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Linking actual instances of language use with structures of social power in francophone Belgium Gross outlines the history and contemporary configuration of rod puppetry in Liège. The analysis of this working class performance art moves between what occurs on and off stage. As puppeteers speak in other voices sometimes in Walloon and sometimes in French they create a sociolinguistic model based on 19th century renditions of medieval texts the voices of past puppeteers and the language that surrounds them. The high level of linguistic reflexivity created by the regional language movement has led to frequent metalinguistic and metapragmatic commentaries within the puppet shows. This complex speech genre embedded in social context shows the influence of identity struggles: from local class oppositions to imperial designs abroad. Keeping a tight focus on language Speaking in Other Voices examines the process of entextualization and recontextualization as stories of war and religion are transmitted to succeeding generations.

Research on the interplay between language structure and language use has shown that grammar is shaped maintained and modified by language use. In this view then grammar is not seen as existing apart from language use but rather as a set of recurrent grammaticized patterns of discourse. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book focuses on syntactic structuring in Finnish from the viewpoint of language use. The author sets out to study syntactic structures in their local contexts in order to discover the more global patterns and constraints on the use of these structures. The coding strategies point to the clause core as the locus of syntactic structuring: this is where syntactic relations emerge most clearly. It is shown that the key to understanding the coding of the core syntactic relations is the category of person. The clause core also shows strong intonational unity as it is most often presented in one intonation unit. Furthermore analysis of spoken discourse shows the robustness of the category of noun phrase both as a clausal constituent and as a free syntactic unit the free NP.

This volume brings together a selection of articles presented at 'Going Romance' 1999. The articles focus on current syntactic and semantic issues in various Romance languages including Catalan French Italian Spanish Portuguese and a number of Northern Italian dialects. A large number of articles focus on negation which was the theme of the workshop at Going Romance 1999 but other topics investigated include Wh- in situ free relatives exclamatives lexical decomposition and thematic structure unaccusative inversion and temporal existential constructions. Most articles are comparative in nature relating the different syntactic and semantic properties of both Romance and non-Romance languages to principles of Universal Grammar. The theoretical frameworks adopted in the various articles are diverse ranging from the Principles and Parameters framework to HPSG.

This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers originally presented at the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages representing the areas of syntax semantics their interfaces and second language acquisition. The topics addressed include movement (both wh- and head-movement) control issues of second language acquisition related to the Determiner Phrase the effect of word order and syntactic simplification in second language acquisition adverbials syntactic constraints on access to lexical structure a semantic characterization of the subjunctive in Spanish and impersonal constructions and impersonal reflexive pronouns. The papers in this volume not only discuss issues related to most of the major Romance languages (French Italian Portuguese Rumanian and Spanish) and a Portuguese Creole but also include comparisons with languages from other families (Marathi Bulgarian Polish and Slovenian). This collection of papers illustrates the richness in the field of Romance linguistics and the value of cross-linguistic research and multi-modular approaches.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Umbrüche ist keine lückenlose Darstellung aller Wendepunkte in der Philosophiegeschichte sondern eine Sammlung von Beiträgen die sowohl bekannte Neuanfänge als auch bislang wenig beachtete Denkbewegungen analysieren ­ bis hin zu Auseinandersetzungen mit Anregungen die für sich selbst genommen Umbrüche bedeuten als solche jedoch nicht historisch wirksam werden konnten. Folgende Autoren bzw. Themen werden berücksichtigt: die Sprach- und Erkenntnistheorie Platons Naturphilosophie und Philosophiekritik bei Augustin Meister Eckharts Predigt 21 wissenschaftstheoretische und ontologische Neuansätze bei Adam de Wodeham Hervaeus Natalis und Wilhelm von Ockham atheistische Tendenzen im 14. Jahrhundert Niccolò Machiavellis politische Philosophie philosophiehistorische Überlegungen zum Epochenbegriff Kants kritische Transzendentalphilosophie und ihre Wende bei Fichte die Bedeutung der Französischen Revolution für den Freiheitsbegriff Fichtes die Vollendung des Anselmianischen Arguments durch Schellings Begriff des Überseienden die Sprachphilosophie W. von Humboldts sowie die Dionysius-Pseudo-Areopagita-Rezeption bei Hugo Ball.

Beiträgen von: Burkhard Mojsisch; Arne Malmsheimer; Udo Reinhold Jeck; Franz-Bernhard Stammkötter; Jens Maassen; Christian Rode; Martin Lenz; Olaf Pluta; Bernhard Milz; Christiane Schultz; Christoph Asmuth; Annette Sell; Orrin F. Summerell; Klaus Kahnert; Matthias Bloch.The volume Umbrüche ­ the German word means “radical changes” ­ presents not a seamless account of the many turning points in the history of philosophy but instead contributions individually reflecting on both well-known and little regarded crises in the development of philosophical thought including some whose promise was never fully realized. At issue are the following authors and themes: Plato’s epistemology and theory of language Augustine‘s philosophy of nature and his critique of philosophy Meister Eckhart’s German sermon 21 Adam de Wodeham’s Hervaeus Natalis’s and William of Ockham’s revolutionary theories of science and ontology; atheistic tendencies in the 14th century; Niccolò Machiavelli’s political philosophy; philosophical-historical deliberations on the concept of an ‘epoch’; Kant’s transcendental philosophy and its reception and change by Fichte; the significance of the French Revolution for Fichte’s concept of freedom; the culmination of the Anselmian argument in Schelling’s concept of what is ‘beyond being’; Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language and Hugo Ball’s reception of Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita.

Language centres serve an important role in the development and implementation of language policy and in supporting language teachers. This book describes five language centres the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (London) the European Centre for Modern Languages (Graz) the Regional Language Centre (Singapore) the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC Washington DC) and the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Languages (CALL Brisbane). These contrasting centres provide the basis for a discussion of the roles functions and management of language centres and the challenges facing such centres (and universities in general) arising from tensions between the pursuit of academic excellence and the demands of commercialisation and economic rationalism. The author holds a chair in applied linguistics in Griffith University and has written extensively on language policy and its implementation and on language assessment. He has established and directed three language centres since the mid-1980s including CALL since 1990 and is an Adjunct Fellow of NFLC.

The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme) 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old) 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized) 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded) 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized) 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed) 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated) 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment Focus etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length with linguistic illustrations.

Recent developments in this field of small corpus studies largely brought about by the personal computer have yielded remarkable insights into the nature and use of real language. This book presents work by a number of leading researchers in the field and covers a series of topics directly related to language teaching and language research. The ultimate aim of this book is to encourage the exploitation of small corpora by the ELT profession to make language learning more effective. In addition to descriptions of the basic corpus analysis tools chapters in the collection cover syllabus and materials design comparisons of different genres descriptions of local and functional grammars compilation and use of learner corpora and making cross-linguistic comparisons. The message of this collection is that language use is purposeful and culture specific and that small corpus analysis is an effective method of linguistic investigation.

Preface by: John Sinclair;

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation diachronic change variability child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First the content of people’s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective evaluative statements dominated by the use of pronouns copulas and intransitive clauses. Second the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

This introduction to the dissipative quantum model of brain and to its possible implications for consciousness studies is addressed to a broad interdisciplinary audience. Memory and consciousness are approached from the physicist point of view focusing on the basic observation that the brain is an open system continuously interacting with its environment. The unavoidable dissipative character of the brain functioning turns out to be the root of the brain’s large memory capacity and of other memory features such as memory association memory confusion duration of memory. The openness of the brain implies a formal picture of the world which is modeled on the same brain image: a sort of brain copy or “Double” where world objectiveness and the brain implicit subjectivity are conjugated. Consciousness is seen to arise from the permanent “dialogue” of the brain with its Double. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The author’s narration of his (re-)search gives a cross-over of the physics of elementary particles and condensed matter and the brain’s basic dynamics. This dynamic interplay makes for a “satisfying feeling of the unity of knowledge”. (Series A)