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Speaking for the Nation : Intellectuals and nation-building in the post-Yugoslav space
Jun 2020
Book
Author(s):
Federico Giulio Sicurella
The book explores the nexus of intellectual activity and nation-building from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. By examining how public intellectuals from Serbia Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina commented on key national events in editorials and opinion pieces it offers unique insights into contemporary nation-building discourses in an enlarging Europe. Through a detailed reconstruction of the debates concerning the selected events the book also provides fresh empirical evidence of the implications and challenges of post-socialist transition post-conflict reconciliation democratisation and European integration in the post-Yugoslav region. Its versatile framework which innovatively combines sociological and linguistic approaches to the discursive positioning of intellectuals may be readily applied to the analysis of intellectual engagement with current affairs and public life in general.
Complex Dynamic Systems Theory and L2 Writing Development
Jun 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Gary G. Fogal and
Marjolijn H. Verspoor
This volume integrates complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) and L2 writing scholarship through a collection of in-depth studies and commentary across a range of writing constructs learning contexts and second and foreign languages. The text is arranged thematically across four topics: (i) perspectives on complexity accuracy and fluency (ii) new constructs approaches and domains of L2-writing scholarship (iii) methodological issues and finally (iv) curricular perspectives. This work should appeal to graduate students and academics interested in expanded discussions on CDST highlighting its utility for theorizing and researching language change and to L2 writing scholars curious about how this fresh approach to researching L2 development can inform understandings of how L2 writing develops. As a CDST approach to language change has matured and taken a place among the dominant epistemologies in the field students and researchers of L2 development alike will benefit from this volume.
(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions
Jun 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Chaoqun Xie
(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions presents a timely response to the ‘moral turn’ in (im)politeness studies. This volume presented by a roster of prominent figures in the field documents and showcases the complexity of (im)politeness as social practice by focusing on the morality of (im)politeness in internet-mediated interactions. It includes among others studies on how the moral order is made explicit and salient in the production and perception of online impoliteness as social practice and how situated impoliteness can perform positive social and communicative functions. This volume confirms once again that (im)politeness can serve as a lens through which a variety of topics genres and contexts are intertwined together pointing to the very presence and existence of human beings and is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of (im)politeness and internet pragmatics but also to all those with a more general interest in the study of human (inter)actions in various situations and contexts.
Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 1:2 (2018).
Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 1:2 (2018).
Playing with Mental Models : Humour in the BBC comedy series The Office
Jun 2020
Book
Author(s):
Henri de Jongste
In this book the author uses a mental-model theory of communication to investigate the acclaimed British situation comedy The Office. The approach taken is multi-disciplinary and focuses on questions as:
What are mental models and what role do they play in communication in general and in creating and watching The Office in particular?
Whose mental models are involved in creating and watching The Office? How do these mental models relate to each other?
How exactly do the creators of The Office and their audience engage in constructing exchanging and coordinating mental models?
How do mental models and their comic use relate to humour and humour theories and what is the nature of play in the deployment of mental models in comedy?
The book is aimed at humour scholars from various backgrounds and at people interested in communication in general.
What are mental models and what role do they play in communication in general and in creating and watching The Office in particular?
Whose mental models are involved in creating and watching The Office? How do these mental models relate to each other?
How exactly do the creators of The Office and their audience engage in constructing exchanging and coordinating mental models?
How do mental models and their comic use relate to humour and humour theories and what is the nature of play in the deployment of mental models in comedy?
The book is aimed at humour scholars from various backgrounds and at people interested in communication in general.
Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Agnieszka Piskorska
The chapters in this volume apply the methodology of relevance theory to develop accounts of various pragmatic phenomena which can be associated with the broadly conceived notion of style. Some of them are devoted to central cases of figurative language (metaphor metonymy puns irony) while others deal with issues not readily associated with figurativeness (from multimodal communicative stimuli through strong and weak implicatures to discourse functions of connectives particles and participles). Other chapters shed light on the use of specific communicative styles ranging from hate speech to humour and humorous irony. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Using the relevance-theoretic toolkit to analyse a spectrum of style-related issues this volume makes a case for the model of pragmatics founded upon inference and continuity understood as the non-existence of sharply delineated boundaries between classes of communicative phenomena.
A Language Management Approach to Language Problems : Integrating macro and micro dimensions
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Goro Christoph Kimura and
Lisa Fairbrother
In recent years there has been increased interest in examining the treatment of language problems across different levels of society ranging from individual interactional issues to language policy and planning at the national or supra-national level. Among the various approaches to tackle this issue Language Management Theory (LMT) provides a framework to address behaviour towards language problems on differet levels explicitly and comprehensively. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Using LMT as a unifying theoretical concept the chapters in this volume examine the links between micro and macro dimensions in their analyses of a variety of language problems in Asian and European contexts. This body of work illustrates that the LMT framework is able to show the characteristics of different dimensions clearly especially when combined with a conceptualization of the micro and macro as a continuum of intertwining elements. This volume will appeal both to those interested in language policy and planning as well as those interested in interaction between speakers from different language backgrounds.
The Middle Voice in Baltic
May 2020
Book
Author(s):
Axel Holvoet
The fifth volume in the VARGReB series is a monograph presenting a collection of studies on middle-voice grams in Baltic that is on a widely ramified family of constructions with different syntactic and semantic properties but sharing a morphological marker of reflexive origin. Though the emphasis is on Baltic ample attention is given to other languages as well especially to Slavonic. The book offers many new insights into questions of syntactic and semantic interpretation correct demarcation and diachronic explanation of middle-voice grams. The relationship between reflexive and middle the workings of metonymy changes in syntactic structure and lexical input as factors determining diachronic shifts within the middle-voice domain and transitions from one middle-voice gram to another – these are among the topics discussed in the book which beyond its relevance to Baltic and Slavonic scholarship is also a contribution to the typology of the middle voice.
Brazilian Portuguese, Syntax and Semantics : 20 years of Núcleo de Estudos Gramaticais
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Roberta Pires De Oliveira,
Ina Emmel and
Sandra Quarezemin
This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.
Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Lotte Sommerer and
Elena Smirnova
This volume brings together ten contributions by leading experts who present their current usage-based research in Diachronic Construction Grammar. All papers contribute to the discussion of how to conceptualize constructional networks best and how to model changes in the constructicon as for example node creation or loss node-external reconfiguration of the network or in/decrease in productivity and schematicity. The authors discuss the theoretical status of allostructions homostructions constructional families and constructional paradigms. The terminological distinction between constructionalization and constructional change is revisited. It is shown how constructional competition but also general cognitive abilities like analogical thinking and schematization relate to the structure and reorganization of the constructional network. Most contributions focus on the nature of vertical and horizontal links. Finally contributions to the volume also discuss how existing network models should be enriched or reconceptualized in order to integrate theoretical psychological and neurological aspects missing so far.
Computational Phraseology
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Gloria Corpas Pastor and
Jean-Pierre Colson
Whether you wish to deliver on a promise take a walk down memory lane or even on the wild side phraseological units (also often referred to as phrasemes or multiword expressions) are present in most communicative situations and in all world’s languages. Phraseology the study of phraseological units has therefore become a rare unifying theme across linguistic theories.
In recent years an increasing number of studies have been concerned with the computational treatment of multiword expressions: these pertain among others to their automatic identification extraction or translation and to the role they play in various Natural Language Processing applications. Computational Phraseology is a comparatively new field where better understanding and more advances are urgently needed. This book aims to address this pressing need by bringing together contributions focusing on different perspectives of this promising interdisciplinary field.
In recent years an increasing number of studies have been concerned with the computational treatment of multiword expressions: these pertain among others to their automatic identification extraction or translation and to the role they play in various Natural Language Processing applications. Computational Phraseology is a comparatively new field where better understanding and more advances are urgently needed. This book aims to address this pressing need by bringing together contributions focusing on different perspectives of this promising interdisciplinary field.
Operationalizing Iconicity
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Pamela Perniss,
Olga Fischer and
Christina Ljungberg
The Iconicity in Language and Literature series has long been dedicated to the recognition and understanding of the pervasiveness of iconicity in language in its many forms and functions. The present volume divided into four sections brings together and unifies different perspectives on iconicity. Chapters in the first section (Iconicity in language) provide linguistic analyses of systems of iconic forms in different languages across both space (areally) and time (diachronically). The second section (Iconicity in literature) is concerned with stylistic analyses of iconicity in literature in both poetry and prose and across a range of devices and genres. The third section (Iconicity in visual media) highlights the use and effects of iconicity in pictorial photographic and cinematic media. The final section (Iconicity in semiotic analysis) offers a theoretical perspective targeting an operationalisation of iconicity with respect to the relationship between types and subtypes of Peircean signs.
History of Linguistics 2017 : Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, (ICHoLS 14), Paris, 28 August – 1 September
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Émilie Aussant and
Jean-Michel Fortis
The present book is a selection of papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (Paris 2017). The volume is divided thematically into three parts: I. Notions and categories II. Representations and receptions III. Learning codification and the linguistic practices of social actors. The first part is especially concerned with data not easily handled by extant traditions of linguistic analysis and with constructs and perspectives which proved difficult to establish in the linguist’s descriptive apparatus. Part II groups six studies dealing with alternative representations of linguistic data and matters of interpretation and reception regarding the work of three important linguists (Saussure Jespersen Chomsky). The scope of part III embraces social and pedagogical practices as well as the involvement of linguists in questions of national identity.
Mobilizing Others : Grammar and lexis within larger activities
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm,
Emma Betz and
Peter Golato
Requesting recruitment and other ways of mobilizing others to act have garnered much interest in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. This volume takes a holistic perspective on the practices that we use to get others to act either with us or for us. It argues for a more explicit focus on ‘activity’ in unpacking the linguistic and embodied choices we make in designing mobilizing moves. Drawing on studies from a variety of different languages and settings the collected studies in this volume illustrate how interactants design their turns not only for specific recipients but also for a specific interactional situation. In doing so speakers are able to mobilize others’ cooperation contribution or assistance in the most appropriate and economical ways. By focusing on ‘situation design’ across languages and settings this volume provides new insights into the ways in which the ongoing activity with its attendant participation structures shapes the design placement and understanding of moves which mobilize others to act.
Language Processing in Advanced Learners of English : A multi-method approach to collocation based on corpus linguistic and experimental data
May 2020
Book
Author(s):
Marco Schilk
The production and processing of collocations and formulaic language is a field of growing interest in corpus linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics. In the past this fascinating field at the interface of grammar and the lexicon has been mainly studied based on English native speakers while research focusing on second language speakers and language learners has been comparatively rare. This book proposes an integration of corpus-based and experimental methods by analysing language processing of collocation by advanced learners of English. In using corpus-derived collocational stimuli of native-like and learner-typical language use in an experimental setting it shows how advanced German L1 learners of English process native-like collocations L1-based interferences and non-collocating lexical combinations. This book is of interest to anyone interested in the psycholinguistic validity of collocation from a bilingual point of view as it explores methods of tracking collocational processing of speakers working with different sets of ‘collocational preferences’.
Lost in Transmission : The role of attrition and input in heritage language development
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Bernhard Brehmer and
Jeanine Treffers-Daller
Heritage speakers are a fascinating group of bilinguals with a unique profile. Living abroad as immigrants of the second generation they speak the language of their own speech community (the heritage language) at home and the societally dominant language in most other domains. What exactly they know about their heritage language continues to fascinate the research community as well as teachers and other practitioners working with this group. The different contributions cover a large variety of studies into heritage languages spoken in Europe and North America (including Chinese Norwegian Russian Spanish and Turkish). The volume makes a key contribution to the description and explanation of variability in the outcomes of heritage language acquisition taking into account a wide range of factors which impact on language acquisition. As comparisons are frequently made with monolinguals and foreign language learners the volume is also highly relevant for researchers working in monolingual language acquisition and foreign language learning and teaching.
Canvi lingüístic, estandardització i identitat en català / Linguistic Change, Standardization and Identity in Catalan
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Hans-Ingo Radatz
The multiplicity of parallel identities that make up our personalities is a phenomenon in which our individual identitary choices merge with diverse collective identities. The present volume is a contribution to the field of Identity Studies but from a clearly linguistic perspective. It unites several contributions which analyze discourses centered on national or regional identities – as for instance the Catalanity of the frontier city of Lleida the connection between the natural environment and the conceptualization of deictic space or the dialectics between center and periphery. Other chapters try to shed light on problems arising from the particular situation of Catalan as a non-state language. The contributions thus range from aspects of Cultural Studies on identities and their constituting discourses to Catalan linguistics and sociolinguistics.
Hispanic Linguistics : Current issues and new directions
May 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Alfonso Morales-Front,
Michael J. Ferreira,
Ronald P. Leow and
Cristina Sanz
This volume addresses a wide range of phenomena including intonation restructuring clitic climbing aspectual structure subject focus marking code-switching lenition loanwords and heritage learning that are central in Hispanic linguistics today. The authors approach these issues from a variety of recent theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies and make important contributions to our current understanding of language acquisition theoretical and descriptive linguistics and language contact. This collection of articles is a testimony to the breadth and degree of specialization of the scholarly interest in the field. The selection of refereed chapters included in this volume were originally presented at the 20th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS) hosted at Georgetown University 2016. The book should be read with interest by scholars and graduate students hoping to gain insight into the issues currently debated in Hispanic Linguistics.
Historical Linguistics : A cognitive grammar introduction
May 2020
Book
Author(s):
Margaret E. Winters
This textbook serves a dual purpose. It is first a comprehensive introduction to historical linguistics intended for both undergraduate and graduate students who have taken at the least an introductory course in linguistics. Secondly unlike many such textbooks this one is based in the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics a semantics-based theory which emphasizes the relationship between cognition and language. Descriptions and explanations touch on cognitive social and physiological aspects of language as it changes across time. Examples come principally from Germanic (English German Yiddish) and Romance (French and Spanish) but with some exploration of aspects of the history of other languages as well. Each chapter concludes with exercises based on material in the chapter and also with suggestions for extensions of the content to wider issues in diachronic linguistics.
Silently Structured Silent Argument
May 2020
Book
Author(s):
Yuta Sakamoto
Theoretical linguistics in the generative tradition has payed much attention to issues related to silence ‒ children know the syntax of silence despite the fact that they do not have direct access to it throughout their language acquisition process. One of the issues that have been hotly discussed regarding silence in natural languages is whether it involves syntactic structure or not. This book is concerned with a particular instance of silence in natural languages what is called radical pro-drop showing that it is silently structured on the basis of novel data from Japanese as well as Chinese Korean Mongolian and Turkish. The discussion in this book also has consequences for the dichotomy between PF-deletion vs. LF-copying shedding a new light on the proper analysis of several syntactic phenomena in Japanese including wh-in-situ and control.
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Vera da Silva Sinha,
Ana Moreno-Núñez and
Zhen Tian
The dynamics of language culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.
How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Anke Beger and
Thomas H. Smith
Metaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts recordings and videos this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science teaching of science and how scientific ideas are promoted and popularized. With an accessible introduction to theory and method this book prepares scientists science teachers and science writers to take advantage of recent shifts in metaphor theories and methods. Metaphor specialists will find theoretical issues explored in studies of bacteriology cell reproduction marine biology physics brain function and social psychology. We see the degree of conscious or intentional use of metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems and constraining inferences. Metaphor sources include social structure embodied experience abstract or mathematical formulations. The results are sometimes innovative hypotheses and robust conclusions; other times pedagogically useful if inaccurate stepping stones or at worst misleading fictions.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>As of January 2023 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Changes in Meaning and Function : Studies in historical linguistics with a focus on Spanish
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Jorge Fernández Jaén and
Herminia Provencio Garrigós
Diachronic linguistics has been experiencing a strong revival during the last few decades since an increasing number of researchers have assumed that evolutionary and historical factors must be considered to properly understand how natural languages work. This book offers new data and insights on some of the research lines which are currently being developed within the framework of diachronic language research. The papers brought together in this volume are characterized both by their originality and by their methodological diversity; the reader will thus find herein theoretical as well as empirical works undertaken from various perspectives of analysis (diachronic cognitive semantics grammaticalization theory discursive traditions historical phraseology etc.). The final outcome is an eclectic volume which offers valuable information for every reader regardless of whether they are experienced linguists or junior researchers willing to know the latest epistemological advances in this discipline.
Drawing Attention to Metaphor : Case studies across time periods, cultures and modalities
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Camilla Di Biase-Dyson and
Markus Egg
The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way the diachronic multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.
Walking on the Grammaticalization Path of the Definite Article : Functional Main and Side Roads
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Renata Szczepaniak and
Johanna Flick
This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive pragmatic semantic and syntactic factors the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics generic usages or onymic articles.
Corpora and the Changing Society : Studies in the evolution of English
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Paula Rautionaho,
Arja Nurmi and
Juhani Klemola
This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language be it from Old English to the present or a shorter time span in the immediate past the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics we hope is beneficial for both parties as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.
New Approaches to Language Attitudes in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Talia Bugel and
Cecilia Montes-Alcalá
The analysis of language attitudes is important not only because attitudes can affect language maintenance and language change but also because such reflections and discussions can bring light to social cultural political and educational matters that require an interdisciplinary approach. This volume fills a crucial void in the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by introducing the latest production in the discipline of attitudes toward Spanish Spanish sign language Portuguese Guarani and Papiamentu around the world from South America and the Caribbean to the United States Spain and Japan. The studies presented in this collection – a variety of sociolinguistic scenarios and methodological approaches – will make an important contribution to theoretical discussions on linguistic attitudes specifically in the domains of language integration through education language policy and language maintenance. This book is intended for sociolinguists social scientists and scholars in the humanities as well as graduate students enrolled in sociolinguistics courses.
Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy
Apr 2020
Book
Author(s):
Josef Fulka
The book represents a historical overview of the way the topic of gesture and sign language has been treated in the 18th century French philosophy. The texts treated are grouped into several categories based on the view they present of deafness and gesture. While some of those texts obviously view deafness and sign language in negative terms i.e. as deficiency others present deafness essentially as difference i.e. as a set of competences that might provide some insights into how spoken language works. One of the arguments of the book is that these two views of deafness and sign language still represent two dominant paradigms present in the current debates on the issue. The aim of the book therefore is not only to provide a historical overview but to trace what might be called a “history of the present”.
Discourses on the Edges of Life
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Vicent Salvador,
Adéla Kotátková and
Ignasi Clemente
Death inhabits our collective imaginary even though sometimes like a squatter it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective.
This book deals with this phenomenon and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive and considers the subject from several standpoints including linguistics anthropology history of medicine and importantly literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely a polylogue.
The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods.
The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.
This book deals with this phenomenon and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive and considers the subject from several standpoints including linguistics anthropology history of medicine and importantly literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely a polylogue.
The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods.
The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.
Approaches to Hungarian : Volume 16: Papers from the 2017 Budapest Conference
Apr 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Veronika Hegedűs and
Irene Vogel
This volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics including comparisons with other languages (e.g. English German Turkish Arabic Spanish).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Specifically the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing the acoustics of Hungarian word stress and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German English and Hungarian and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus.<br/>The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.
Linguistic Approaches to Portuguese as an Additional Language
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Karina Veronica Molsing,
Cristina Becker Lopes Perna and
Ana Maria Tramunt Ibaños
This book includes a selection of theoretical and practical accounts of the acquisition of Portuguese from a broad range of linguistic perspectives. This collection is particularly appealing in the broad academic sphere of language acquisition due to the fact that there has yet to be one entirely dedicated to Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL). This volume showcases the breadth of research being carried out on topics ranging from the acquisition of aspects from the main language modules (syntax morphology semantics phonology and pragmatics) to applied perspectives involving corpus-based approaches and experimental methodologies. Moreover we present studies addressing a variety of learning contexts and learner types. The target audience includes researching scholars with a background in second language acquisition studies interested in learning more about the acquisition of Portuguese as an Additional Language from linguistic perspectives.
Body Part Terms in Conceptualization and Language Usage
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Iwona Kraska-Szlenk
The volume focuses on body part terms as the vehicle of embodied cognition and conceptualization. It explores the relationship between universal embodiment language-specific cultural models and linguistic usage practices. The chapters of the volume add to the previous research in a novel way. The presentation of original data from previously undescribed languages spoken by small communities in Africa and South America allows to discover unknown aspects of embodiment and to propose new interpretations. Well-known languages are analyzed from a new perspective relying on the benefits of linguistic corpora. Contrastive and theoretically oriented studies help to pinpoint similarities and differences among languages as well as tendencies in conceptualization patterns and semantic development of the lexis of body part terms. The volume contributes to the field of linguistics but also to cognitive science anthropology and cultural studies.
Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew : Background, Morpho-lexicon, and Syntax
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Ruth A. Berman
The goal of the volume is to shed fresh light on Modern Hebrew from perspectives aimed at readers interested in the domains of general linguistics typology and Semitic studies. Starting with chapters that provide background information on the evolution and sociolinguistic setting of the language the bulk of the book is devoted to usage-based studies of the morphology lexicon and syntax of current Hebrew. Based primarily on original analyses of authentic spoken and online materials these studies reflect varied theoretical frames-of-reference that are largely model-neutral in approach. To this end the book presents a functionally motivated dynamic approach to actual usage rather than providing strictly structuralist or formal characterizations of particular linguistic systems. Such a perspective is particularly important in the case of a language undergoing accelerated processes of change in which the gap between prescriptive dictates of the Hebrew Language Establishment and the actual usage of educated literate but non-expert speaker-writers of current Hebrew is constantly on the rise.
The NP-strategy for Expressing Reciprocity : Typology, history, syntax and semantics
Mar 2020
Book
Author(s):
Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal
This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the syntax and semantics of a single linguistic phenomenon – the NP-strategy for expressing reciprocity – in synchronic diachronic and typological perspectives. It challenges the assumption common in the typological syntactic and semantic literature namely that so-called reciprocal constructions encode symmetric relations. Instead they are analyzed as constructions encoding unspecified relations. In effect it provides a new proposal for the truth-conditional semantics of these constructions. More broadly this book introduces new ways of bringing together historical linguistics and formal semantics demonstrating how on the one hand the inclusion of historical data concerning the sources of reciprocal constructions enriches their synchronic analysis; and how on the other hand an analysis of the syntax and the semantics of these constructions serves as a key for understanding their historical origins.
The Hero Reloaded : The reinvention of the classical hero in contemporary mass media
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Rosario López Gregoris and
Cristóbal Macías Villalobos
What was a hero in Classical Antiquity? Why is it that their characteristics have transcended chronological and cultural barriers while they are still role models in our days? How have their features changed to be embodied by comic superheroes and film? How is their essence vulgarized and turned into a mass consumption product? What has happened with their literary and artistic representation along centuries of elitist Western culture?<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book aims at posing these and other questions about heroes allowing us to open a cultural reflection over the role of the classical world in the present its meaning in mass media and the capacity of the Greek and Roman civilizations to dialogue with the modern world. This dialogue offers a glimpse into modern cultural necessities and tendencies which can be seen in several aspects such as the hero’s vulnerability the archetype’s banalization the possibility to extend the heroic essence to individuals in search of identities – vital as well as gender or class identities. In some products (videogames heavy metal music) our research enables a deeper understanding of the hero’s more obvious characteristics such as their physical and moral strength. <br/>All these tendencies – contemporary and consumable contradictory with one another yet vigorous above all – acquire visibility by means of a polyhedral vehicle which is rich in possibilities of rereading and reworking: the Greco-Roman hero. In such a virtual and postmodern world as the one we inhabit it comes not without surprise that we still resort to an idea like the hero which is as old as the West.
Palenquero and Spanish in Contact : Exploring the interface
Mar 2020
Book
Author(s):
John M. Lipski
Bilingual speakers are normally aware of what language they are speaking or hearing; there is however no widely accepted consensus on the degree of lexical and morphosyntactic similarity that defines the psycholinguistic threshold of distinct languages. This book focuses on the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero spoken in bilingual contact with its historical lexifier Spanish. Although sharing largely cognate lexicons the languages are in general not mutually intelligible. For example Palenquero exhibits no adjective-noun or verb-subject agreement uses pre-verbal tense-mood-aspect particles and exhibits unbounded clause-final negation. The present study represents a first attempt at mapping the psycholinguistic boundaries between Spanish and Palenquero from the speakers’ own perspective including traditional native Palenquero speakers adult heritage speakers and young native Spanish speakers who are acquiring Palenquero as a second language. The latter group also provides insights into the possible cognitive cost of “de-activating” Spanish morphological agreement as well as the relative efficiency of pre-verbal vs. clause-final negation. In this study corpus-based analyses are combined with an array of interactive experimental techniques demonstrating that externally-imposed classifications do not always correspond to speakers’ own partitioning of language usage in their communities.
English Resultatives : A force-recipient account
Mar 2020
Book
Author(s):
Seizi Iwata
The objective of this book is to develop a force-recipient account of English resultatives. Within this approach the post-verbal NP is a recipient of a verbal force whether it is a subcategorized object or not and the verbal force being exerted onto the post-verbal NP is responsible for bringing about the change as specified by the result phrase. It is shown that many apparent puzzles posed by English resultatives are due to the complex interplay between the verb meaning and the constructional meaning or between the verb meaning and the semantics of the result phrase. Thus the proposed account can provide answers to the question “Which resultatives are possible and which are not?” in a coherent way. Also the proposed account reveals that English resultatives are not a monolithic phenomenon and that some “resultatives” cited in the literature as such are not resultatives at all. This book is of interest not only to practitioners of Construction Grammar but also to everyone interested in English resultatives.
Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Pierre-Yves Modicom and
Olivier Duplâtre
The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic antitopic contrastive topic focus verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles sentence-final particles and other medial sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk including Basque French German Italian Kazakh Spanish and Turkish with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.
Late Modern English : Novel encounters
Mar 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Merja Kytö and
Erik Smitterberg
The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology morphology syntax lexis spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.
Sign Language in Papua New Guinea : A primary sign language from the Upper Lagaip Valley, Enga Province
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Adam Kendon
This book presents in revised form and as a single monograph three papers on a sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea. Originally published in 1980 for more than twenty years these papers remained the only report of a sign language from that part of the world. The detailed descriptive analyses that the author provided are still fresh today and in some respects they anticipate insights into the nature of sign languages that were not further explored until much more recently. The monograph is accompanied by two essays: Sherman Wilcox comments on value and relevance of the author’s work in the light of much more recent work on the linguistics of sign languages. An essay by Lauren Reed and Alan Rumsey provides an up to date survey of what is now known about sign languages in Papua New Guinea. Information about sign languages in the Solomon Island is also included.
The Quest for Argumentative Equivalence : Argumentative patterns in political interpreting contexts
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Emanuele Brambilla
What are the implications of strategic manoeuvring for the activity of the simultaneous interpreter? This is the main question addressed in The Quest for Argumentative Equivalence. Based on the analysis of a multilingual comparable corpus named ARGO the book investigates political argumentation with an eye to its reformulation by interpreters. After reporting and discussing a series of case studies illustrating interpreters’ problems in the political context the study reconstructs the prototypical argumentative patterns used by Obama Cameron Sarkozy and Hollande not only in a hermeneutical perspective but also considering interpreters’ need to reproduce them into a foreign language. Situated at the intersection of Argumentation Theory and Interpreting Studies the book provides a contribution to the descriptive study of political argumentation highlighting the presence of interpreters as a key contextual variable in political communication and deepening the study of the interlinguistic and translational implications of the act of arguing.
The Politics of Translating Sound Motifs in African Fiction
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo
Starting with the premise that aesthetic choices reveal the ideological stances of translators the author of this research monograph examines works of fiction by postcolonial African authors writing in English or French the genesis and reception of their works and the translation of each one into French or English. Texts include those by Nuruddin Farah from Somalia Abdourahman Ali Waberi from Djibouti Jean-Marie Adiaffi from Côte d’Ivoire Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana Chenjerai Hove from Zimbabwe and Assia Djebar from Algeria and their translations by Jacqueline Bardolph Jeanne Garane Brigitte Katiyo Jean-Pierre Richard Josette and Robert Mane and Dorothy Blair. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The author highlights the aural poetics of these works explores the sound motifs underlying their literary power and shows how each is articulated with the writer’s literary heritage. She then embarks on a close examination of each translator’s background followed by a rich analysis of their treatments of sound. The translators’ strategies for addressing sound motifs are contextualized in the larger framework of postcolonial literatures and changing reading materialities.
Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognitive Development : Essays in honour of Bencie Woll
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Gary Morgan
The study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are being applied in the areas of clinical and educational settings. It also marks the career and contributions of one of the greatest scholars in the field of deafness: Bencie Woll. As the field of deafness goes through rapid and profound changes we hope that this volume captures the latest perspectives regarding the impacts of these changes for our understanding of child development. The volume will be of essential interest to language development researchers as well as teachers and clinical researchers.
Follow the Signs : Archetypes of consciousness embodied in the signs of language
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Rodney B. Sangster
In this his latest book Sangster presents a comprehensive theory that takes the cognitive view of language in a promising new direction based upon how linguistic signs relate to one another at different levels of consciousness. At the rational level where signs are necessarily experienced in context they are primarily polysemic. At the transpersonal or pre-contextual level however they are monosemic constituting a dynamic and self-organizing relational structure capable of producing a potentially infinite variety of contextual applications. The two levels are united by a stochastic or somatic selection process called contextualization where feedback from experience assures the evolution of the system. The relational structure itself is composed of archetypes of space and time consciousness that derive from the evolution of the linguistic sign from the signaling behavior of antecedent species. Detailed analyses are provided to explain how the archetypes structure meaning in both the grammatical and lexical spheres as well as in syntax.
Emergent Syntax for Conversation : Clausal patterns and the organization of action
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Yael Maschler,
Simona Pekarek Doehler,
Jan Lindström and
Leelo Keevallik
This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English Estonian Finnish French German Hebrew Italian Mandarin and Swedish. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns serve as resources for projection (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally moment-by-moment out of the real-time trajectories of action (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation.<br/>The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of syntax as fundamentally temporal emergent dialogic sensitive to local interactional contingencies and interwoven with other semiotic resources.
Right Peripheral Fragments : Right dislocation and related phenomena in Romance
Feb 2020
Book
Author(s):
Javier Fernández-Sánchez
In recent years a number of authors (De Vries 2009 Truckenbrodt 2015 Ott and de Vries 2016 inter alia) have defended that right dislocations (RD) should be treated as bisentential structures where the “dislocated” constituent is actually a remnant of a clausal ellipsis operation licensed under identity with an antecedent clause. Although Romance RD is a fertile area of research the consequences of the biclausal analysis remain unexplored in these languages. This monograph intends to fill this gap. Adopting this approach not only solves some issues that have always been at the core of dislocation structures in general; it also allows us to uncover novel sets of data and to provide straightforward explanations for well-known generalizations. Further it brings RD along with a set of phenomena which are structurally very similar like afterthoughts or split questions which have been independently argued to display a bisentential structure. Under alternative monoclausal approaches to RD the striking similarities between these phenomena must be rendered anecdotal.
Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing : Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Ute Römer,
Viviana Cortes and
Eric Friginal
This volume showcases some of the latest research on academic writing by leading and up-and-coming corpus linguists. The studies included in the volume are based on a wide range of corpora spanning first and second language academic writing at different levels of writing expertise containing texts from a variety of academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines) and of different academic registers. Particularly novel aspects of the collection are the inclusion of research that combines rhetorical moves with multi-dimensional analysis studies that cover both fixed and variable phraseological items (lexical bundles phrase-frames constructions) and work that is based on corpora of English as an academic lingua franca. Going beyond merely summarizing their findings the authors also discuss what their research means for academic writing practice and pedagogical settings. The volume will be of interest to researchers students and teachers who would like to expand their knowledge of how academic writing functions and what it looks like in a variety of contexts.
Hispanic Contact Linguistics : Theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Luis A. Ortiz López,
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo and
Melvin González-Rivera
This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages such as Catalan English and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g. United States Puerto Rico Colombia Brazil Argentina); and varied participant groups ranging from dialect contacts second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers. Taken together the chapters provide rich empirical descriptions of data pertaining to different levels of language diverse – naturalistic and experimental – methodological approaches to data collection as well as theoretical implications of the findings. The interdisciplinary perspective adopted by the authors contributes to the linguistic analysis and offers important insights into theoretical linguistics in general and into theories of sociolinguistics language variation bilingualism and second language acquisition.
Chapters of Dependency Grammar : A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Feb 2020
Book
Editor(s):
András Imrényi and
Nicolas Mazziotta
Was Tesnière the founding father of dependency grammar or merely a culmination point in its long history? Leaving no doubt that the latter position is correct Chapters of Dependency Grammar tells the story of how dependency-oriented grammatical description developed from Antiquity up to the early 20th century. From Priscian’s Rome to Dmitrievsky’s Russia from the French Encyclopaedia to Stephen W. Clark’s school grammars in 19th century America it is shown how the concept of dependencies (asymmetric word-to-word relations) surfaced again and again assuming a central place in syntax. A particularly intriguing aspect of the storyline is that even without any direct contact or influence authors were making key breakthroughs in similar directions. In the works of Sámuel Brassai a Transylvanian polymath and Franz Kern a German grammarian the first dependency trees appear in 1873 and 1883 respectively predating Tesnière’s stemmas by several decades.
Cross-theoretical Explorations of Interlocutors and their Individual Differences
Jan 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Laura Gurzynski-Weiss
This book examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language (L2) development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach sociocultural theory the variationist approach and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar in the framework and each overview is followed by an empirical study that demonstrates how interlocutor IDs can be fruitfully researched within that framework. To maximize readability and impact the chapters follow common organizing questions inviting the engagement of L2 researchers students and teachers alike.Collectively the chapters in the current volume initiate a cohesive discussion of the theoretical roles of the interlocutor within these four popular approaches to SLA; illustrate how interlocutor IDs influence L2 opportunities and/or development; present innovative original empirical research on interlocutors and their IDs within each approach; and provide theoretical empirical and methodological guidance for future research on interlocutors and their IDs. A powerful contribution of this volume highlighted in the concluding chapter’s synthesis is the common call across all four approaches for the irrefutable role and need for research on interlocutors and their IDs. The volume also demonstrates how despite theoretical and methodological differences the four approaches are advancing congruently toward a more robust understanding of the multifaceted and dynamic nature of all interlocutors and their IDs and thus toward a more complete and accurate picture of their influence on L2 development.
Lexical Semantics for Terminology : An introduction
Jan 2020
Book
Author(s):
Marie-Claude L'Homme
Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives primarily focused on knowledge. Topics such as term identification meaning polysemy relations between terms and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with examples taken from various fields of knowledge.
This book is an indispensable companion for those who are interested in words and work with specialized terms e.g. terminologists translators lexicographers corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book complements other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se.
This book is an indispensable companion for those who are interested in words and work with specialized terms e.g. terminologists translators lexicographers corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book complements other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se.
Linking up with Video : Perspectives on interpreting practice and research
Jan 2020
Book
Editor(s):
Heidi Salaets and
Geert Brône
This volume is intended as an innovating reader for both interpreting practitioners as well as scholars engaging with the multifaceted question addressed in the title “Why linking up with video?”. The chapters in this volume deal with this question from different perspectives. On the one hand the volume continues the ongoing discussion on the pros and cons of video-based interaction for the interpreting profession exploring the implications and applications when interpreters and their clients link up through video technology. On the other hand the chapters also explore the potential of video technology for research on interpreting hence raising the question in which way high-quality video recordings of interpreters in the booth participants involved in interpreter-mediated talk etc. may be instrumental in gaining new insights. In this sense the volume strongly ties in with the fast-growing field of multimodal (interaction) studies which makes use of video recordings to study the relationship between verbal and nonverbal resources such as gestures postural orientation gaze and head movements in the construction of meaning in communication.
Handbook of Pragmatics : 22nd Annual Installment
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Jan-Ola Östman and
Jef Verschueren
This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics broadly conceived as the cognitive social and cultural study of language and communication i.e. the science of language use.
The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.
Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop
The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.
Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop
Normativity in Language and Linguistics
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Aleksi Mäkilähde,
Ville Leppänen and
Esa Itkonen
This volume sets out to discuss the role of norms and normativity in both language and linguistics from a multiplicity of perspectives. These concepts are centrally important to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics and their role and nature need to be investigated in detail. The chapters address a range of issues from general questions about ontology epistemology and methodology to aspects of particular subfields (such as semantics and historical linguistics) or phenomena (such as construal and code-switching). The volume aims to further our understanding of language and linguistics as well as to encourage further discussion on the metatheory of linguistics. Due to the fundamental nature of the issues under discussion this volume will be of interest to all linguists regardless of their background or fields of expertise and to philosophers concerned with language or other normative domains.
Language Variation - European Perspectives VII : Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda,
Francisco Díaz-Montesinos,
Antonio-Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and
Matilde Vida-Castro
This volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9) which was held at the University of Malaga (Spain) from June 6 to 9 2017. The volume includes plenaries by Manuel Almeida (“Language hybridism: On the origin of interdialectal forms”) and Frans Hinskens (“Of clocks clouds and sound change”). In addition the editors have selected 13 papers encompassing different languages and language varieties — not only from large language families such as Romance and Germanic but also small language families like Greek or smaller languages like Croatian — and covering a large range of topics on sociolinguistics and linguistic variation. The book displays a contemporary picture of the research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages. Readers interested in every field related to language and language use will enjoy a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives on speech variation historical sociolinguistics and foreign language acquisition and learning.
Metaphor and National Identity : Alternative conceptualization of the Treaty of Trianon
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Orsolya Putz
Due to the Treaty of Trianon – which was signed at the end of World War 1 in 1920 – Hungary lost two thirds of its former territory as well as the inhabitants of these areas. The book aims to reveal why the treaty still plays a role in Hungarian national identity construction by studying the alternative conceptualization of the treaty and its consequences. The cognitive linguistic research explores Hungarian politicians’ conceptual system about Trianon with special interest on conceptual metaphors. It also analyzes the factors that may motivate the emergence of the conceptual system as well as its synchronic diversity and diachronic changes. The monograph provides a niche insight into the conceptual basis of how contemporary citizens of Hungary interpret the treaty of Trianon and its consequences. The book will be of interest to cognitive and cultural linguists cultural anthropologists or any professionals working on national identity construction.
The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Anita Fetzer and
Elda Weizman
Departing from the premise that ‘being ordinary’ is brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse and is thus an interactional achievement the contributions to this edited volume investigate its construction reconstruction and deconstruction in media discourse. Ordinariness is perceived as a scalar notion which is conceptualised against the background of both non-ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. The chapters address its strategic construction across media genres (public talk Prime Minister’s Questions interview radio call-in commenting) and discursive activities (tweets social media posts) as done in various languages (American English Austrian German British English Chinese French Finnish Hebrew and Japanese) by professional participants (e.g. politicians journalists scientists) and by ordinary people participating in media discourse (e.g. ordinary citizens viewers members of the audience). Discursive strategies used to bring about (non/extra) ordinariness include small stories quotations conversational style irony naming and addressing as well as references to the private-public interface.
Reference Point and Case : A Cognitive Grammar exploration of Korean
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Chongwon Park
This monograph answers the rarely discussed questions of why complicated grammatical case phenomena exist in Korean and what the connection is between the case forms and their functions. The author argues that the case forms in Korean reflect patterns of the human cognitive process. While this approach may seem rather obvious to non-linguists it is indeed a novel claim in contemporary linguistic theory. In order to provide technical analyses of Korean case phenomena such as multiple nominative/accusative non-nominative subject and adverbial case constructions this book adopts an independently established descriptive construct known as reference point in the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author demonstrates that the notion of reference point not only explains a substantially wider set of data but also leads to a more reasonable generalization. The intended readership of this book are researchers who are interested in case phenomena irrespective of their theoretical orientation.
A History of Catalan Folk Literature
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Carme Oriol and
Emili Samper
A History of Catalan Folk Literature is the fruit of a collaborative effort between fifteen researchers from various universities and research centres who have joined forces to create a broader study of Catalan folk literature that addresses the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories in their entirety.
Since the thirteenth century Catalan culture has created a rich and abundant literary legacy and since the mid-nineteenth century this has been complemented by a tradition of folklore studies that remains very much alive today. Within this comparatively recent discipline folk literature has played a particularly important role.
The book presents the evolution of Catalan folk literature studies in each of the areas that make up the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories referred to above. The period considered stretches from the mid-nineteenth century when the beginnings of a scientific interest in folklore emerged across Europe to the present day.
Since the thirteenth century Catalan culture has created a rich and abundant literary legacy and since the mid-nineteenth century this has been complemented by a tradition of folklore studies that remains very much alive today. Within this comparatively recent discipline folk literature has played a particularly important role.
The book presents the evolution of Catalan folk literature studies in each of the areas that make up the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories referred to above. The period considered stretches from the mid-nineteenth century when the beginnings of a scientific interest in folklore emerged across Europe to the present day.
The Cinematic Novel and Postmodern Pop Fiction : The case of Manuel Puig
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Décio Torres Cruz
Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States England France and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations Cruz shows how in Puig’s hands the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts films discourses and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.
A Criterial Approach to the Cartography of V2
Dec 2019
Book
Author(s):
Giuseppe Samo
This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages in both root and embedded clauses on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words there is no “bottleneck effect” but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.
Science Communication on the Internet : Old genres meet new genres
Dec 2019
Book
Editor(s):
María-José Luzón and
Carmen Pérez-Llantada
This book examines the expanding world of genres on the Internet to understand issues of science communication today. The book explores how some traditional print genres have become digital how some genres have evolved into new digital hybrids and how and why new genres have emerged and are emerging in response to new rhetorical exigences and communicative demands. Because social actions are in constant change and ensuing from this genres evolve faster than ever it is important to gain insight into the interrelations between old genres and new genres and the processes underpinning the construction of new genre sets chains and assemblages for communicating scientific research to both expert and diversified audiences. In examining scientific genres on the Internet this book seeks to illustrate the increasing diversification of genre ecologies and their underlying social disciplinary and individual agendas.
Intercultural Experience in Narrative : Expatriate stories from a multicultural workplace
Nov 2019
Book
Author(s):
Michał Wilczewski
This book systematically investigates intercultural experiences of Polish managers and specialists delegated by their multinational company (MNC) on an international assignment to China. The book employs narrative inquiry to explore language intercultural communication collaboration learning and expatriate adjustment in the MNC. This approach offers new insights into intercultural experiences communication and cultural challenges faced by an under-researched group of professionals exposed to intensive collaborations with the local managers and employees. The findings also illustrate how the expatriates learned to better navigate the multicultural and multilingual business context and what factors facilitated and inhibited their learning and adjustment. Encouraging the qualitative context-sensitive examination of expatriate-local personnel interactions the book will be an invaluable source for scholars and practitioners interested in among others novel approaches to investigating language and intercultural communication in international business cross-cultural management qualitative cross-cultural research as well as for lecturers and students interested in Central Europe and China.
Representing the Exotic and the Familiar : Politics and perception in literature
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Meenakshi Bharat and
Madhu Grover
The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process” as Graham Huggan has called it which separates a “first world” from a “third world” the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples of literatures and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and in so doing to make a significant critical intervention.
Keeping in Touch : Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Raymond Hickey
The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain who settled at these locations in the past few centuries with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech and hence their written form of language does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore the writers of the emigrant letters examined in the current volume were very unlikely to have known of still less have used manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA Canada South Africa Australia and New Zealand.
Heritage Languages : A language contact approach
Nov 2019
Book
Author(s):
Suzanne Aalberse,
Ad Backus and
Pieter Muysken
Heritage languages such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles are non-dominant languages often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history their structural properties and their interaction with other surrounding languages.
Metaphor Identification in Multiple Languages : MIPVU around the world
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Susan Nacey,
Aletta G. Dorst,
Tina Krennmayr and
W. Gudrun Reijnierse
This volume explores linguistic metaphor identification in a wide variety of languages and language families. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in researching language and metaphor from students to experienced scholars. Its primary goals are to discuss the challenges involved in applying the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) to a range of languages across the globe and to offer theoretically grounded advice and guidelines enabling researchers to identify metaphors in multiple languages in a valid and replicable way. The volume is intended as a practical guidebook that identifies and discusses procedural challenges of metaphor identification across languages thus better enabling researchers to reliably identify metaphor in a multitude of languages. Although able to be read independently this volume – written by metaphor researchers from around the world – is the ideal companion volume for the 2010 Benjamins book A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU.
“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition
Nov 2019
Book
Author(s):
Yanying Lu
This book explores socio-cultural meanings of ‘self’ in the Chinese language through analysing a range of conversations among Chinese immigrants to Australia qualitatively on the topics of individuality social relationships and collective identity. If language culture and cognition are major roads this book is the junction that unites them by arguing that selfhood occurs at their interface. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to unpack manifestations and perceptions of ‘self’ in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse from the perspectives of Sociolinguistics Cognitive Linguistics and the newly developed Cultural Linguistics. This book not only discusses empirical and theoretical issues on the conceptualisation and communication of social identity in a cross-cultural context it also reveals how traditional and modern ideas in Chinese culture are interacting with those of other world cultures. Considering the power of language enduring and emerging beliefs and stances that permeate these speakers’ views on their social being and outlooks on life impart their significance in cross-cultural communication and pragmatics.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>As of January 2023 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
Widening Contexts for Processability Theory : Theories and issues
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Anke Lenzing,
Howard Nicholas and
Jana Roos
This book explores relationships between Processability Theory approaches and other approaches to SLA. It is distinctive in two ways. It offers PT-insiders a way to see connections between their familiar traditions and theories with other ways of working. Parallel to this it offers readers who work in other traditions ways of connecting with a research tradition that makes specific testable claims about second language acquisition processes. These dual perspectives mean that both beginning and established SLA researchers as well as those seeking to connect their work with views of language learning will find something of interest. Studies of multiple languages and multiple aspects of language are included. Chapters cover areas as diverse as literacy language comprehension language attrition and language testing.
Renaissance Man : Essays on literature and culture for Anthony W. Johnson
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Tommi Alho,
Jason Finch and
Roger D. Sell
Here friends of Anthony W. Johnson honour him as a re-embodiment of the polymathic artist-scholar figure once observable in Ben Jonson on whom he has done some of his most distinctive work. Part I of the book reflects his strong grounding in English literature and culture of the seventeenth century with essays not only on Ben Jonson but also on university drama on grammar school drama and on humanist literary taste. Part II responds to his pioneering flights of culture-imagological time-travel to other periods with essays on riddles through the ages on Matthew Arnold’s doubts about Homeric pictorialism and on anciently comic elements in George Gissing’s urban fiction. Part III celebrates his importance both as scholar and artist for the present day with essays extending imagological analysis to the singer Nick Drake to the avant-garde Danish poet Morten Søkilde and to Sean S. Baker’s film Tangerine plus a climactic celebration of Johnson’s own performances on solo violin and guitar as augmented by self-recording.
Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language : In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015)
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Paul Simpson
This commemorative volume comprises ten essays which celebrate the work of Walter (Bill) Nash. Bill Nash was an extraordinary scholar – a classicist parodist critic musician linguist poet polyglot humourist and novelist. He was as adroit in his reading of the Old Norse sagas as he was in his analyses of the rhetorical composition of everyday English usage and his published outputs embrace the stylistic rhetorical compositional and creative topographies of both language and literature. The contributions that comprise this volume are all by well-known scholars in the field and each essay celebrates Nash’s prodigious offering by covering the academic fields with which he was particularly associated. These fields include composition rhetoric discourse analysis English usage comic discourse creative writing and the stylistic exploration of literature from the Old English period to that of the present day.
Cognitive Linguistics and the Study of Chinese
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Dingfang Shu,
Hui Zhang and
Lifei Zhang
Bringing together contributions from a group of prominent researchers within a cognitive-linguistic framework this volume sheds light on linguistic structures and usages characteristic of the Chinese language including noun-verb inclusion the conceptual spatialization of actions existential constructions conceptual structures and coherence idioms and metaphors language acquisition of caused motion etc. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The contributions are committed to the principle of “converging evidence” that has been advocated in Cognitive Linguistics since its inception. Some studies in this volume combine introspective methods with theoretical analysis while others rely on corpus-based experimental and neuroscientific methods. Featuring diverse topics and multiple methods this collection will be useful to readers who are interested in the grammatical and conceptual structure of Chinese as well as in the state-of-the-art of Cognitive Linguistics in China.
Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Whitney Chappell
This book provides a cutting-edge exploration of the social meaning of phonetic variation in the Spanish-speaking world. Its 11 chapters elucidate the ways in which listeners process perceive and propagate phonetically motivated social meaning across monolingual and contact varieties including the Spanish spoken in Spain (Asturias Catalonia and Andalusia) Ecuador Colombia Argentina Chile Mexico and the United States. The book presents a wide variety of new and innovative research by renowned scholars and the chapters examine issues like the influence of visual cues bilingualism contact geographic mobility and phonotactic predictability on social and linguistic perception. Additionally the volume engages in timely discussions of intersectionality replicability and the future of the field. As the first unified reference on Spanish sociophonetic perception this volume will be useful in graduate and undergraduate classrooms in libraries and on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in Spanish sociophonetics.
Pragmatics and Literature
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Siobhan Chapman and
Billy Clark
Pragmatics and Literature is an important collection of new work by leading practitioners working at the interface between pragmatic theory and literary analysis. The individual studies collected here draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and are concerned with a range of literary genres. All have a shared focus on applying ideas from specific pragmatic frameworks to understanding the production interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. A full-length introductory chapter highlights distinctions and contrasts between pragmatic theories but also brings out complementarities shared aims and assumptions and ways in which different pragmatic theories can make different contributions to our understanding of literary texts. The book as a whole encourages a sense of coherence for the field and presents insights from various approaches for systematic comparison. Building on previous work by the editors the contributors and others it makes a significant contribution to the growing field of pragmatic literary stylistics.
It’s not all about you : New perspectives on address research
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Bettina Kluge and
María Irene Moyna
The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches variation and change address in digital and audiovisual media nominal address and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French Czech Dutch English (from the US UK Australia and Canada) Finnish Italian Mongolian Palenquero Creole Portuguese Slovak and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists sociolinguists typologists and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.
Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Linguistics
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Natalie Depraz and
Agnès Celle
Surprise is treated as an affect in Aristotelian philosophy as well as in Cartesian philosophy. In experimental psychology surprise is considered to be an emotion. In phenomenology it is only addressed indirectly in phenomenology (Husserl Heidegger Levinas) with the important exception of Ricœur and Maldiney; it is reduced to a break in cognition by cognitivists (Dennett). Only recently was it broached in linguistics with a focus on lexico-syntactic categories. As for the expression of surprise it has been studied in connection with evidentiality in languages that encode surprise morphosyntactically. However how surprise is encoded in languages that lack an evidential morphosyntactic system has been largely unexplored. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book provides new insights into the dynamics of surprise based on a heuristic hypothesis tested against the investigation of time language and emotion. It is intended to arouse the interest of a multidisciplinary audience keen on crossing the disciplinary borders of phenomenology cognitive sciences and pragmatics. <br/>The theoretical approaches adopted in this collection of articles rely on experiments and corpus data. They advance knowledge by building on robust empirical results coming from psychology microphenomenology linguistics and physiology.
Semantic Plurality : English collective nouns and other ways of denoting pluralities of entities
Nov 2019
Book
Author(s):
Laure Gardelle
This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting ‘more than one’ entity from collective and aggregate nouns (with the first-ever typology) to count plurals partly substantivised adjectives and conjoined NPs. This semantic feature approach to plurality which cuts across number the count/non-count distinction and lexical/NP levels reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns and accommodates cases such as three elephant cattle or a chain of islands. The study also offers a refined understanding of aggregate nouns (a category nearly as large as that of collective nouns) and quantification in pseudo-partitives develops Guillaume’s notion of ‘internal plurality’ and proposes the innovative concept of ‘hyperonyms of plural classes’ (e.g. furniture). The Animacy Hierarchy is also found to be influential beyond hybrid agreement. The book aims to be accessible to scholars of any theoretical background interested in these topics.
Current Perspectives on Literary Reading
Nov 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Dari Escandell and
José Rovira-Collado
This collection aims to provide answers regarding what the most recent trends are in research in literary reading. Based on that premise it contains a rigorously selected and varied roster of investigations that focus on presenting and attempting to interpret and understand the most recent literary trends or tendencies as well as the reasons for the propensities they create among the masses of young and adult readers. This selection of texts in English Catalan and Spanish will give the reading specialist an idea of where today’s trends are headed and how they point towards the formation of a new paradigm in matters of literature.
A Humanizing Literary Pragmatics : Theory, criticism, education. Selected papers 1985-2002
Oct 2019
Book
Author(s):
Roger D. Sell
In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies historical perspectives and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Literary writers through their handling of deixis evaluative and modal expressions tellability politeness norms and genre expectations activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account human beings are profoundly influenced by society but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals” who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.<br/>As well as explaining these theoretical positions the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.
Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures
Oct 2019
Book
Author(s):
Rosario Caballero,
Ernesto Suárez-Toste and
Carita Paradis
Wine culture is a complex phenomenon of increasing importance in modern society and it combines the joys of wine appreciation with the frustrations of trying to verbally communicate sensory impressions. While wine appreciation is traditionally characterized as joyously convivial in its social dimension sensory impressions remain eminently private. This contrast explains why the language used to represent wine or winespeak is the object of increasing crossdisciplinary interest.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book analyzes the many different forms / many of the different forms of representing wine in present-day society with a special emphasis on winespeak starting from the premise that such study demands a genre approach to the many different communities involved in the wine world: producers/ critics/ merchants/ consumers. By combining the methodologies of Cognitive Linguistics and discourse analysis the authors analyze extensive real-life corpora of wine reviews and multimodal artifacts (labels advertisements documentaries) to reflect on the many inherent difficulties but also to highlight the rich and creative figurative strategies employed to compensate for the absence of a proper wine jargon of a more unambiguous nature.
Reference and Identity in Public Discourses
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Ursula Lutzky and
Minna Nevala
This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns both from a historical and present-day perspective and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public such as letters newspapers parliamentary debates and online communication in the form of reader comments discussion pages and tweets. In addition to English the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.
Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness : A pragmatic analysis of social interaction
Oct 2019
Book
Author(s):
Valeria Sinkeviciute
Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness is the first systematic study that offers a socio-pragmatic perspective on humorous practices such as teasing mockery and taking the piss and their relation to (im)politeness. Analysing data from corpora reality television and interviews in Australian and British cultural contexts this book contributes to cross-cultural and intercultural research on humour and its role in social interaction. Although in both contexts jocular verbal practices are highly valued and a positive response – the ‘preferred reaction’ – can be expected the conceptualisation of what is seen as humorous can vary especially in terms of what ‘goes too far’. By examining how attempts at humour can occasion offence presenting a distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ perceptions of jocularity and looking at how language users evaluate jocular behaviours in interaction this study shows how humour and (im)politeness are co-constructed and negotiated in discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in pragmatics conversational humour (im)politeness intercultural communication discourse analysis television studies and interaction in English-speaking contexts.
The Intricacy of Languages
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Francesc Feliu and
Olga Fullana
If as we believe the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and as a consequence has made the ancient intrinsic diversity of all languages visible at least to the extent that this is still possible. <br/>Nowadays then the old linguistic diversity of dialects of parlances of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.
Discourse and Political Culture : The language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK
Oct 2019
Book
Author(s):
Michael Kranert
This book presents a new approach to comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary stance and combines analytical tools from linguistic discourse analysis (keywords metaphors argumentation genre) and political science (political culture comparative politics ideologies). It is comprehensive in its introduction of approaches from the German tradition of politico-linguistics. This tradition has not thus far been accessible to a non-German speaking readership and hence the volume adds insights into the mechanics of political discourse from a diverse set of viewpoints. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book analyses the modernisation discourses in social democratic parties in Britain and Germany between 1994 and 2003 a project that was named ‘Third Way’. It demonstrates how political language and political culture are related and how politicians will adapt a global ideology to local political circumstances in order to convince the electorate. At the same time the book presents new insights into the German political culture and the version of Third Way discourses in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder which have played a key role in shaping current political discourse in Germany. It concludes with a model for the study of political discourse which makes the work relevant to scholars in Social Sciences and beyond.
The Carthaginian North: Semitic influence on early Germanic : A linguistic and cultural study
Oct 2019
Book
Author(s):
Robert Mailhammer and
Theo Vennemann
This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet) the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs the development of the Germanic word order and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages Proto-Germanic was in intensive contact with Punic a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.
Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Nancy Stern,
Ricardo Otheguy,
Wallis Reid and
Jaseleen Sackler
This collection is the fifth volume of selected papers to emerge from Columbia School (CS) linguistics conferences. A radically functionalist approach CS shares with Cognitive linguistics the view that grammar is composed of form-meaning correspondences. CS views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users. The volume includes papers on methodological issues and innovative analyses on English Spanish and Mandarin that illustrate the value of the strict application of clearly spelled out theoretical principles to the execution of linguistic analysis. Four of the volume’s eleven papers are written in Spanish and all papers have abstracts in both English and Spanish. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical premises of CS and their differences from and similarities with cognitive-functional approaches. The collection will be of interest to researchers and laymen who aim to understand the role of language in human communication.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15 : Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Ingo Feldhausen,
Martin Elsig,
Imme Kuchenbrandt and
Mareike Neuhaus
In 2016 the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective others from a diachronic perspective or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French Italian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian Gallo and Sardinian.
Lexicalization patterns in color naming : A cross-linguistic perspective
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Ida Raffaelli,
Daniela Katunar and
Barbara Kerovec
The volume presents sixteen chapters focused on lexicalization patterns used in color naming in a variety of languages. Although previous studies have dealt with categorization and perceptual salience of color terms few studies have been consistently conducted in order to investigate phonological morphological syntactic and semantic devices languages use to form color terms.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> The aim of this volume is to approach color data from a relativist and typological perspective and to address some novel viewpoints in the research of color terms such as: (a) the focus on language structure per se in the study of lexicalization data; (b) investigation of inter- and intra-language structural variation; (c) culture and language contact as reflected in language structure.<br/>Topics of this book have a broad appeal to researchers working in the fields of linguistics anthropology sociology and psychology.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Nigel Duffield,
Trang Phan and
Tue Trinh
This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers representing a wide spectrum of frameworks approaches and methods from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects to corpus-based discussions of language and gender to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes to laboratory experiments and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics and Southeast Asian languages more generally.
Case Studies in Fluid Construction Grammar : The verb phrase
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Luc Steels and
Katrien Beuls
Construction grammar enjoys great popularity among empirical linguists typologists psycholinguists and language educators because it puts meaning and function of language at the forefront of linguistic analysis. This book shows that construction grammar gives us also a powerful new way to conceive and implement operational parsing and production systems which could be used as a basic component of a wide range of Artificial Intelligence applications such as dialog systems language tutoring applications or translation assistants. The book focuses on a particular formalism Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) that has emerged recently as a solid platform for writing and testing grammars from a constructional point of view. It introduces the basics of FCG and illustrates its use through a number of case studies all centering around the verb phrase. The case studies consider the verb phrase in different languages (Dutch English Spanish Russian) and examine different challenging linguistic phenomena ranging from word order flexibility language change and language acquisition to the complex semantics of the verb phrase particularly for aspect. The book is intended for those who want a first contact with FCG and see how different non-trivial analyses of language phenomena can be expressed. It is also an excellent first step for those who want to explore FCG to build language applications.
Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 9:2 (2017).
Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 9:2 (2017).
Writing History in Late Modern English : Explorations of the Coruña Corpus
Oct 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Isabel Moskowich,
Begoña Crespo,
Luis Puente-Castelo and
Leida Maria Monaco
This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis syntax semantics morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts such as year of publication sex of the author geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories as well as the above-mentioned metadata information can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) purpose-designed software by IrLab is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849
Argumentation in Actual Practice : Topical studies about argumentative discourse in context
Sept 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Frans H. van Eemeren and
Bart Garssen
Argumentation in Actual Practice contains a collection of topical studies about argumentative discourse in context written by argumentation scholars from a diversity of academic backgrounds. Some contributions provide general perspectives other contributions deal with specific issues particular types of argumentative discourse or individual argumentative speech events. The contexts in which argumentation is examined vary from politics and the media to medical juridical educational commercial or military contexts a specific academic discipline a special issue or pertain to all kinds of contextualised argumentative discourse. The issues discussed include the interpretation and analysis of argumentation strategic manoeuvring argument schemes the stock issues the fallacies the principle of charity and the persuasiveness of argumentative discourse. A common feature is that they are all empirically-oriented and that virtually all of them are strongly concerned with an adequate understanding of contextualised argumentative discourse and the factors that may increase or decrease its reasonableness and effectiveness.
Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew
Sept 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Edit Doron,
Malka Rappaport Hovav,
Yael Reshef and
Moshe Taube
The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival” acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn this particular case of language-shift which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew alongside general theoretical discussion with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.
Historical Linguistics 2015 : Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015
Sept 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Michela Cennamo and
Claudia Fabrizio
The collection of articles presented in this volume addresses a number of general theoretical methodological and empirical issues in the field of Historical Linguistics in different levels of analysis and on different themes: (i) phonology (ii) morphology (iii) morphosyntax (iv) syntax (v) diachronic typology (vi) semantics and pragmatics and (vii) language contact variation and diffusion. The topics discussed often in a comparative perspective feature a variety of languages and language families and cover a wide range of research areas. Novel analyses and often new diachronic data — also from less known and under-investigated languages — are provided to the debate on the principles mechanisms paths and models of language change as well as the relationship between synchronic variation and diachrony. The volume is of interest to scholars of different persuasions working on all aspects of language change.
Intertextuality in Practice
Sept 2019
Book
Author(s):
Jessica Mason
The books we’ve read the films we’ve seen the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually rather than how it can be identified described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism neuroscience linguistics and sociology this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.
Researching L2 Task Performance and Pedagogy : In honour of Peter Skehan
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Zhisheng (Edward) Wen and
Mohammad Javad Ahmadian
This volume honours Peter Skehan’s landmark contributions to research in Task-Based Language Teaching. It offers state-of-the-art reviews as well as cutting-edge new research studies all reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current research such as the role and nature of task complexity and the distinct dimensions of L2 task performance. Collectively these chapters celebrate Professor Skehan’s seminal influence on TBLT and second language acquisition research and they bear witness to the sustained academic mentoring and collaboration that have characterised his career. Contributed both by senior academics and more recent participants in SLA and TBLT research the chapters variously explore conceptual frameworks and methodological insights on central issues in TBLT research theoretical debates innovative research paradigms and methodologies as well as practical pedagogical proposals. The book provides a wide-ranging and balanced account of Skehan’s work and its impact on other researchers serving as an introduction as well as a critical review for both seasoned and novice researchers and for interested practitioners.
The Internal Context of Bilingual Processing
Aug 2019
Book
Author(s):
John Truscott and
Michael Sharwood Smith
This book offers a broad-based account of bilingual processing drawing on research findings and current thinking from various domains across cognitive science. The theoretical approach adopted is the Modular Cognition Framework in which language processing is characterized as an interaction between dedicated linguistic systems and the other modules of the human mind. The latter provide the 'internal context' of bilingual processing. This internal context involves goals value emotion self and representations of the external context. The book combines all these elements into a coherent picture of the bilingual's internal context and the way it shapes processing. It then shows how some central concepts in cognitive science and bilingualism fit in with – and follow from – this view. These concepts include working memory consciousness attention effort codeswitching and the possible cognitive benefits of being bilingual. The book should be of interest to professionals in the field as well as postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Learning the Language of Dentistry : Disciplinary corpora in the teaching of English for Specific Academic Purposes
Aug 2019
Book
Author(s):
Peter Crosthwaite and
Lisa Cheung
This book explores the affordances of disciplinary corpora for the teaching and learning of the language of dentistry within the field of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). We extract disciplinary register features and vocabulary from three key genres of the dentistry discipline (published experimental research articles case reports and novice/professional research reports within the Dental Public Health domain) before integrating these features into ESAP pedagogy in the form of corpus-based ESAP materials that promote student-led direct engagement with disciplinary corpora – an approach known as 'data-driven learning'. This book is a timely and relevant addition to the field of corpus linguistics and ESAP and is especially targeted at ESAP professionals who are required to teach disciplinary discourses but who may struggle to know what to teach as non-experts of the target discipline.
Controversies in the Contemporary World
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Adriano Fabris and
Giovanni Scarafile
Inspired by Marcelo Dascal’s theory of controversies this volume includes studies in the theory of controversies studies of the history of controversy forms and their evolution and case-studies of particular historical and current controversies.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The purpose of this volume is to identify a taxonomy of controversies and also to sense a line of development for the phenomenon of controversies itself. <br/>At the same time we want to ask ourselves about the impact and the spread of controversies in the contemporary world eminently intended as a heuristic element facilitating knowledge.<br/>For all these reasons the fundamental aim of the volume is to provide the reader with a selection of current theoretical and practical perspectives on controversies and to offer a broad picture of the complex range of definitions meanings and practices connected to them.
Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age : Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Marianna Bolognesi,
Mario Brdar and
Kristina Despot
This book describes methods risks and challenges involved in the construction of metaphor and metonymy digital repositories. The first part of this volume showcases established and new projects around the world in which metaphors and metonymies are harvested and classified. The second part provides a series of cognitive linguistic studies focused on highlighting and discussing theoretical and methodological risks and challenges involved in building these digital resources. The volume is a result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive linguists psychologists and computational scientists supporting an overarching idea that metaphor and metonymy play a central role in human cognition and that they are deeply entrenched in recurring patterns of bodily experience. Throughout the volume a variety of methods are proposed to collect and analyze both conceptual metaphors and metonymies and their linguistic and visual expressions.
Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Aug 2019
Book
Editor(s):
Óscar Loureda,
Inés Recio Fernández,
Laura Nadal and
Adriana Cruz
This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis experimentation or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages range from mechanisms through which information structure connection and discourse organization are realized to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.