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Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally fillers can function as a pragmatic tool in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.

This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes erosion (uni)directionality the relation between grammaticalization and constructions subjectification and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control clitics reciprocal markers pronouns and agreement markers gender markers auxiliaries aspectual categories intensifying adjectives and determiners and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties German Dutch Italian Spanish French Slavonic languages and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.

The concept of theory of mind (ToM) a hot topic in cognitive psychology for the past twenty-five years has gained increasing importance in the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. However even though the relationship between ToM and verbal communication is now recognized the extent causality and full implications of this connection remain mostly to be explored. This book presents a comprehensive discussion of the interface between language communication and theory of mind and puts forward an innovative proposal regarding the role of discourse connectives for this interface. The proposed analysis of connectives is tested from the perspective of their acquisition using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and controlled experiments thus placing the study of connectives within the emerging framework of experimental pragmatics.

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 cultural variational interactional or discursive angles this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’ viz. linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.

This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic focus contrastivity givenness anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts dislocations reflexives null subjects prosodic features interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan English French Georgian German Hebrew Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.

Somewhere and somehow in the 5 to 7 million years since the last common ancestors of humans and the great apes our ancestors “got” language. The authors of this volume all agree that there was no single mutation or cultural innovation that took our ancestors directly from a limited system of a few vocalizations (primarily innate) and gestures (some learned) to language. They further agree to use the term “protolanguage” for the beginnings of an open system of symbolic communication that provided the bridge to the use of fully expressive languages rich in both lexicon and grammar. But here consensus ends and the theories presented here range from the compositional view that protolanguage was based primarily on words akin to the nouns and verbs etc. we know today with only syntax lacking to the holophrastic view that protolanguage used protowords which had no meaningful subunits which might nonetheless refer to complex but significantly recurrent events.

The present volume does not decide the matter but it does advance our understanding. The lack of any direct archaeological record of protolanguage might seem to raise insuperable difficulties. However this volume exhibits the diversity of methodologies that can be brought to bear in developing datasets that can be used to advance the debate.

These articles were originally published as Interaction Studies 9:1 (2008).

In this volume Germen de Haan gives a multi-faceted view of the syntax sociolinguistics and phonology of West-Frisian. The author discusses distinct aspects of the syntax of verbs in Frisian: finiteness and Verb Second embedded root phenomena the verbal complex verbal complementation and complementizer agreement. Because Frisian has minority language status and is of interest to sociolinguists the author reviews the linguistic changes in Frisian under the influence of the dominant Dutch language and more generally reflects on how to deal with contact-induced change in grammar. Finally in three phonological articles the author discusses nasalization in Frisian the putatively symmetrical vowel inventory of Frisian and the variation between schwa + sonorant consonants and syllabic sonorant consonants.

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care therapy and city council meetings they often incorporate gesture prosody and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics distributed cognition and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. New Adventures in Language and Interaction gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff Gumperz and their co-workers.

This book provides a thoroughly worked out and systematic presentation of an interpretivist position in the philosophy of mind of the view that having mental properties is a matter of interpretation. Bruno Mölder elaborates and defends a particular version of interpretivism the ascription theory which explicates the possession of mental states with contents in terms of their canonical ascribability and shows how it can withstand various philosophical challenges. Apart from a defence of the ascription theory from the objections commonly directed against interpretivism the book provides a critical analysis of major alternative accounts of mental state possession as well as the interpretivist ideas originating from Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. The viability of the approach is demonstrated by showing how one can treat mental causation as well as the faculties closely connected with consciousness – perception and the awareness of one’s own mental states – in the interpretivist framework. (Series A)

Semantic relations are at the core of any representational system and are keys to enable the next generation of information processing systems with semantic and reasoning capabilities. Acquisition description and formalization of semantic relations are fundamentals in computer-based systems where natural language processing is required. Probing Semantic Relations provides a state of the art of current research trends in the area of knowledge extraction from text using linguistic patterns. First published as a Special Issue of Terminology 14:1 (2008) the current book emphasizes how definitional knowledge is conveyed by conceptual and semantic relations such as synonymy causality hypernymy (generic–specific) and meronymy (part–whole). Showing the difficulties and successes of pattern-based approaches the book illustrates current and future challenges in knowledge acquisition from text. This book provides new perspectives to researchers and practitioners in terminology knowledge engineering natural language processing and semantics.