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New technologies are constantly transforming traditional notions of language use and literacy in online communication environments. While previous research has provided a foundation for understanding the use of new technologies in instructed second language environments few studies have investigated new literacies and electronic discourse beyond the classroom setting. This volume seeks to address this gap by providing corpus-based and empirical studies of electronic discourse analyzing social and linguistic variation as well as communicative practices in chat discussion forums blogs and podcasts. Several chapters also examine the assessment and integration of new literacies. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for researchers teachers and students interested in exploring electronic discourse and new literacies in language learning and teaching.

What words come into your head when you think of SUN? For native English speakers the most common responses are MOON SHINE and HOT and about half of all native speaker responses to SUN are covered by these three words. L2 English speakers are much less obliging and produce patterns of association that are markedly different from those produced by native speakers. Why? What does this tell us about the way L2 speakers' vocabularies grow and develop? This volume provides a user-friendly introduction to a research technique which has the potential to answer some long-standing puzzles about L2 vocabulary. The method is easy to use even for inexperienced researchers but it produces immensely rich data which can be analysed on many different levels. The book explores how word association data can be used to probe the development of vocabulary depth productive vocabulary skills and lexical organisation in L2 speakers.

This is a state-of-the-art volume on lexicography at the beginning of the 21^st century. It also offers proposals for future theoretical and practical work. The contributions inspired by the ground-breaking work of Henning Bergenholtz address topics such as dictionary functions; dictionary users; access routes; dictionary structures; dictionary reviewing; subject-field classifications; data retrieval; corpus lexicography; and collocations and phraseology. The contributors all highly regarded international scholars in the field of lexicography show how the theory of lexicographical functions can extend the forefront of the discipline by focusing on dictionary functions and how these meet the needs of users in various types of user situations. Thereby echoing Bergenholtz’s idea that a dictionary is a tool that can help users solve problems encountered in communicative cognitive and operative situations. This volume is not only of interest to practical and theoretical lexicographers but to anyone interested in lexicography.

Linguistic Cycles are ever present in language change and involve a phrase or word that gradually disappears and is replaced by a new linguistic item. The most well-known cycles involve negatives where an initial single negative such as not is reinforced by another negative such as no thing and subjects where full pronouns are reanalyzed as endings on the verb. This book presents new data and insights on the well-known cyclical changes as well as on less well-known ones such as the preposition auxiliary copula modal and complementation cycles. Part I covers the negative cycle with chapters looking in great detail at the steps that are typical in this cycle. Part II focuses on pronouns auxiliaries and the left periphery. Part III includes work on modals prepositions and complementation. The book ends with a psycholinguistic chapter. This book brings together linguists from a variety of theoretical frameworks and contributes to new directions in work on language change.

This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik’s (1999 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship coordinate symmetries scope ellipsis code-switching and probe-goal relations. Despite the diverse broad range of topics discussed in this volume the papers are connected by a renewed investigation of Frampton & Gutmann’s (2002) vision of a crash-proof syntax. This volume provides new and interesting perspectives on theoretical issues that have challenged the Minimalist Program since its inception and will provide ample food for thought for syntacticians working in the Minimalist tradition and beyond.

Figurative language has been regarded traditionally as situated outside the realm of grammar. However with the advent of Cognitive Linguistics metonymy and metaphor are now recognized as being not only ornamental rhetorical tropes but fundamental figures of thought that shape to a considerable extent the conceptual structure of languages. The present volume goes even beyond this insight to propose that grammar itself is metonymical in nature (Langacker) and that conceptual metonymy and metaphor leave their imprints on lexicogrammatical structure. This thesis is developed and substantiated for a wide array of languages and lexicogrammatical phenomena such as word class meaning and word formation case and aspect proper names and noun phrases predicate and clause constructions and other metonymically and metaphorically motivated grammatical meanings and forms. The volume should be of interest to scholars and students in cognitive and functional linguistics in particular conceptual metonymy and metaphor theory cognitive typology and pragmatics.

This anthology brings together fresh corpus-based research by international scholars. It contrasts southern and northern hemisphere usage on variable elements of morphology and syntax. The nineteen invited papers include topics such as irregular verb parts pronouns modal and quasimodal verbs the perfect tense the progressive aspect and mandative subjunctives. Lexicogrammatical elements are discussed: light verbs (e.g. have a look) informal quantifiers (e.g. heaps of) no-collocations concord with government and other group nouns alternative verb complementation (as with help prevent) zero complementizers and connective adverbs (e.g. however). Selected information-structuring devices are analyzed e.g. there is/are like as a discourse marker final but as a turn-taking device and swearwords. Australian and New Zealand use of hypocoristics and changes in gendered expressions are also analyzed. The two varieties pattern together in some cases in others they diverge: Australian English is usually more committed to colloquial variants in speech and writing. The book demonstrates linguistic endonormativity in these two southern hemisphere Englishes.

John Sinclair’s work is widely known and has had a far-reaching influence particularly in the areas of corpus linguistics lexis phraseology lexicography grammar and discourse analysis. This collection of papers written by former colleagues at Birmingham University looks at some key writings by John Sinclair with the intention of showing why his ideas are of lasting significance. Contributions deal with the Cobuild Project (directed by Sinclair) and its innovative first dictionary; collocation and the Open Choice and Idiom Principles; the interactions between and interdependence of phraseology and grammar; semantic prosody; and the construction of meaning in text. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2 (2007).

This book explores the nature of stative verbs their eventuality structure and the patterns of argument realization. The study shows that there is no single class of stative verbs. Rather several distinct groups of verbs are found: Verbs that undergo a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity; verbs that allow for a stative reading only; and verbs that seem to have an intermediate status (verbs of position and verbs of internal causation). The study concludes that there is a discrete boundary between stative and eventive verbs excluding any intermediate status. Stativity arises because the aspectual operators DO and BECOME are absent in the lexical-semantic structure. Eventivity arises if one of these is present. A minimalist view on argument realization and event structure completes the book: Theta features on the arguments are checked against the aspectual heads within the verb phrase.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in adjacent disciplines such as linguistic pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis psycholinguistics gender and translation studies. The volume effectively offers an overview of the range of phenomena falling in the broad category of ‘conversational humor’ and convincingly argues for the many different functions humor can fulfill bypassing simplistic humor theories reducing humor to one function. All the articles draw on empirical material from different countries and cultures comprising conversations among friends and family talk in workplace situations humor in educational settings and experimental approaches to humor in interaction. The book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of humor studies pragmatics and (socio-)linguistics.

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 interactional or discursive angles this first volume reviews basic notions that pervade the pragmatic literature such as deixis implicitness speech acts context and the like. It situates the field of pragmatics broadly defined as the cognitive social and cultural science of language use in relation to a general concept of communication and the discipline of semiotics. It also touches upon the non-verbal aspects of language use and even ventures a comparison with non-human forms of communication. The introductory chapter moreover explains why a highly diversified field of scholarship such as pragmatics can be regarded as a potentially coherent enterprise.

This collection of articles highlights a selection of on-going research projects. Phonological morphological and syntactic issues are addressed by international experts on Maltese. The diachronic development of Maltese its age-long contact with Italo-Romance and the present diglossic situation with co-official English are the topics of a variety of contributions to this volume. The repercussions that the promotion of Maltese to the status of official working language of the EU has on the Maltese lexicon are discussed. A project on the sociolinguistics of non-native Maltese-English is presented. The problems posed by the creation of electronic resources for Maltese are equally focused upon. The papers amply demonstrate that Maltese Linguistics can stand on its own outside the traditional field of Oriental Studies.

Ce volume se propose d’évaluer la place de Pomponazzi dans la philosophie de la Renaissance à la fois son ancrage dans des traditions médiévales et sa force d’innovation. A côté de contributions sur le De immortalitate animae (1516) ses antécédents les débats qu’il a suscités le volume comprend aussi des interventions sur d’autres questions de philosophie de la nature ou sur la liberté et le destin ainsi qu’une contribution davantage centrée sur l’interprétation qui a été réservée à la pensée de Pomponazzi au début du XXe siècle. Les textes de Pomponazzi et notamment le traité sur l’âme apparaissent ainsi comme des textes frontaliers. Leur étude permet d’évaluer le transfert de certaines thématiques philosophiques médiévales et en particulier de la noétique aristotélicienne alexandriste et averroïste dans le contexte intellectuel de la Renaissance au sein d’une réflexion générale sur le sens anthropologique et éthique de la finitude constitutive de la nature humaine. This book proposes to evaluate the importance and signification of Pietro Pomponazzi in the philosophy of the Renaissance. It considers both its rooting in Medieval traditions and its innovative force. Besides contributions on Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae (1516) its antecedens and the debates that arose the volume contains contributions on other aspects of the philosophy of nature or on liberty and fate and one dedicated to the interpretation of Pomponazzi at the beginning of the twentieth century. So the texts of Pomponazzi and especially his treatise on the soul appear as frontier texts. Their study allows an evaluation of the transfer of some medieval thematics especially of Aristotelian Alexandrinian and Averroist noetics in the intellectual context of Renaissance inside a general reflection upon the anthropological and ethical meaning of the finitude which is constitutive of human nature.

Examining Argumentation in Context: Fifteen studies on strategic maneuvering contains a selection of papers on strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse. Starting point of all of these contributions is that a satisfactory analysis and evaluation of strategic maneuvering is possible only if the argumentative discourse is first situated in the communicative and interactional context in which it occurs. While some of the contributions present general views with regard to strategic maneuvering other contributions report on the results of empirical studies examine strategic maneuvering in a particular legal or political context or highlight the presentational design of strategic maneuvering. Examining Argumentation in Context therefore provides an insightful view of recent developments in the research on strategic maneuvering which is currently prominent in the study of argumentation.

Vocalize-to-Localize? Meerkats do it for specific predators… And babies point with their index finger toward targets of interest at about nine months well before using language-specific that-demonstratives. With what-interrogatives they are universal and as relativizers and complementizers play an important role in grammar construction. Some alarm calls in nonhumans display more than mere localization: semantics and even syntax. Instead of telling another monomodal story about language origin in this volume advocates of representational gestures semantically transparent but with a problematic route toward speech meet advocates of speech with a problematic route toward the lexicon. The present meeting resulted in contributions by 23 specialists in the behaviour and brain of humans including comparative studies in child development and nonhuman primates aphasiology and robotics. The near future will tell us if the present crosstalk — between researchers in auditory and in visual communication systems — will lead to a more integrative framework for understanding the emergence of babbling and pointing two types of neural control whose coordination could pave the way toward the word and syntax.

The contributions to this volume were previously published as Interaction Studies 5:3 (2004) and 6:2 (2005).

This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized repetitive side of language which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted conventionalized pre-fabricated “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae their stylistic distribution within languages and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics besides being a resource in linguistic research the book may be used in courses on discourse structure pragmatics semantics language acquisition and syntax as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

In Early Modern Britain new publication channels were developed and new textual genres established themselves. News discourse became increasingly more important and reached wider audiences with pamphlets as the first real mass media. Newspapers appeared first on a weekly and then on a daily basis. And scientific news discourse in the form of letters exchanged between fellow scholars turned into academic journals. The papers in this volume provide state-of-the art analyses of these developments.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> The first part of the volume contains studies of early newspapers that range from reports of crime and punishment to want ads and from traces of religious language in early newspapers to the use of imperatives. The second part is devoted to pamphlets and provides detailed analyses of news reporting and of impoliteness strategies. The last section is devoted to scientific news discourse and traces the early publication formats in their various manifestations.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 21st and 22nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Stuttgart. The contributions provide insightful discussions of several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of contemporary and historical Germanic languages. The theoretical issues explored include: the left periphery with a number of contributions touching on the pros and contras of cartographic accounts; different aspects of word order and how it arises from movement and clause structure; the interplay of thematic relations and case theory with the realization of DPs; and the treatment of finiteness and modal structures. This book is of interest to syntacticians working in a comparative perspective and to advanced undergraduates.

Ioane Petritsi a twelfth-century Georgian philosopher translated from Greek into Georgian The Elements of Theology of the Neoplatonist Proclus (fifth century) and wrote a Commentary on the entire text with a preface and a postface. Petritsi tried to prove the priority of the Proclean One over all other ontological hypostases its transcendence and its omnipresence together with the thesis that all things depend on the One including even matter. In his Commentary Petritsi also referred to other works of Proclus besides The Elements of Theology as well as to many other ancient Greek philosophers. Although Petritsi’s Commentary is an important milestone in the history of the medieval Christian philosophical interpretations of ancient Platonism to date this text written in Old Georgian has remained almost unknown for western scholarship. This is the first time that the complete text of Petritsi’s Commentary is being published in a western language. The present book provides a German translation of the complete text with an introduction notes indices and bibliography. Der mittelalterliche georgische Philosoph Ioane Petrizi übersetzte im 12. Jahrhundert die Stoicheiosis theologike des Neuplatonikers Proclus (5. Jh.) ins Alt-Georgische und verfasste zu dem gesamten Text der Stoicheiosis einen umfangreichen Kommentar den er zusätzlich mit einem Prolog und einem Epilog versah. Petrizi versucht in seinem Kommentar die ontologische Vorrangigkeit des Proklischen Einen über alle anderen Hypostasen ebenso zu beweisen wie dessen Transzendenz bei gleichzeitiger Allanwesenheit im Seinskontinuum. Zudem vertritt er die These dass alle Dinge vom Einen abhängen sogar die Materie. Dabei berücksichtigt Petrizi neben der Stoicheiosis auch andere Werke Proclus’ ebenso wie zahlreiche weitere Texte antiker griechischer Philosophen. Damit wird Petrizis Kommentar zu einer bedeutenden Schrift für die Erforschung und das Verständnis der mittelalterlichen christlichen Philosophie und ihrer Aneignung des (spät-)antiken Platonismus. Trotz seiner Bedeutung ist Petrizis Text von der westlichen Forschung bisher kaum zur Kenntnis genommen worden. Die vorliegende Übersetzung ins Deutsche ist die erste komplette Übersetzung dieses Textes in eine westliche Sprache überhaupt. Neben der Übersetzung bietet diese Ausgabe eine Einleitung Anmerkungen Indices und eine Bibliografie.

Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue shows contemporary oral history at work in a variety of contexts levels and engagements. The issues developed in the book correspond to different stages of research: preparing and conducting the interview evaluating and analyzing the collected material publishing in the broad sense of speaking to different audiences and finally addressing the dilemmas and philosophical reflections with an emphasis on ethics. This book aims to address oral history from two perspectives. The first is the perspective of oral history as dialoguing the second is the presentation of concrete situations research persons and their own stories as built on the solid ground of discourse and within a concrete context. The chapters embody the experiences of the authors their efforts and successes as well as their failures in dialoguing with narrators. Unveiled in this book is the extensive breadth of contemporary oral history work bridging epistemological and methodological horizons.

Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity recursive-embedded clauses has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This volume coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 2008 tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive instrument of communication assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny the individual endeavor directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity and the evolutionary relevance of diachrony ontogeny and pidginization is argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly several of the contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not in itself an adaptive target but rather the by-product of two distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.

This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world – UK Pakistan US South Africa Hungary Korea Mexico – to illustrate and celebrate the many ways in which Roz Ivanič has advanced the academic study of writing. Focusing on writing in different formal contexts of education from primary through to further and higher education in a range of national contexts the twenty one original contributions in the book critically engage with theoretical and empirical issues raised in Ivanič’s influential body of work. In their exploration of writers’ struggles with the demands of dominant literacy the authors significantly extend understandings of writing practices in formal institutions. Organized around three themes central to Ivanič’s work – creativity and identity; pedagogy; and research methodologies – the twelve chapters and nine personal and scholarly reflections reveal the powerful ways in which Ivanič’s work has influenced thinking in the field of writing and continues to open up avenues for future questioning and research.

Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of linguistics - phonetics phonology morphology syntax typology and the ethnography of communication. Such languages have however received comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented language communities can provide our understanding of language variation and change will be incomplete. To help fill this gap and develop broader viewpoints this anthology presents 21 original fieldwork-based studies of a wide range of indigenous languages in the framework of quantitative sociolinguistics. The studies illustrate how such understudied communities can provide new insights into language variation and change with respect to socioeconomic status gender age clan lack of a standard exogamy contact with dominant majority languages internal linguistic factors and many other topics.

This collection of papers discusses some of the major syntactic properties of Brazilian Portuguese from a minimalist perspective. The volume focuses on movement and empty category issues and brings new empirical material on a variety of topics (null subjects and finite control possessive and existential constructions factive constructions relative clauses null objects and stress shift preposition duplication VP topicalization and ellipsis). The book is of interest to a wide spectrum of linguists working on theoretical and comparative syntax.

This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia on through the Aleutian Islands Alaska and Canada as far as Greenland. The aim of the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in general linguistic terms particularly with regard to polysynthesis. The degree of variation from more to less polysynthesis is evaluated within Eskaleut (Inuit-Yupik vs. Aleut) even in previously insufficiently explored domains such as pragmatics and use in context – including language contact and learning situations – and over typologically related language families such as Athabascan Chukotko-Kamchatkan Iroquoian Uralic and Wakashan.