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The articles of this collection cover a wide range of formal syntactic and semantic phenomena. The focus is on a broad array of developmental syntactic phenomena including topics in Argument Structure and Clause-Internal Syntax the DP Domain and Learning Theory. In total the contents of the volume illustrate ways in which theoretically informed linguistic research can explain language behavior in terms that are motivated on independent grounds and point towards new research opportunities to test theoretical claims about the adult model of grammar. The contributions of this volume are inspired by or related to the scholarship of Nina Hyams whose dedication to rigorous theoretically-informed research on language is well represented here.

This work is designed firstly to both provoke theoretical discussion and serve as a practical guide for researchers and students in the field of corpus linguistics and secondly to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus techniques for practitioners of discourse studies. It delves into a wide variety of language topics and areas including metaphor irony evaluation (im)politeness stylistics language change and sociopolitical issues. Each chapter begins with an outline of an area followed by case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes in this area and to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate them. The chapters conclude with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. An Appendix contains a list of currently available resources for corpus research which were used or mentioned in the book.

Everyday language use overflows with discourse-pragmatic features. Their frequency form and function can vary greatly across social groups and change dramatically over time. And yet these features have not figured prominently in studies of language variation and change. The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained into both the structure of synchronic language variation and the interactional mechanisms creating it by subjecting discourse-pragmatic features to systematic variationist analysis. Introducing an innovative methodology that combines principles of variationist linguistics grammaticalisation studies and conversation analysis it explores patterns of variation in the formal encoding of I DON’T KNOW I DON’T THINK and negative polarity tags in a north-east England interview corpus. Speakers strategically exploit the formal variability of these constructions to signal subtle meaning differences and to index social identities closely linked to the variables’ and their variants’ functional compartmentalisation in the variety. The methodology results and implications of this study will be of great interest to scholars working throughout variationist sociolinguistics grammaticalisation and discourse analysis.

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics cognitive linguistics conceptual metaphor studies poetry intermediality and multimodality.

This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia including its contribution to economic growth national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. Each country has two contributions devoted to it: one paper provides an overview of the country’s language policy and its positioning of English and another provides a critical discussion of creative expressions involving the use of English. Taken together the papers in the volume detail the most recent developments concerning the politics of English in Asia.

Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition Struggle and Change is the first book to bring together the topics of language and gender African languages and gender in African contexts and it does so in a descriptive explanatory and critical way. Including fascinating new work and new often challenging data from Botswana Chad Ghana Kenya Nigeria and South Africa this collection looks at some ‘traditional’ uses of language in relation to the gender of its speakers and the gendered nature of the languages themselves; it also identifies and explores social change in terms of both gender and sexuality as reflected in and constructed by language and discourse. The contributions to this volume are accessibly written and will be of interest to students and established academics working on African sociolinguistics and discourse as well as those whose interest is language gender and sexuality.

This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive perceptive and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach — with methods drawn from narratology aesthetics social psychology education and the empirical study of literature — The Art of Sympathy in Fiction will interest scholars in a variety of fields. Its focus is the sympathetic effects of stories and the possible ways these feelings can contribute to what has been called the “moral imagination.” Part I examines the dynamics of readers’ beliefs regarding fictional characters and the influence of those impressions on the emotions that readers experience. The book then turns its attention to sympathy providing a comprehensive definition and considering the ways in which it operates in life and in literature. Part I concludes with a discussion of the narratological and rhetorical features of fictional narratives that theoretically elicit sympathy in readers. Part II applies these theories to four stories that persuade readers to sympathize with characters who seem unsympathetic. Finally based on empirical findings from the responses of adolescent readers Part III considers pedagogical approaches that can help students reflect on emotional experiences that result from reading fiction.

This volume brings together empirical research that explores interaction in a wide range of educational settings. It includes work that takes a cognitive brain-based approach to studying interaction as well as studies that take a social contextual perspective. Interaction is defined quite broadly with many chapters focusing on oral interaction as is typical in the field while other chapters report work that involves interaction between learners and technology. Several studies describe the linguistic and discourse features of interaction between learners and their interlocutors but others demonstrate how interaction can serve other purposes such as to inform placement decisions. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to interaction research investigating interactions with different interlocutors ( learner-learner learner-teacher) in a variety of environments (classrooms interactive testing environments conversation groups) and through different modalities (oral and written face-to-face and technology-mediated).

This book offers fresh perspectives on “shared grammaticalization” a state whereby two or more languages have the source and the target of a grammaticalization process in common. While contact-induced grammaticalization has generated great interest in recent years far less attention has been paid to other factors that may give rise to shared grammaticalization. This book intends to put this situation right by approaching shared grammaticalization from an integrated perspective including areal as well as genealogical and universal motivations and by searching for ways to distinguish between these factors. The volume offers a wealth of empirical facts presented by internationally renowned specialists on the Transeurasian languages (i.e. Japonic Koreanic Tungusic Mongolic and Turkic) — the languages in focus —as well as on various other languages. Shared Grammaticalization will appeal to scholars and advanced students concerned with linguistic reconstruction language contact and linguistic typology and to anyone interested in grammaticalization theory.