of subtractive morphology the phonological account that is offered will be important for the ongoing discussion of the abstractness of phonological representations. Finally Pomeranian is a welcome addition to the set of languages on which our etymological understanding of West Germanic is based.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts TV broadcasts online forums politicians’ speeches legal and administrative texts and oral narratives drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian English French German Greek Italian Lithuanian Polish Russian Serbian Slovenian Spanish and Ukrainian – and it employs different discourse-analytical methods such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis Gendered Language Studies Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources languages and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars students and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies media studies identity studies and social and public policy.

As of January 2023 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events but more importantly further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the cognitive functional approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events syntax-semantic interface and typology.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books.

This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory reader-response studies and pedagogical stylistics among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics stylistics narratology and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

What do people think of translation in the different historical cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not.

But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena whose formal manifestation and underlying licensing conditions represent the convergence of two or more areas of the grammar an area of investigation particularly invigorated in recent generative research by developments such as phase theory (cf. Chomsky 2001; 2008) and the cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999). In this respect the dialects of Italy are no exception in that they present comparative Romance linguists and theoretical linguists alike with many valuable opportunities to study the linguistic interfaces as highlighted by the many case studies presented in this volume which provide a series of original insights into how different components of the linguistic system – syntactic phonetic phonological morphological semantic and pragmatic – do not necessarily operate in isolation but rather interact to license phenomena whose nature and distribution can only be fully understood in terms of the formal mapping between the interfaces.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book) corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III) and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

In the context of constantly increasing linguistic diversity in many parts of the world opportunities and challenges arise for the acquisition of literacy skills. The successful development of literacy skills becomes a crucial prerequisite for educational attainment determining future career prospects of migrant students. Multilingual settings reveal the diversification of languages and scripts prompted in the context of migration. This monograph explores the phenomenon of biscriptuality and aims to provide an approach for investigating the development of biliteracy in the context of divergent scripts. This interdisciplinary mixed-methods study bridges intercultural education science education research and applied linguistics for gaining a complex view on the role of biscriptuality in students’ biliteracy. It considers the extent of students’ biscriptual skills specifies language dimensions in which the influence on biliteracy may occur and differentiates between the effects of biscriptuality on the development of writing skills in two different genres narrative and expository.

This volume explores a pivotal period in European history the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Politeness scholars have suggested that the nineteenth century heralds a significant transition in the meanings and realisations of politeness between the Ancien Régime and the contemporary period with the rise of the middle classes as economic political social and cultural actors.

The central innovation of this volume consists in its use of a wide range of politeness metasources — grammar books schoolbooks conduct books etiquette books and letter-writing manuals — to access social norms. This interdisciplinary approach which draws on historical linguistics argumentation theory appraisal theory and literary stylistics is applied to a wide range of languages: English including Scottish and business English Italian Spanish West and South Slavic languages.

As a highly coherent collection of innovative research papers the volume will be welcomed by researchers of (im)politeness pragmatics and sociolinguistics both from a historical and contemporary perspective.

The chapters in this collection authored by renowned scholars address a gap in the literature by focusing on the consequences that outsourcing among other globalized economic practices and remediation by new technologies have had on the service encounters genre (SE). From both a multilingual and a multidisciplinary perspective this collection explores the development of technological applications and professional best practices as well as call centre interaction e-commerce and e-word of mouth. More specifically the papers in this volume report on technology developed to support SEs and how this technology influences service providers and their allowable linguistic contributions. Further this collection provides valuable insights on the language and strategic behaviour deployed in less researched kinds of SEs gives special attention to how technology impacts the interface between the transactional and interactional goals of SEs and thus has real world applications.