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This book describes new methodological and technological approaches to corpus building and presents recent research based on the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. This is a large monitor corpus of contemporary Norwegian language compiled through daily harvesting of web newspapers. The book gives an overview of the corpus and its system architecture and presents tools used for tasks such as text harvesting annotation topic classification and extraction and frequency profiling of new words and phrases. Among the innovative technologies is Corpuscle a corpus query engine and management system which is flexible enough to handle very large corpora in an efficient way. The individual research contributions based on the corpus explore different aspects of Norwegian including the occurrence of anglicisms neologisms and terminology and the use of metonymy and metaphor in newspaper language. The book also describes an innovative method of applying correspondence analysis and implicational analysis to investigate interdependencies between morphosyntactic variants.

This is a comprehensive guidebook to the quantitative methods needed for Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). It provides a systematic description of the various statistical tests used in Corpus Linguistics which can be used in translation research. In Part 1 Theoretical Explorations the interplay between quantitative and qualitative methodologies is explored. Part 2 Essential Corpus Studies describes how to undertake quantitative studies with a suitable level of technical and relevant case studies. Part 3 Quantitative Explorations of Literary Translations looks at translations of classic works by Cao Xueqin James Joyce and other authors. Finally Part 4 on Translation Lexis uses a variety of techniques new to translation studies including multivariate analysis and game theory. This book is aimed at students and researchers of corpus linguistics translation studies and quantitative linguistics. It will significantly advance current translation studies in terms of methodological innovation and will fill in an important gap in the development of quantitative methods for interdisciplinary translation studies.

How do participants display affectivity in social interaction? Based on recordings of authentic everyday conversations and radio phone-ins this study offers a fine-grained analysis of how recipients of affect-laden informings deploy sound objects i.e. interjections (oh ooh and ah) and paralinguistic signals (whistle and clicks) for responsive displays of affectivity. Examining the use of such sound objects across a number of interactional activities including news telling troubles talk complaining assessments and repair the study provides evidence that the sound pattern and sequential placement of sound objects systematically contribute to their specific meaning-making in interaction i.e. the management of sequence organisation and interactional relevancies (e.g. affiliation). Presenting an in-depth analysis of a little researched area of language use from an interactional linguistic perspective the book will be of theoretical and methodological interest to an audience with a background in linguistics sociology and conversational studies.

The fascinating question of the origins and evolution of language has been drawing a lot of attention recently not only from linguists but also from anthropologists evolutionary biologists and brain scientists. This groundbreaking book explores the cultural side of language evolution. It proposes a new overarching framework based on linguistic selection and self-organization and explores it in depth through sophisticated computer simulations and robotic experiments. Each case study investigates how a particular type of language system can emerge in a population of language game playing agents and how it can continue to evolve in order to cope with changes in ecological conditions. Case studies cover on the one hand the emergence of concepts and words for proper names color terms names for bodily actions spatial terms and multi-dimensional words. The second set of experiments focuses on the emergence of grammar specifically case grammar for expressing argument structure functional grammar for expressing different uses of spatial relations internal agreement systems for marking constituent structure morphological expression of aspect and quantifiers expressed as articles. The book is ideally suited as study material for an advanced course on language evolution and it will be of interest to anyone who wonders how human languages may have originated.

Author Representations in Literary Reading investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading which they use to create an image of the text’s author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences including literary studies and psychology.

Adverb positions vary within a single language as well as across diverse languages. Based on the study of adverbs in English French and German this monograph shows that the distribution of adverbs is influenced by various factors at distinct levels of linguistic representation – comprising semantics syntax phonology and information structure – which interact in determining adverb positions. The results of the investigation are formulated within the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory which captures the complex interaction of these factors by hierarchically ranked constraints deriving cross-linguistic variation of adverb positions by differences in the language-specific constraint hierarchies. The book is divided into two parts: While Part I examines adverb positions in general Part II investigates under which circumstances an adverb may attach to a phonetically empty constituent in the languages under discussion. The book appeals to a linguistic audience interested in Germanic and Romance languages as well as in theoretical syntax in general.

Language acts are acts of identity and linguistic variation reflects the multifaceted construction of verbal alternatives for transmitting social meaning where style-shifting represents our ability to take up different social positions due to its potential for linguistic performance rhetorical stance-taking and identity projection.Traditional variationist conceptualizations of style-shifting as a primarily responsive phenomenon seem unable to account for all stylistic choices. In contrast more recent formulations see stylistic variation as initiative creative and strategic in personal and interpersonal identity construction and projection making a significant contribution to our understanding of this aspect of sociolinguistic variation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In this volume social constructivist approaches to style-shifting are further developed by bringing together research which suggests that people make stylistic choices aimed at conveying (and achieving) a particular social categorization sociolinguistic meaning and/or to project a specific positioning in society. Therefore there is a need we collectively argue to adopt permeable and flexible multidimensional multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to speaker agency that take into consideration not only reactive but also proactive motivations for stylistic variation and where individuals – rather than groups – and their strategies are the main focus when examining style-shifting in public.<br/>This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the areas of sociolinguistics dialectology social psychology anthropology and sociology.

Since the publication of the still very valuable Biblioteca histórica de la filología by Cipriano Muñoz y Manzano conde de la Viñaza (Madrid 1893) our knowledge of the history of the study of the Spanish language has grown considerably. It has been the purpose of BICRES I (from the early beginnings to 1600) published in 1994 to bring together already available bibliographical information with the more recent research findings scattered in many places books and articles. BICRES II (covering the 1601–1700 period) followed in 1999 and BICRES III (including period 1701-1800) was published in 2005.

Now the fourth volume arranged according to the same principles as those guiding the preceding volumes and covering the years from 1801 to 1860 has become available.

Years of research in the major libraries of Spain and other European countries have gone into this new bibliography and relative sources of the Americas have also been covered in order to offer — in an as exhaustive as possible fashion — a description of all Spanish grammars and dictionaries histories of the Spanish language as well as studies devoted to particular facets of its evolution during the years 1801-1860.

BICRES IV brings together in chronological order more than 3279 titles. Access to the bibliographical information is facilitated by several detailed indexes such as a short title index a listing of printers publishers and places of production and an author index.

This volume provides a first systematic comprehensive account of English in Southeast Asia (SEA) based on current research by leading scholars in the field. The volume first provides a systematic account of the linguistic features across all sub-varieties found within each country. It also has a section dedicated to the historical context and language planning policies to provide a background to understanding the development of the linguistic features covered in Part I and finally the vibrancy of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic realities that govern actual language in use in a wide variety of domains such as the law education popular culture electronic media and actual pragmatic encounters are also given due coverage. This volume also includes an extensive bibliography of works on English in SEA thus providing a useful and valuable resource for language researchers linguists classroom educators policy makers and anyone interested in the topic of English in SEA or World Englishes as a whole.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is being encouraged as part of a major overhaul of the entire school languages curriculum in New Zealand. However teachers often struggle with understanding what TBLT is and how to make TBLT work in classrooms. Using the stories that emerged from a series of interviews with teachers (the curriculum implementers) and with advisors (the curriculum leaders) this book highlights the possibilities for TBLT innovation in schools. It also identifies the constraints and proposes how these might be addressed. The result is a book that whilst rooted in a particular local context provides a valuable sourcebook of teacher stories that have relevance for a wide range of people working in a diverse range of contexts. This book will be of genuine interest to all those who wish to understand more about TBLT innovation and the opportunities and challenges it brings.