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This book explores the current state of Spanish sociolinguistics and its contribution to theories of language variation and change from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It offers original analyses on a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from different formal experimental and corpus-based standpoints. The volume is organized around six thematic sections: (i) Cutting-edge Methodologies in Sociolinguistics; (ii) Bilingualism; (iii) Language Acquisition; (iv) Phonological Variation; (v) Morpho-Syntactic Variation; and (vi) Lexical Variation. As a whole this collection reflects an array of approaches and analyses that show how in its variation across speakers speech communities linguistic contexts communicative situations dialects and time the Spanish language provides an immense wealth of data to challenge accepted linguistic views and shape new theoretical proposals in the field of language variation and change. Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis represents a significant contribution to the growing field of Spanish sociolinguistics.

This volume makes important contributions to the growing body of descriptive and theoretical studies in Arabic linguistics. It focuses on the rich linguistic work being done on Arabic dialects. The papers on individual dialects draw attention to the micro-variation that exists emphasize that they do not comprise a uniform group and reveal the implications of dialectal variation for linguistic theory. The chapters are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology syntax and sociolinguistics. They address first and second language acquisition historical linguistics phonetics aspects of negation light verb constructions raising verbs and sociolinguistic variation. The book is indispensable reading for those working in dialect description the analysis of Arabic and the Semitic languages and linguistic theory more generally.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations while being adapted to target audience’s preferences to a large extent are clearly susceptible to source language interference when it comes to more fine-grained differences. The book discusses which general factors determine the degree of impact of source language features on translations and also comments on the possibility of source language influence on target language norms via translations. The book is of interest to researchers and students in a variety of fields such as pragmatics translation studies genre analysis and stylistics.

This unique collection of articles in honor of Marianne Mithun represents the very latest in research on language contact and language change in the Indigenous languages of the Americas. The book aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into how and why languages change especially with regard to contact phenomena in languages of North America Meso-America and South America. The individual chapters cover a broad range of topics including sound change morphosyntactic change lexical semantics grammaticalization language endangerment and discourse-pragmatic change. With chapters from distinguished scholars and talented newcomers alike this book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in internally- and externally-motivated language change.

Nasality whether part of a consonant or vowel has certain phonetic and phonological characteristics that lead to outcomes seen time and again in languages with and without common ancestries. Spanish and Portuguese constitute a particularly fruitful language pairing for studying phonological aspects of synchronic and diachronic variation given their intimate relationship as well as the array of dialectal variation in each. This research monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of nasals and nasalization in Spanish and Portuguese with a special focus on the role of perception in order to provide insight into how perception informs models of phonetics phonology and language change. Of interest to researchers and advanced students alike this volume integrates phonetic and phonological models of speech perception and production and discusses these with regards to original empirical research on the perception of nasal place features and vowel nasalization by listeners of Peninsular Spanish Cuban Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

This third volume of our Ute language collection contains the Ute dictionary. It opens with several introductory chapters that link the dictionary to our <i>Ute Reference Grammar</i> (2011) and explain the structure and use of the dictionary. The bulk of the information on the meaning and usage of Ute words is then given in the Ute-English part. The English-Ute part next serves primarily as a search-and-reference tool. A short section on traditional semantic-cultural fields follows. Ute is a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Numic sub-family. Together with its northern dialects (Southern Paiute Uintah White River) it should be considered a single language Núuchi ("of the people") or Núu-'apaghapi ("the people's speech"). While our work was done primarily in the southern dialects (Southern Ute Ute Mountain Uncompaghre) we have included as many words as could be safely extracted from Powel's and Smith's work on the northern dialects as well as some from Sapir's work (1931) on Northern Ute adjusting them to Southern-dialect pronunciation. This brings the work as close as one could hope at this time to a comprehensive all-Ute dictionary a task that yet remains to be done. We have tried to emphasize in the Ute-English entries the historical and derivational connectivity of Ute vocabulary and its gradual growth and expansion. This is also underscored in the introductory chapter on word derivation. While this work remains incomplete we hope it can be some day expanded into an all-inclusive Ute dictionary and will help the people – Núuchiu – preserve their language and culture.

Mixing metaphors in speech writing and even gesture is traditionally viewed as a sign of inconsistency in thought and language. Despite the prominence of mixed metaphors there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively explain why people mix their metaphors so frequently and in the particular ways they do. This volume brings together a distinguished group of linguists psychologists and computer scientists who tackle the issue of how and why mixed metaphors arise and what communicative purposes they may serve. These scholars almost unanimously argue that mixing metaphors is a natural consequence of common metaphorical thought processes highlighting important complexities of the metaphorical mind. <i>Mixing Metaphor</i> for the first time offers new critical empirical and theoretical insights on a topic that has long been ignored within interdisciplinary metaphor studies.

This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian Bulgarian Armenian English Norwegian Hindi) Hamito-Semitic (Berber Zenaga Berber Arabic varieties Neo-Aramaic) African (Wolof Langi) Asian (Badaga Korean Mongolian languages – Khalkha Buriat Kalmuck – Thaï Tibetic languages) Amerindian (Yucatec Maya Sikuani) Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality on pragmatics on areal linguistics and on typology.

This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

This volume invites the reader into the world of pragmatic and discourse studies in Japanese popular culture. Through “character-speak” the book analyzes quoted speech in light (graphic) novels the effeminate <i>onee kotoba</i> in talk shows narrative character in <i>keetai</i> (mobile phone) novels floating whispers in manga and fictionalized dialects in television drama series. Explorations into conversational interaction internal monologue rhetorical figures intertextuality and the semiotic mediation between verbal and visual signs reveal how speakers manipulate language in performing playful “characters” and “characteristics”. Most prominent in the discourse of Japanese popular culture is its “fluid orality”. We find the essential oral nature in and across genres of Japanese popular culture and observe seamless transitions among styles and speech variations. This fluidity is understood as a feature of polyphonic speech initiated not by the so-called ideal singular speaker but by a multiple and often shifting interplay of one’s speaking selves performing as various characters. Challenging traditional (Western) linguistic theories founded on the concept of the autonomous speaker this study ventures into open and embracing pragmatic and discourse studies that inquire into the very nature of our speaking selves.