Browse Books

Divided into three main sections on Phonology Syntax and Semantics this new volume on variation in French aims to provide a snapshot of the state of sociolinguistic research inside and outside metropolitan France. From a diatopic perspective varieties in France Belgium Switzerland Africa and Canada are considered mainly with respect to phonological features but also focusing on syntactic and lexical evolutions (the relative clause in Ivorian French and discourse markers in Canadian French). The acquisition of stylistic features of French figures in chapters on both first and second language learners and variation across different genres is addressed with respect to non-standard non-finite forms. Finally a section on semantic change traces the way that interactional and other socio-historical factors affect word meaning. The volume will appeal to (socio-)linguists with an interest in contemporary French as well as to advanced undergraduates and post-graduate students of French and specialists in the field.

From 1660 to c 1700 England set her eyes on Spain and on the seventeenth-century Spanish comedy of intrigue with an aim to import new plots and characters that might appeal to the Anglo-Saxon audience. As a consequence Hispanic drama in translation enjoyed a period of relative popularity never to be repeated until the turn of the twenty-first century. By analysing a corpus of translated classical Spanish plays intended for performance this book aims to show the strategies chosen by the translators concerned. Hence many aspects present in the source texts are naturalized in order to meet the demands of the target culture while others are kept to clarify the “Spanishness” of the text. This study draws significant conclusions on the validity of these mechanisms within the specific framework of Drama Translation Studies. This volume will be of interest to Hispanists drama translation scholars and theatre practitioners.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical cognitive grammatical social cultural variational or discursive angles this fourth volume is dedicated to the empirical investigation of the way human beings organize their interaction in natural environments and how they use talk for accomplishing actions and their contexts. Starting from Goffman’s observation that interaction exhibits a structure in its own right that cannot be reduced to the psychological properties of the individual nor to society it contains a selection of articles documenting the various levels of interactional organization. In addition to treatments of basic concepts such as sequence participation prosody and style and some topical articles on phenomena like reported speech and listener response it also includes overviews of specific traditions (conversation analysis ethnomethodology) and articles on eminent authors (Goffman Sacks) who had a formative influence on the field.

World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes the 22 articles in this collected volume selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englishes in Regensburg cover a broad range of topics which together reflect the state of the art of research in this field. The volume focuses on regions as diverse as Africa the Caribbean the Antipodes and Asia but also promotes a globally comparative perspective by analyzing selected characteristics of the English language across a wide range of varieties. Methodologically a number of different approaches are applied including corpus linguistic studies socio-phonetics as well as historical discourse analysis. Due to its wide scope the book is of interest not only to World Englishes scholars but also to sociolinguists as well as applied contact or corpus linguists.

This detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated given the meaning of the individual clitics and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts in coherent and principled fashion for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data the range of syntactic phenomena discussed and its analytic scope.

This volume deals with issues on negation patterns in languages of West Africa and the adjacent north and east. The first aim is to provide data on various aspects of negation in African languages. Although the topics addressed here reflect a great diversity of negation patterns the following typological features have been identified to be prominent in our region: conflict or even incompatibility between negation and focus use of other indirect means of negating non-indicative mood (covered under the term ‘Prohibitive’) different negation patterns in different Tense-Aspect-Moods (e.g. Imperfective vs. Perfective) lack of negative indefinites and disjunctive negative marking (often referred to as ‘double negation’). The articles presented here show that areal factors have played a significant role in the development of negation strategies in the languages of West Africa and beyond. On the other hand genetic factors seem to be less prominent.

Within a new model of language acquisition this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter this study shows that in many languages this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus within a split-CP model of clause structure a number of micro-cues are formulated taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type subcategory of the elements involved etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children’s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children’s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical cognitive cultural social variational interactional or discursive points of view this fifth volume looks at the field of linguistic pragmatics from a primarily grammatical angle. That is it asks in which particular sense a variety of older and more recent functional (rather than generative) models of grammar relate to the study of language in use: how this affects their general outlook on language structure whether issues of language use inform the very makeup of these models or are merely included as possible research themes and how far the actual integration of pragmatics ultimately goes (is it a module/layer or is the model truly “usage-based”?). Each of the authors presenting these models has taken systematic care to highlight the relevant problems and focus on the implications of considering pragmatic phenomena from the point of view of grammar. Furthermore a limited number of chapters deal with traditional topics in the grammatical literature and specifically those which are called pragmatic because they either are not strictly concerned with truth (semantics) or receive their (truth) value only from an interaction with context. In the introduction these theories and topics are set up against the historical background of a gradually changing attitude on the part of grammarians towards questions of linguistic knowledge and behavior and the role of learning in their relationship.

The history of English writing is to a considerable extent the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts from Ælfric’s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old Middle and Modern English periods this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume.

The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech illustrates how recent findings about primary intersubjectivity participant perception and mirror neurons afford a new understanding of children’s nature dialogue and language.

Based on recent infancy research and the mirror neurons discovery studies of early speech perception comparative primate studies and computer simulations of language evolution this book offers replies to questions as: When and how may spoken language have emerged? How is it that infants so soon after birth become so efficient in their speech perception? What enables 11-month-olds to afford and reciprocate care? What are the steps from infant imitation and simulation of body movements to simulation of mind in conversation partners?

Stein Bråten is founder and chair of the Theory Forum network with some of the world’s leading infancy primate and brain researchers who have contributed to his edited volumes for Cambridge University Press (1998) and John Benjamins Publishing Company (2007). (Series B)