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This book is the first on Cantonese that deals with the grammaticalization phenomenon systematically. Focusing on a group of twelve directional particles this book tracks their grammaticalization pathways from full-fledged directional verbs to directional particles indicating meanings relating to tense-aspect modality and quantification in the post-verbal position. Some of these particles have undergone further grammaticalization to convey speaker’s subjective as well as intersubjective stances.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book is also unique in its diachronic component. Examples in the book are drawn from various sources including early Cantonese pedagogical texts Cantonese films and contemporary Cantonese corpora with data ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book will be a valuable resource not only for all linguists interested in the development of grammatical forms but also for teachers and students in conversation/discourse analysis psychology and anthropology interested in deepening their understanding of the interaction between language structure and use.<br/>

Grammaticalization research has increasingly highlighted the notion of constructions in the last decade. In the wake of this heightened interest efforts have been made in grammaticalization research to more precisely articulate the largely pretheoretical notion of construction in the theoretical framework of construction grammar. As such grammaticalization research increasingly interacts and converges with the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. This volume brings together articles that are situated at the intersection of grammaticalization research and diachronic construction grammar. All articles share an interest in integrating insights from grammaticalization research and construction grammar in order to advance our understanding of empirical cases of grammaticalization. Constructions at various levels of abstractness are investigated both in well-documented languages such as Ancient Greek Latin Spanish German Norwegian and English and in less-described languages such as Manchu and Mongolian.

This book is a research monograph divided into two parts. The first part describes the methods used to build the first sizeable corpus of informal conversational data collected from bilingual speakers of Welsh and English: Siarad. The second part describes the linguistic analysis of data from this corpus (available at bangortalk.org.uk). The information in Part One will be useful as a ‘how to’ manual on building a bilingual spoken corpus including methods of data collection transcription glossing and analysis. The findings reported in Part Two throw new light on the debate regarding code-switching vs. borrowing the application of the Matrix Language Framework (MLF) to the grammar of Welsh-English code-switching the extralinguistic factors influencing variation in quantity of code-switching and the extent to which the grammar of Welsh is changing in contact with English. Additional findings by other researchers using the corpus are also reported and possible future directions are discussed.

The relationship between science and democracy has become a much-debated issue. In recent years we have even seen an exponential growth in literature on the subject. No doubt the interest has partly been justified by the concern of public opinion over the technological repercussions of scientific research. Moreover there are scientific theories that if they were accepted would allegedly imply the adoption of policies that have wide social consequences as well as a rethinking of deeply-rooted habits on the part of the citizens. These considerations alone allow us to understand the reasons for the interest in the at times troublesome relationships between science and public opinion which characterize democratic societies.

This book is a collection of eleven research articles which altogether serve as a contribution to the study of verb complementation and other constructions an area of investigation which bridges observations on the spectrum of lexico-grammar syntax and semantics. In terms of methodological approaches and the types of linguistic patterns examined the chapters cast light on the subject from a variety of perspectives and the volume is structured in a way that groups the various perspectives under three main themes according to their main focus and/or methodological approaches namely: the semantic and functional descriptions of constructions; the investigation into the distribution of complementation patterns; and the study of innovative patterns in ESL contexts and languages other than English. All chapters in this volume employ data from large electronic corpora where possible – the BNC COCA COHA GloWbE NOW and newly compiled corpora representing regional varieties of English.

Die 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. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>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.

Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they interact with other linguistic and cognitive skills. This book compiles a set of seventeen short review chapters from distinguished experts that have contributed significantly to our knowledge about how prosody develops in first language acquisition. The ultimate aim of the book is to offer a complete state of the art on prosodic development that allows the reader to grasp the literature from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of psychology linguistics cognitive science speech therapy and education.

Classification is a popular topic in typological descriptive and theoretical linguistics. This volume is the first to deal specifically with the diachrony of linguistic systems of classification. It comprises original papers that examine the ways in which linguistic classification systems arise change and dissipate in both natural circumstances and in circumstances of attrition. The role of diffusion in such processes is explored as well as the question of what can be diffused. The volume is not restricted to nominal systems of classification but also includes papers dealing with the less well-known phenomenon of verbal classification. Languages from a wide spread of world regions are examined including Africa Amazonia Australia Eurasia Oceania and Mesoamerica. The volume will be of interest to linguistic typologists descriptive linguists historical linguists and grammaticalization theorists.

The book is a comprehensive corpus study of analogical developments in the nominal morphology of four Northern West Germanic languages: Old English Old Frisian Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian. It examines the patterns of reorganisation of the nominal paradigms focusing on the analogical interdeclensional shifts of nouns affiliated with historical minor classes. The wide scope and comparative nature of the study facilitate identifying the major patterns of inflectional restructuring both language-specific and those of a more general character demonstrating that the process was far from random. By framing the investigated phenomena quantitatively the study affords insight into the dynamics of the changes their scope in individual languages the mechanisms underlying the restructuring process and the factors conditioning it. The book may be of interest to both historical linguists who may appreciate its descriptive aspects as well as morphologists concerned with the mechanisms of morphological processes especially analogy.

The papers in this volume focus on the dynamics of one specific cell in morphological paradigms – the genitive. The high amount of diachronic and synchronic variation in all Germanic languages makes the genitive a particularly interesting phenomenon since it allows us for example to examine comparable but slightly different diachronic pathways the relation of synchronic and diachronic variation and the interplay of linguistic levels (phonology morphology syntax and semantics). The findings in this book enhance our understanding of the genitive not only by describing its properties but also by discussing its demarcation from functional competitors and related grammatical items. Under-researched aspects of well-described languages as well as from lesser-known languages (Faroese Frisian Luxembourgish Yiddish) are examined. The papers included are methodologically diverse and the topics covered range from morphology syntax and semantics to the influence of (normative) grammars and the perception and prestige of grammatical items.

This book introduces a methodology and research tool (DART) that make it possible to carry out advanced corpus pragmatics research using dialogue corpora enriched with pragmatics-relevant annotations. It first explores the general use of spoken corpora for pragmatics research as well as issues revolving around their representation and annotation and then goes on to describe the resources required for such an annotation process. Based on data from three different corpora ranging from highly constrained task-oriented ones (SPAADIA Trainline & Trains 93) to unconstrained dialogues (Switchboard) it next presents an in-depth discussion and illustration of the potential contributions of syntax semantics and semantico-pragmatics towards pragmatic force. This is followed by a description of the largely automatic annotation process itself and finally an analysis of how a set of more than 110 potential speech acts defined in DART contributes towards establishing the specific communicative characteristics of the three corpora.

Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world including languages of Western China the Andean region of South America the Caucasus Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This book develops a grammar model which accounts for discourse ellipses in spoken Norwegian. This is a previously unexplored area which has also been sparsely investigated internationally. The model takes an exoskeletal view where lexical items are inserted late and where syntactic structure is generated independently of lexical items. Two major questions are addressed. Firstly is there active syntactic structure in the ellipsis site? Secondly how are discourse ellipses licensed? It is argued that both structural and semantic restrictions are required to account for the empirical patterns. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Discourse ellipses can be seen as a contextual adaptation. Ellipsis is only possible in certain contexts. The existence of ellipsis may lead to the impression that syntax is partly destroyed. However the analysis shows that narrow syntax is not affected. The underlying structure stays intact as the licensing restrictions concern only phonological realization. Hence the grammar of discourse ellipses is best characterized as an interface phenomenon.

A Linguistic Handbook of French for Translators and Language Students offers the reader an in-depth contrastive study of French and English based on recent theories of linguistics and discourse analysis. At the same time it is a practical manual for the advanced language student or the translator with dozens of exercises in analyzing and translating French along with detailed corrections.

Organized in three sections – Structure Perspective and Coherence – the handbook first explores French word formation and syntax then moves on to the use of tense and aspect illocution and speech styles in various text types. Finally problems concerning textual coherence and cohesion in both languages are discussed: anaphora and ellipsis relevance and equivalence and information structure.

Each chapter is followed by a list of suggested readings for further discussion and a detailed glossary at the end of the book explains all technical terms used.

The handbook is designed to be used either as a textbook or for individuals working at home.

This volume shows the relevance of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ for understanding the dynamics of identification through language. It also opens up a new terrain for sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological study namely the margins. Rural as well as urbanized areas that are seen as marginal or peripheral to places that are overtly recognized as mixed and hybridized have received relatively little sociolinguistic attention. Yet people living in these supposedly less ‘spectacular’ margins are not immune to the effects of globalization and rapid technological change. They too constantly form new ensembles from linguistic and cultural resources which they invest with novel instable often ambiguous meanings. This volume focusses on the purportedly unspectacular in order to achieve a full understanding of the relation between language place and belonging. The contributors to this volume therefore focus on language practices analyzing them as dialectically related to political-economic processes and language ideologies.

In his foreword to the original edition of this classic of functionalism typology and diachrony Dwight Bolinger wrote: "I foresee it as one of the truly prizes statements of our current knowledge…a book about understanding done with deep understanding – of language and its place in Nature and in the nature of humankind… The book is rich in insights even for those who have been with linguistics for a long time. And beginners could be thankful for having it as a starting point from which so many past mistakes have been shed". Thoroughly revised corrected and updated On Understanding Grammar remains as its author intended it in 1979 a book about trying to make sense of human language and of doing linguistics. Language is considered here from multiple perspectives intersecting with cognition and communication typology and universals grammaticalization development and evolution. Within such a broad cross-disciplinary context grammar is viewed as an automated structured language-processing device assembled through evolution diachrony and use. Cross-language diversity is not arbitrary but rather is tightly constrained and adaptively motivated with the balance between universality and diversity mediated through development be it evolutionary or diachronic. The book's take on language harkens back to the works of illustrious antecedents such as F. Bopp W. von Humbold H. Paul A. Meillet O. Jespersen and G. Zipf offering a coherent alternative to the methodological and theoretical strictures of Saussure Bloomfield and Chomsky.

This collection of original contributions dealing with Hispanic contact linguistics covers an array of Spanish dialects distributed across North South and Central America the Caribbean the Iberian Peninsula and the Bosporus. It deals with both native and non-native varieties of the language and includes both synchronic and diachronic studies. The volume addresses and challenges current theoretical assumptions on the nature of language variation and contact-induced change through empirically-based linguistic research. The sustained contact between Spanish and other languages in different parts of the world has given rise to a wide number of changes in the language which are driven by a concomitance of different linguistic and social processes. This collection of articles provides new insight into such phenomena across the Spanish-speaking world.

The use of corpora has conventionally been envisioned as being either corpus-based or corpus-driven. While the formal definition of the latter term has been widely accepted since it was established by Tognini-Bonelli (2001) it is often applied to studies that do not in fact fullfil the fundamental requirement of a theory-neutral starting point. This volume proposes the term pattern-driven as a more precise alternative. The chapters illustrate a variety of methods that fall under this broad methodology such as the extraction of lexical bundles POS-grams and semantic frames and demonstrate how these approaches can uncover new understandings of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Developmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties the nature of the input to children across contexts and several aspects of the learners themselves. Chapters explore these sources of variation within an interdisciplinary and comparative approach allying theories and methodologies stemming from linguistics psycholinguistics developmental psychology and neuroscience. The comparative perspective involves different languages contexts of use types of learners (first/second language acquisition monolingual/bilingual learners autism language impairment) as well as vocal and visuo-gestural communicative modalities (co-verbal gestures sign language acquisition). The volume points to the need to enhance interdisciplinary research using complementary methodologies to further examine sources of variation and to integrate variation into a more general developmental theory.

In The Fictions of Translation emerging and seasoned scholars from a range of cultures bring fresh perspectives to bear on the age-old practice of translation. The current movement of people knowledge and goods around the world has made intercultural communication both prevalent and indispensable. Consequently the translator has become a more prominent figure and translation an increasingly present theme in works of literature. Embedding translation in a fictional setting and considering its most extreme forms – pseudotranslation or self-translation for example – are fruitful ways of conceptualizing the act of translating and extending the boundaries of translation studies. Taken together the various translational fictions examined in this collection yield new insights into questions of displacement migration and hybridity all characteristic of the modern world. The Fictions of Translation will thus be of interest to practising translators students and scholars of translation and literary studies as well as a more general readership.

An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers artists and intellectuals by examining them within the ecological environment that first made them possible and then led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period. Through illustrative case studies it mounts a close analysis of word and image and their synergistic interplay in avant-garde picturebooks while also recontextualizing them within the ecology of their original environment where extraordinary countervailing forces played out a drama of which these books survive as telling artifacts. Ultimately it argues that the Russian avant-garde picturebook offers a uniquely illustrative example of literary ecology that sheds light on issues of creativity and censorship politics and art more broadly as well.

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists psychologists cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage in this volume is a testament to the many different aspects of bilingualism that continue to generate phenomenal interest in the scholarly community. The bilingual experience is captured through a multifaceted prism that includes aspects of language and literacy development in child bilinguals with and without developmental language disorders language processing and mental representations in adult bilinguals across the lifespan and the cognitive and neurological basis of bilingualism. Different theoretical approaches – from generative UG-based models to constructivist usage-based models – are brought to bear on the nature of bilingual linguistic knowledge. The end result is a compendium of the state-of-the-art of a field that is in constant evolution and that is on an upward trajectory of discovery.

How is ‘crisis’ one of the most resonating words in the modern world related to the mass media? Is crisis independent of the discourse practices of media text and talk? This book is a collection of studies that brings together current research into the ways in which crisis is constructed and communicated in contemporary media discourse. Studies in this book advance our understanding of crises as social events that are discursively constructed performed responded to but also ‘rehearsed’ as a form of social practice. Relying on the application of techniques of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) including visual analysis the book provides a wealth of empirical evidence on how crisis is mediated across a range of written oral and visual media. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of media who combine an interest in discourse analysis with disciplines as diverse as media and cultural studies political communication and sociology.

Threatening is among the less pleasant “things we do with words” but together with other conflictive speech acts it seems to play a central role in communication. Yet little is still known about how and when exactly speakers threaten. The present volume addresses this void by giving an in-depth analysis of the form and function of this speech act. A set of authentic threat utterances is used to probe questions on the linguistic repertoire employed and the different objectives speakers pursue with their threats. Based on the central findings a classification of two types of threats is proposed each with distinctive formal and functional properties. The analysis employs a mixed method approach with a two-fold aim; by combining a qualitative discussion of examples with the application of innovative statistical methodology the findings allow new insights into research on threats and simultaneously offer new perspectives on general research methodology.

Translating the Female Self across Cultures examines contemporary autobiographical narratives and their Italian and French translations. The comparative analyses of the texts are underpinned by the latest developments in Translation Studies that place emphasis on identity construction in translation and the role of translation in moulding various types of identity. They focus on how the writers’ textual personae make sense of their sexual artistic and post-colonial identities in relation to the mother and how the mother-daughter dyad survives translation into the Italian and French social political and cultural contexts. The book shows how each target text activates different cultural literary linguistic and rhetorical frames of reference which cast light on the facets of the protagonists’ quest for identity: the cult of the Madonna; humour and irony; gender and class; mimesis and storytelling; performativity and geographical sense of self. The book highlights the fruitfulness of studying women’s narratives and their translations and the polyphonic dialogue between the translations and the literary and theoretical productions of the French and Italian cultures.