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Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009) this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics but overlapping with socially-oriented fields such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics has a central focus on historical language use in its situational contexts and how those situational contexts engender norms which speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. The chapters represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The reader will find English texts from the 15th century through to the 18th a variety of genres (including personal correspondence trial proceedings and plays) and both qualitative and (corpus-based) quantitative analyses. Importantly attention is given to how contexts can be (re)constructed from written records a sine qua non of the field. It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in pragmatics especially socially-oriented pragmatics and/or historical linguistics especially the history of English.

This volume further elaborates the empirical tradition of Columbia School (CS) Linguistics by offering diverse empirical analyses for a wide variety of languages. These studies open a much needed debate advocating the necessity of the independent validation of linguistic hypotheses. This research exemplifies how such a validation should be conducted by determining which forms underlie the analyses and extracting those observations that are considered to be objective. The volume consists of two parts: a section on synchronic and diachronic grammatical problems and a section on Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB) the Columbia School version of phonology applied to evolutionary developmental and clinical issues and the phonotactics of the selected lexicon of a literary text. It provides a wealth of useful empirical data and in-depth and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of languages from diverse families: French Spanish Afrikaans Dutch English Polish Russian Japanese and Hebrew.

Landscape is fundamental to human experience. Yet until recently the study of landscape has been fragmented among the disciplines. This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. Scientists of various disciplines such as anthropologists geographers information scientists linguists and philosophers address several questions including: Are there cross-cultural and cross-linguistic variations in the delimitation classification and naming of geographic features? Can alternative world-views and conceptualizations of landscape be used to produce culturally-appropriate Geographic Information Systems (GIS)? Topics included: ontology of landscape; landscape terms and concepts; toponyms; spiritual aspects of land and landscape terms; research methods; ethical dimensions of the research; and its potential value to indigenous communities involved in this type of research.

Ute is a Uto-Aztecan language of the northernmost (Numic) branch currently spoken on three reservations in western Colorado and eastern Utah. Like many other native languages of Northern America Ute is severely endangered. This book is part of the effort toward its preservation. Typologically Ute offers a cluster of intriguing features best viewed from the perspective of diachronic change and grammaticalization. The book presents a comprehensive synchronic description of grammatical structures and their communicative functions as well as a diachronic account of a grammar in the midst of change. The book is the first of a 3-volume series which also includes a collection of oral texts and a dictionary. Ute speakers and tribal members may find in the present volume a step-by-step description of how words are combined into meaningful communication. Linguists may find a detailed account of one language an account that is unabashedly informed by universals of grammar communication and change.

This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.

This monograph addresses two issues phases and adverbials. It proposes that there is a correlation between the phase structure the tripartite quantificational structure and the information structure of the sentence. This correlation plays an important role not only in referential and information-structural properties of arguments and the verb but also in adverbial properties. For instance the study shows that certain sentence adverbials can occur in the sentence-final position in the vP phase when they represent the extreme value with respect to the set of focus alternatives. The proposed correlation also becomes important in anaphoric relations with respect to adjuncts. Only an R-expression spelled out and interpreted in the CP phase of an adjunct clause can corefer with the coindexed pronoun. The study also discusses adverbial ordering and shows that the relative order of certain adverbials can be reversed if they occur in different phases. The monograph will appeal to syntacticians and linguists interested in the relationship between syntax and its interfaces.

This volume explores the translation of literary and humorous style including comedy irony satire parody and the grotesque from Italian to English and vice versa. The innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical approach places the focus on creativity and playful rewriting as central to the translation of humour. Analysing translations of works by Rosa Cappiello Dario Fo Will Self and Anthony Burgess the author explores literary translation as a form of exchange between translated and receiving cultures. In a final case study she recounts her own strategies in translating the work of Milena Agus exploring humour creation and recreation from the perspective of the translator and demonstrating the benefits of critical engagement with both the theory and the practice of translation. This unique contribution to the study of humour and literary style in translation will be of interest to scholars of translation humour comparative literature and literary and cultural studies.

This is the first empirical study to focus on adjectives complemented by that-clauses. The in-depth analysis of more than 50000 cases taken from the British National Corpus gives comprehensive insights into hitherto neglected relations of lexis and grammar. The result of this corpus-driven study is a novel classification of adjectives based on co-occurrence patterns and corroborated with the help of statistical means. The inductive analysis of corpus data offers new perspectives on and innovative descriptions of well-known phenomena of English grammar such as extraposition or the resultative construction so…that. It is based on a new methodological approach which looks at mutual relations of both lexis and grammar in unprecedented ways.

Bringing together fifteen articles by scholars in Europe and North America this collection aims to represent and advance studies in historical lexis. It highlights the significance of the understanding of dictionary-making and language-making as important socio-cultural phenomena. With its general focus on England and English the book investigates the reception and development of historical and modern English vocabulary and culture in different periods social and professional strata geographical varieties of English and other national cultures. The volume is based on individual (meta)lexicographical etymological lexicosemantic and corpus studies representing two large areas of research: the first part focuses on the history of dictionaries analysing them in diachrony from the first professional dictionaries of the Baroque period via Enlightenment and Romanticism to exploring the possibilities of the new online lexicographical publications; and the second part looks at the interfaces between etymology semantic development and word-formation on the one hand and changes in society and culture on the other.

China’s emergence has generated a wave of interest in interpreting and interpreter training. First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting (11:2 2009) this collection of papers by six leading researchers from the Chinese Mainland Hong Kong Taiwan and overseas some based on recent PhDs explores topics as diverse as historical conceptions of the interpreter’s role interaction with linguistic minorities methods for training and assessment and negotiating hazards like speed register or the cultural divide in conference courtroom and community. The volume also includes an Editor’s foreword contextualising the Chinese interpreting scene for the international reader an overview of the fast evolving landscape of interpreter training and research in China and two critical reviews of textbooks used in home-grown training programmes.