Browse Books

Bidirectional Optimality Theory (BiOT) emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics‑semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the centre of BiOT is the insight that this optimisation has to take place both in production and interpretation and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal form–meaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition historical linguistics phonology syntax and typology. This book provides a state of the art overview of these developments. It collects nine chapters by leading scientists in the field.

From the 16th century onwards Europeans encountered languages in the Americas Africa and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document and all of them witness their authors’ attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia Tamil four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context and its linguistic context is analyzed with particular attention to orthography the parts of speech system morphology and syntax. Whenever possible pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

The articles assembled in Semblance and Signification explore linguistic and literary structures from a range of theoretical perspectives with a view to understanding the extent prevalence productivity and limitations of iconically grounded forms of semiosis. With the complementary examination of large theoretical issues extensive corpus analysis in several modern languages such as Italian Japanese Sign Language and English and applied close studies across a range of artistic media this volume brings a fresh understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of iconicity. If primary and secondary modelling systems are rarely studied in tandem it is clear from this volume that their fruitful juxtaposition yields striking insight into the cognitive concerns that pervade current semiotic research.

Jiří Levý’s seminal work The Art of Translation considered a timeless classic in Translation Studies is now available in English. Having drawn on adjacent disciplines the methodology of Czech functional sociosemiotic structuralism and the state-of-the art in the West Levý synthesized his findings and experience in the field presenting them in a reader-friendly book which combines the approaches of a theoretician systemic analyst historian critic teacher practitioner and populariser. Although focused on literary translation from theoretical descriptive and historical perspectives it presents a conceptualization of a general theory addressing a number of issues discussed today. The ‘practical’ mission of the book as a theory extending to practice is based on the same historical-dialectic affinity of methods norms functions and values accounting for the translator’s agency and other contextual agents involved in the communication process. The book will be useful to translators researchers students and teachers in Translation and Literary Studies.

<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners which agglutinated to nouns resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation from predicative in French to argumental in MC and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity and the mapping of their form and function.

Cognitive Linguistics is not a unified theory of language but rather a set of flexible and mutually compatible theoretical frameworks. Whether these frameworks can or should stabilize into a unified theory is open to debate. One set of contributions to the volume focuses on evidence that strengthens the basic tenets of CL concerning e.g. non-modularity meaning and embodiment. A second set of chapters explores the expansion of the general CL paradigm and the incorporation of theoretical insights from other disciplines and their methodologies – a development that could lead to competing and mutually exclusive theories within the CL paradigm itself. The authors are leading experts in cognitive grammar cognitive pragmatics metaphor and metonymy theory quantitative corpus linguistics functional linguistics and cognitive psychology. This volume is therefore of great interest to scholars and students wishing to inform themselves about the current state and possible future developments of Cognitive Linguistics.

This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text. When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. This volume represents the first collection of papers that focus on the specific properties of language contact through multilingual discourse production. It brings together approaches by historical linguists language contact researchers and translation scholars thus presenting the topic in its full variety and providing valuable suggestions for further research in this emerging field of study.

This edited volume constitutes the first serious sustained examination of the study of children’s books for children aged from 0 to 3 with contributions by scholars working in different domains and attempting to assess the recognition of the role and influence of children’s literature on the cognitive linguistic psychological and aesthetic development of young children. This collection achieves a balance between theoretical empirical historical and cross-cultural approaches by examining the broad range of children’s books for children under three years of age ranging from early-concept books through wimmelbooks and ABC books for small children to picture books that support the young child’s acquisition of behavioral norms. Most importantly the chapters proffer new insights into the strong relationship between children’s books for young children and emergent literacy drawing on current research in children’s literature research visual literacy cognitive psychology language acquisition picture theory and pedagogy.

It has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields. Here “dialogue” has become a buzzword that promises democratic participatory processes of mutual learning and knowledge co-production. But what does “dialogue” actually entail in the fields in which it is practised and how can we analyse those practices in ways that take account of their complexities?

The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory action research and science and technology studies.

It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how dialogue is enacted in the fields of planned communication public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical reflexive approach is taken that interrogates the complexities tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of “dialogue” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of the dialogic turn.

This monograph sets out to derive the effects of standard constraints on displacement like the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) and the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED) from more basic principles in a minimalist approach. Assuming that movement via phase edges is possible only in the presence of edge features on phase heads simple restrictions can be introduced on when such edge features can be inserted derivationally. The resulting system is shown to correctly predict MLC/CED effects (including certain exceptions like intervention without c-command and melting). In addition it derives operator-island effects a restriction on extraction from verb-second clauses and island repair by ellipsis. The approach presupposes that syntactic operations apply in a fixed order: Timing emerges as crucial. Thus the book provides new arguments for a strictly derivational organization of syntax. Accordingly it should be of interest not only to all syntacticians working on islands but more generally to all scholars interested in the overall organization of grammar.