Browse Books

Adverbs as a word class are notoriously difficult to define. The volume deals with the delimitation of this category its internal structure the morphological make-up of adverbs and their positions in syntactic structures. A closer look at diachronic developments sheds light on the characteristics of adverbial word-formation. Taking into account adverbs in German English Dutch French and Italian the contributions to this volume provide new insights into the characteristics of this heterogeneous and multi-faceted category and will be of interest to linguists working in the fields of morphology syntax and language change.

Sociology of Discourse takes the perspective that collective actors like social movements are capable of creating social change from below by creating new institutions through alternative discourses. Institutionalization becomes a process of moving away from existing institutions towards creating new ones. While discourses entail openness and enable the questioning of what is instituted institutions offer continuity and stability to social mobilizations. This dual movement of openness and stabilization explains how social struggles ensure their continuity without completely assuming the logic of the dominant order. The book proposes an analytical model of social change which is unfolded through three intertwined areas: discourse communication and institution. Collective experiences of social change from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy illustrate the main theoretical points and concepts. Through the example of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages the book concludes by analyzing how social change from below is possible.

This book offers the first in-depth corpus-based description of written Sri Lankan English. In comparison to British and Indian English lexical and lexicogrammatical features of Sri Lankan English are analysed in a complex corpus environment comprising data from the respective components of the International Corpus of English newspapers and online sources to explore the status of Sri Lankan English as a variety in its own right. The evolution of Sri Lankan English is depicted against the background of historical as well as sociolinguistic considerations and allows deriving a fine-grained model of the emergence of distinctive structural profiles of postcolonial Englishes developing in a multitude of norm orientations. This book is highly relevant to readers interested in Sri Lankan English and South Asian Englishes. It also offers more general sociolinguistic perspectives on the dynamics of postcolonial Englishes world-wide and on the inextricable link between language and identity.

This book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study this book offers extensive textual analysis comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences particularly those in linguistics media and communication studies journalism and international politics.

This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 42nd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at Southern Utah University in Cedar City Utah in 2012. The contributions cover a wide range of current topics in the areas of phonetics phonology syntax interfaces and diachronic Romance linguistics with an emphasis on experimental approaches in connection to L1 and L2 acquisition code-switching and psycholinguistics. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are French (Old Modern and Norman) Portuguese (Brazilian and Classical) and Spanish (Modern and Judeo-Spanish) but also Italo-Romance Latin and Romanian. In a comparative tradition the discussions extend to languages outside Romance such as dialects of Arabic Germanic and Palenquero creole. This collection of papers at the forefront of research contributes to our understanding of Romance languages and to the influence of Romance linguistics and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and general linguistics.

Rethinking Sinclair and Coulthard’s sequentiality-based notion of the follow-up this volume explores its forms and communicative functions in traditional and contemporary modes of communication (parliamentary sessions interviews debates speeches op-eds discussion forums and Twitter) wherein political actors address challenges to their political agenda and to their political face. In so doing the volume achieves two major advances. First its contributions expand the understanding of follow-ups beyond the traditional focus on structural sequentiality considering communicative function as a defining feature of a follow-up. Second it broadens the understanding of what constitutes political discourse as not being limited to a single discourse but also being able to span multiple discourses of different forms and speech events over time.

This book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch German Pennsylvania Dutch Icelandic Norwegian Swedish West Frisian and Yiddish and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology morphology syntax and semantics and the lexicon in addition to work on sociolinguistics historical linguistics and contact settings. With this the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features such as V2 gender and agreement in the nominal system and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.

Traveling Conceptualizations is a monograph which is concerned with African cultural conceptualizations in Jamaican. It contributes to the study of Transatlantic relations between Africa and Jamaica and in particular to the understanding of African influences in Jamaican linguistic practices. The book constitutes a first study of these phenomena from a cognitive-linguistic perspective and investigates traveling conceptualizations at the intersection of language culture and cognition. The author explores Jamaican linguistic practices in different domains namely conceptualizations involving parts of the (human) body conceptualizations of events roles and relations underlying serial verb constructions and conceptualizations of kinship and names. The study can be regarded as an innovative contribution as it looks not only at linguistic expressions on the surface but discusses the underlying cultural and cognitive basis of semantic structures. The study thus aims at making African-Jamaican connections on the conceptual level visible and also discusses notions of consciousness agency and emblematicity.

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories the means narrators use to structure them their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

Auch die Britischen Inseln waren von der wikingerzeitlichen Expansion ab dem 8. Jh. betroffen. Nördlich und westlich des dänischen Danelag in England entstanden norwegische Siedlungen auf den Shetland- und Orkneyinseln in Nordschottland auf den Hebriden an der schottischen und nordenglischen Westküste um die Irische See herum und südwärts. Waren die Nordleute anfangs als Plünderer und Eroberer unterwegs wirkten sie bald auch als Händler und Stadt- und Staatengründer. Der daraus resultierende keltisch-westnordische Sprachkontakt hielt ein halbes Jahrtausend an und hinterließ Spuren im Norn der frühneuzeitlichen nordischen Sprache die bis ins 18. Jh. auf den Shetland- und Orkneyinseln und in Caithness gesprochen wurde. So finden sich Keltizismen sowohl in den wenigen Aufzeichnungen des Norn als auch im nordischen Substrat der schottischen Gegenwartsmundarten die das Norn ablösten.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The British Isles were among the geographical areas affected by the Viking expansion from the 8th century onwards. North and west of the Danish Danelaw Norwegian settlements were established on Shetland and Orkney in Northern Scotland on the Hebrides along the west coast of Scotland and Northern England around the Irish Sea and even further south. Raiders and conquerors at the outset the Norsemen soon became traders and founded towns and states. The resulting language contact between Celtic and Old West Norse lasted half a millennium and left its mark on Norn an early modern Nordic language spoken on Shetland Orkney and in Caithness until the 18th century. Thus Celticisms can be found both in the few written records of Norn and in the Nordic substratum of those varieties of Modern Scots that came to supplant Norn.

This collection of articles contributed by both experienced and novice researchers addresses core issues in three different domains of Hispanic Linguistics: theoretical linguistics language acquisition and language contact. Together these papers provide an overview of how the analysis of Spanish contributes to current formal and experimental linguistics while on an individual level offering fine-grained analyses and innovative proposals covering a wide range of areas such as semantics and pragmatics syntax morphology phonology prosody dialectal variation first second and bilingual language acquisition as well as sociolinguistics. The volume will be a resource for graduate students academics and researchers in theoretical experimental and descriptive linguistics in general and Hispanic Linguistics in particular.The selection of chapters included in this volume were presented at the 17th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium hosted in October 2013 by the Language Acquisition Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa Canada.

A major contribution to the study of language acquisition and language development inspired by theoretical linguistics has been made by research on the acquisition of Italian syntax. This book offers an updated overview of results from theory-driven experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual early and late L2 SLI etc.) as well as exploring possible developments for future research. The book focuses on experimental studies which address research questions generated by linguistic theory providing a detailed illustration of the fruitful interaction between linguistic theorizing and developmental studies. The authors are leading figures in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition; their own work is featured in the research presented here. Students and advanced researchers will benefit from the systematic review offered by this book and the critical assessment of the field that it provides.

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is the first study that investigates the intricate influence of the avant-garde movements on children’s literature in different countries from the beginning of the 20th century until the present. Examining a wide range of children’s books from Denmark France Germany Hungary the Netherlands Russia Sweden the United Kingdom and the USA the individual chapters explore the historical as well as the cultural and political aspects that determine the exceptional character of avant-garde children’s books. Drawing on studies in children’s literature research art history and cultural studies this volume provides comprehensive insights into the close relationships between avant-garde children’s literature images of childhood and contemporary ideas of education. Addressing topics such as the impact of exhibitions the significance of the Bauhaus and the influence of poster art and graphic design the book illustrates the broad range of issues associated with avant-garde children’s books. More than 60 full-color illustrations demonstrate the impressive variety of design in avant-garde picturebooks and children’s books.

Winner of the Edited Book Award 2017 of The Children's Literature Association.

Winner of the Edited Book Award 2017 of the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.

Although for some scholars the very possibility of syntactic reconstruction remains dubious numerous studies have appeared reconstructing a variety of basic elements of Proto-Indo-European syntax based on evidence available particularly from ancient and/or archaic Indo-European languages. The papers in this volume originate from the Workshop “PIE Syntax and its Development” (Thessaloniki 2011) which aimed to bring together scholars interested in these problems and to shine new light on current research into ancient Indo-European syntax. Special attention was paid to the development of the hypothetical reconstructed features within the documented history of Indo-European languages.

The articles in this volume were originally published in the Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 3:1 (2013).

The emergence of empirical approaches to L2 pronunciation research and teaching is a powerful fourth wave in the history of the field. Authored by two leading proponents of evidence-based instruction this volume surveys both foundational and cutting-edge empirical work and pinpoints its ramifications for pedagogy. The authors begin by tracing the history of pronunciation instruction and explicating L2 phonetic learning processes. Subsequent chapters explore the themes strengths and ethical problems of the field through the lens of the intelligibility principle. The importance of error gravity and the need for assessment and individualized instruction are highlighted and the role of L2 accents in social contexts is probed. Material readily available elsewhere has been omitted in favour of an emphasis on the how why and when of pronunciation instruction. Anyone with an interest in L2 pronunciation–especially graduate students language teachers and experienced researchers–will find much value in this indispensible resource.

The goal of this volume is to further the examination of the role shape and quality of argumentation in political deliberation. The chapters collected in the volume employ the concepts and methods developed within argumentation theory to investigate the specifics of political discourse across various deliberative arenas: from debates in the European Parliament consensus conferences and public hearings in France discussions in Dutch online forums to exchanges of comments in online versions of British newspapers. In this way the studies reveal the inner workings of argumentative interactions that constitute deliberative discourse – and thus importantly contribute to the study of public deliberation. This should be of interest to the students of argumentation deliberation and political discourse. In addition the volume problematizes and theorizes some vital issues related to the study of situated argumentation thus advancing the study of argumentation in context.

Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context Vol. 2:1 (2013).

Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities contains a collection of new articles that approach the study of dialogue through the construct of the ‘community’ that is a group of people who come together for any number of reasons; e.g. geographical location a common goal a search for unity or bonding or a particular set of circumstances. The authors address a wide range of topics such as dialogic skills as situated practice the learning of culture and the negotiation of identities between native speakers and L2 learners. This volume also investigates how native and non-native speakers learn various community-based aspects of dialogic interaction such as how to interpret social contexts stances frames and gestures. Despite different methodologies and frameworks the studies demonstrate that native speakers and L2 learners alike use multiple ‘vocalizations’ of a language.

This monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>To illustrate the theory the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves. <br/>This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour business communication and computer-mediated communication.

Applying a sociophonetic research paradigm this volume presents an investigation of variation and change in the Scottish Standard English accent. Based on original audio recordings made in Edinburgh it provides detailed acoustic and auditory analyses of selected accent features. In contrast to other studies of English in Scotland the focus is on the extent to which certain characteristics of middle-class speech are susceptible (or immune) to the influence of Southern Standard British English or vary in ways unrelated to that influence. Beyond the fine-grained patterns of variation that are revealed the study highlights innovative methodological approaches to sociophonetic variation and contributes to a better general understanding of the status and function of Scottish Standard English. The book will be of general interest to sociolinguists and sociophoneticians and of particular interest to researchers or students concerned with phonetic or phonological aspects of Scottish English.

No literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants or with ‘foreign’ languages and the phenomenon of ‘translation’ as English Renaissance drama. Originally published as a themed issue of English Text Construction 6:1 (2013) this carefully balanced collection of essays now enhanced with a new Afterword decisively demonstrates that Shakespeare and his colleagues were far more than just ‘English’ authors and that their very ‘Englishness’ can only be properly understood in a broader international and multilingual context. Showing a healthy disrespect for customary disciplinary borderlines Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries brings together a wide range of scholarly traditions and vastly different types of expertise. While several papers venture into previously uncharted territory others critically revisit some of the loci classici of early modern theatrical multilingualism such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural constitution? At what level of neural activity is consciousness constituted in the brain and what might be learned from well-studied phenomena like binocular rivalry attention memory affect pain dreams and coma? What should the science of consciousness want to know and what should explanation look like in this field? How should the constitution relation be applied to brain and mind and are other relations like identity supervenience realization emergence and causation preferable? Building on a companion volume on the constitution of visual consciousness (AiCR 90) this volume addresses these questions and related empirical and conceptual territory. It brings together for the first time scientists and philosophers to discuss this engaging interdisciplinary topic.

First published as a special issue of Target (issue 25:1 2013) this volume explores interdisciplinarity in translation and interpreting process research fields that have enjoyed a boom in the last decade. For this reason the time was ripe for a reflection on the broad range of methodologies that have been applied in our endeavours to understand both translation and interpreting processes better. The ten chapters provide a snapshot of how translation and interpreting process researchers have availed themselves of concepts and theories developed in other disciplines such as psychology the cognitive sciences journalism and literary studies to examine and illuminate their object of study. This collection demonstrates that translation and interpreting process research borrow heavily from other disciplines and call for a consideration of how translation research can become truly interdisciplinary through increased collaboration synergy and mutual advancement.

Language Structure and Environment is a broad introduction to how languages are shaped by their environment. It makes the argument that the social cultural and natural environment of speakers influences the structures and development of the languages they speak. After a general overview the contributors explain in a number of detailed case studies how specific cultural societal geographical evolutionary and meta-linguistic pressures determine the development of specific grammatical features and the global structure of a varied selection of languages. This is a work of meticulous scholarship at the forefront of a burgeoning field of linguistics.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness brings together the work of linguists psychologists neuroscientists and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologies while a specially commissioned epilogue places the volume in the field as a whole. Part I is dedicated to self-reporting studies Part II covers observational studies and Part III introduces experimental studies. A central goal of the present collection is to make a case for the relevance of all these types of data and of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to the ongoing theoretical debates in the field of im/politeness.