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The Translator’s Dialogue: Giovanni Pontiero is a tribute to an outstanding translator of literary works from Portuguese Luso-Brasilian Italian and Spanish into English. The translator introduced authors such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade Manuel Bandeira Clarice Lispector and José Saramago to the English reading world.

Pontiero’s essays shed light on the process of literary translation and its impact on cultural perception. This process is exemplified by Pontiero the translator and analyst some of the authors he collaborated with publishers’ editors and literary critics and finally by an unpublished translation of a short story by José Saramago Coisas.

This volume aims to extend both the range of analyses and the database on nominal classification systems. Previous analyses of nominal classification systems have focussed on two areas: the semantics of the classification system and the role of the system in discourse. In many nominal classification systems there appear to be a significant percentage of nominals with an arbitrary classification. There is a considerable body of literature aimed at elucidating the semantic bases of clasification in such systems thereby reducing the degree of apparent arbitrariness. Contributors to this volume continue this line of enquiry but also propose that arbitrariness in itself has a role from a wider socio-cultural perspective. Previous analyses of the discourse role of classification systems posit that they play a significant role in referential tracking. For the languages surveyed in this volume contributors propose that reference instantiation is an equally significant function and indeed that reference instantiation and tracking cannot be properly divided from one another. This volume provides detailed information on classification in a number of northern Australian languages whose systems are otherwise poorly known.

The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems among others: the history of the interpretation of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation etc. (Series B)

Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies cultural studies cultural anthropology and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe the Caribbean islands Africa and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature the arts and public policy.

Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America Europe and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors.

Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity transculturation and the carnivalesque which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts.

Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture propounded by Antonio Benítez-Rojo and +douard Glissant receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Benítez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice.

Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed Cross-Cultural Studies will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars teachers and advanced students of the Caribbean region. This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer_history_of_literature_in_the_caribbean.pdf

This study examines the clausal noun-modifying construction (NMC) in Japanese a much-discussed construction that embraces what have usually been called relative clause and noun complement constructions. Drawing upon a broad range of naturally-occurring NMCs including types that fall outside the domains of relative clause and noun complement constructions Yoshiko Matsumoto argues for an analysis of NMCs that gives an important role to semantics and pragmatics. The framework in which this approach is presented draws from and further refines concepts of frame semantics. By using a frame semantic definition of semantic integration the author reveals the commonality of diverse types of NMCs in Japanese and posits a tripartite classification of NMCs which is both more comprehensive and more revealing than the traditional dichotomy between relative clause and noun complement constructions.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>As the first comprehensive and systematic study in English of Japanese NMCs with diverse lexical heads this work is further notable for its detailed discussion of the dependence of NMCs on both linguistic and extra-linguistic context.

Standards and Variation in Urban Speech is an examination and exploration of the aims and methods of sociolinguistic investigation based on studies of Scottish urban speech. It criticially examines the implications of the notions ‘vernacular’ ‘standard language’ ‘Received Pronunciation’ ‘social class’ and ‘linguistic insecurity’. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods using examples from comedians’ jokes dialect poetry formal and informal interviews and personal narratives the work illustrates the actual norms that speakers exemplify in various ways.

Most higher animals are said to be territorial as a huge amount of work in ethology has made it clear. Human beings are no exceptions. They tend to occupy a certain space around them where they claim their own presence and exclude others quite naturally. If territory is so prevalent among higher animals including humans then isn't it possible to observe its manifestations in aspects of human language?

Territory of Information starts from this fundamental question and attempts to demonstrate the key function of the concept of territory in the informational structure and syntax of natural language. It offers an analysis of English Japanese and Chinese in terms of territory and shows its fundamental importance in the interface of information and syntax in these languages. Moreover it argues that the concept of territory plays a major role in the evidentiality of a number of languages and in the linguistic structure of politeness. It also makes much reference to discourse and conversational analysis. Thus this is a book which might interest readers concerned with pragmatics in general the relationship between informational structure and syntax evidentiality politeness discourse analysis and conversational analysis.

The Reaching for Mind workshop held at AISB ’95 explicitly addressed itself to the current crisis in Cognitive Science. In particular the issue of how this discipline can address consciousness was a leitmotiv in the workshop. The conclusion seems inescapable that there is a need for two sciences in this area. Cognitive Science can be freed to become a fully-fledged experimental epistemology by the creation of a science of consciousness also encompassing subjectivity. This exciting collection of papers indicates where both these sciences may be heading. (Series B)<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The programme committee of the workshop included: Mike Brady (Oxford); Daniel Dennett (Tufts); Jerry Feldman (Berkeley); John Macnamara (McGill) and Zenon Pylyshyn (Rutgers).<br/>

The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information including figure-ground relations image-schematic structures and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure.In sections two and three papers are presented on cross-categorial polysemy between lexical and grammatical uses of a morpheme and between different grammatical senses and on the relationship between earlier lexical senses and later grammatical ones.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The final section of the volume brings together studies which shed further light on transitivity and argument structure. The study of transitivity necessarily entails exploration of the relationship between syntactic constructions and the pragmatics and semantics conveyed by such constructions.<br/>As a whole this collection of papers gives new evidence on the complexity and motivation of the mapping between linguistic form and function and offers a wealth of new directions for research on the construction of meaning at every level of the sentence.

Conversational narratives provide valuable resources for the discursive construction and invoking of personal and sociocultural identities. As such their sociolinguistic and cultural analysis constitute a high priority in the agenda of discourse studies. This book contributes to the growing line of discourse-analytic research on the dynamic relations between narrative forms and functions and their immediate and wider communicative contexts. The volume draws on a large corpus of spontaneous conversational stories recorded in Greece where everyday stortytelling is a central mode of communication in the community’s interactional contexts and thus a rich site for a meaningful enactment of social stances roles and relations. The study brings to the fore the stories’ text-constitutive mechanisms and explores the ways in which they situate the narrated experiences globally by invoking sociocultural knowledge and expectations and locally by making them sequentially and interactionally relevant to the specific conversational contexts. The stories’ micro- and macro-level analysis richly illustrated with narrative transcripts throughout leads to the uncovery of a global mode of narrative performance which is based on a closed set of recurrent devices. It is argued that the choice or avoidance of this mode is at the heart of the stories’ (re)constitution of a self an other and a sociocultural world. The numerous cases of intergenerational narrative communication (adults-children) shed additional light on the performance’s contextualization aspects and contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the dynamics of oral performances.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Besides students and researchers of discourse analysis sociolinguistics anthropological linguistics narrative analysis and Greek studies this book will also appeal to all those interested in communication and cultural studies.