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Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives i.e. speech acts such as requests commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings compliments and apologies. The third part finally contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

Ce recueil se compose de treize articles centrés sur la morphologie ou le lexique. Ses auteurs ont tous entretenu des relations de travail avec Danielle Corbin et la plupart sont des linguistes reconnus en morphologie. Au-delà de la diversité des approches l’originalité de l’ouvrage tient au fait qu’il rassemble des contributions qui mettent en lumière des données nouvelles concernant plusieurs phénomènes peu ou pas décrits auparavant (l’incidence des contraintes prosodiques dans la formation des gentilés les noms dérivés ambigus entre N de procès et N de propriété (correction) la sémantique des adjectifs dénominaux l’inhibition dans les adjectifs dérivés d’ethniques en espagnol (Usbekistán / usbekistano) ou encore la morphologie non conventionnelle à travers les lexèmes complexes en -ouille) et des contributions qui débattent de questions théoriques plus classiques : principe de la base unique frontière entre dérivation et composition statut des segments fluctuants relation entre préfixation et catégorisation dérivation paradigmatique. Les phénomènes traités concernent essentiellement l’espagnol le français le grec l’italien et le portugais.

Corpus research forms the backbone of research on children's language development. Leading researchers in the field present a survey on the history of data collection different types of data and the treatment of methodological problems. Morphologically and syntactically parsed corpora allow for the concise explorations of formal phenomena the quick retrieval of errors and reliability checks. New probabilistic and connectionist computations investigate how children integrate the multiple sources of information available in the input and new statistical methods compute rates of acquisition as well as error rates dependent on sample size. Sample analyses show how multi-modal corpora are used to investigate the interaction of discourse and linguistic structure how cross-linguistic generalizations for acquisition can be formulated and tested and how individual variation can be explored. Finally ways in which corpus research interacts with computational linguistics and experimental research are presented.

Sociolinguists have been pursuing connections between language and identity for several decades. But how are language and identity related in bilingualism and multilingualism? Mobilizing the most current methodology this collection presents new research on language identity and bilingualism in three regions where Spanish coexists with other languages. The cases are Spanish-English contact in the United States Spanish-indigenous language contact in Latin America and Spanish-regional language contact in Spain. This is the first comparativist book to examine language and identity construction among bi- or multilingual speakers while keeping one of the languages constant. The sociolinguistic standing of Spanish varies among the three regions depending whether or not it is a language of prestige. Comparisons therefore afford a strong constructivist perspective on how linguistic ideologies affect bi/multilingual identity formation.

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive and necessarily so i.e. that they have a built-in “implicit” awareness of their own occurrence such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal or “what-it-is-like” dimension of conscious experience defending the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character including qualia theories according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations and representationalism according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (Series A)

The papers in this volume investigate the semantics of aspect from both a theoretical and a crosslinguistic point of view in a wide range of languages from a number of different language families. The papers are all informed by the belief that a thorough exposure to the expression of aspect crosslinguistically is crucial for progress in understanding how the semantics of aspect works and what the semantic basis of aspectual distinctions is. The languages discussed include Russian English Dutch Hebrew Mandarin Japanese and Kalaallisut. The issues discussed in this volume include the centrality of measuring and counting in an understanding of telicity; the importance of the singular/plural distinction in the study of aspect; the importance of homogeneity as a property of event types; the flexibility of lexical classes; and the interaction between expressions of aspect and the particular morphosyntactic structure of a language.

Evaluation is central to literary studies and has led to an impressive list of publications on the status and history of the canon. Yet it is remarkable how little attention has been given to the role of textual properties in evaluative processes. Most of the chapters in The Quality of Literature redress this issue by dealing with texts or genres ranging from classical antiquity via Renaissance to twentieth century. They provide a rich textual and historical panorama of how critical debate over literary quality has influenced our modes of thinking and feeling about literature and how they continue to shape the current literary landscape. Four theoretical chapters reflect on the general state of literary evaluation while the introduction weaves the different threads together aiming at further conceptual clarification. This book thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the problems that are at the heart of past and present debates over literary quality.

To go “beyond” the work of a leading intellectual is rarely an unambiguous tribute. However when Gideon Toury founded Descriptive Translation Studies as a research-based discipline he laid down precisely that intellectual challenge: not just to describe translation but to explain it through reference to wider relations. That call offers at once a common base an open and multidirectional ambition and many good reasons for unambiguous tribute. The authors brought together in this volume include key players in Translation Studies who have responded to Toury’s challenge in one way or another. Their diverse contributions address issues such as the sociology of translators contemporary changes in intercultural relations the fundamental problem of defining translations the nature of explanation and case studies including pseudotranslation in Renaissance Italy Sherlock Holmes in Turkey and the coffee-and-sugar economy in Brazil. All acknowledge Translation Studies as a research-based space for conceptual coherence and creativity; all seek to explain as well as describe. In this sense we believe that Toury’s call has been answered beyond expectations.

There is a large amount of scientific work on emotion in psychology neuroscience biology physiology and psychiatry which assumes that it is possible to study emotions and other affective states objectively. Emotion science of this sort is concerned primarily with 'facts' and not 'values' with 'description' not 'prescription'. The assumption behind this vision of emotion science is that it is possible to distinguish factual from evaluative aspects of affectivity and emotion and study one without the other. But what really is the basis for distinguishing fact and value in emotion and affectivity? And can the distinction withstand careful scientific and philosophical scrutiny? The essays in this collection all suggest that the problems behind this vision of emotion science may be more complex than is commonly supposed.

This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal Norway under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is ‘internal factors in grammatical change.’ The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways but are generally critical of ‘Grammaticalization Theory’. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change ‘by itself.’ A wide range of languages is covered including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan) Zoque and Athapaskan languages in addition to Indo-European languages both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.