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An important tool for scientific study in any field is a formal language in which the phenomena can be described and hypotheses formulated. In this book a formal notation is developed for the description of the cognitive structure of arguments. The analyses based on this notation are more fine-grained than the analyses in previous attempts and they are applicable not only to arguments but to all types of moves in a discourse. Further the notational system provides a basis for the description of relations between arguments and the structure of the discourse as a whole. In the final chapter some empirical studies of retention of arguments in memory and of précis writing are reported based on hypotheses formulated in terms of the notational system.

This book investigates the notion of conversational dominance in depth and seeks to establish a systematic method of analysing it. It also offers a new insight into the role of gender and the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms in the first and second language conversations among native speakers of Japanese.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Drawing upon a critical synthesis of insights from several different fields including Conversation Analysis the Birmingham school of discourse analysis and dialogical analysis the author proposes an innovative analytical framework for operationalising the concept of dominance in conversation. She then applies this framework to the empirical analysis of Japanese speakers’ L1 and L2 conversations finding direct evidence for the important role of gender and pragmatic transfer in conversational dominance.<br/>By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to discourse analysis the author offers a new perspective into the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms. She does so by demonstrating how the notion of self-oriented and other-oriented conversational styles and strategies can affect the level of transfer of interactional behaviour differently for male and female speakers.

The contributions in this volume a sequel to the volume published in 1986 (SiHoLS 34) treat many aspects of the history of the language sciences in Spain and in Hibero-America from the Renaissance and ‘Siglo de Oro’ to the 20th century. Most papers were published in the journal Historiographia Linguistica; they were complemented with a few invited papers.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

The thought of Meister Eckhart — the Dominican theologian the preacher the master of language the mystic — exudes a remarkable fascination on the modern mind not the least due to its characteristic interplay of scholastic-academic and vernacular terminology. This volume presents the only book-length study in English of Meister Eckhart the philosopher within the tradition in which his thought is embedded and from which it draws its authority. It shows that even as Eckhart may be justly regarded as a medieval precursor of a modern philosophy of subjectivity the novelty and continuity of his thought can only be understood in its relation to that of Albert the Great Aristotle Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita the Liber de causis and the Neoplatonic heritage Theodoric of Freiberg and Thomas Aquinas as well as Eckhart of Gründig Jakob of Metz and Johannes Picardi of Lichtenberg. At its center lies the return of the soul through its detachment from everything corporeal manifold and temporal into its ground or spark — into that “something” in the soul where according to Eckhart “the ground of God is my ground and my ground is God’s ground”. The present translation not only revises the German-language original to take account of recent debates in Eckhart-scholarship it moreover makes accessible to the non-specialist all Latin and Middle High German material much of it previously not available in any translation at all. Meister Eckhart: Dominikanischer Theologe Prediger Sprachgenie Mystiker — sein Denken fasziniert den modernen Menschen nicht zuletzt wegen der einprägsamen Wechselwirkung von scholastisch-akademischer Terminologie und deutscher Mundart. Der vorliegende Band ist die einzige englischsprachige Monographie über Meister Eckhart als Philosophen die ihn im Zusammenhang der ihn maîgeblich bedingenden philosophischen Tradition interpretiert. Auch wenn Eckhart zurecht als Vordenker der modernen Subjektivität gilt kann man ihn nur im bezug auf Albert den Groîen Aristoteles Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita den Liber de causis und die neuplatonische Tradition Dietrich von Freiberg und Thomas von Aquin sowie Eckhart von Gründig Jakob von Metz und Johannes Picardi von Lichtenberg adäquat verstehen. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Studie steht die Rückkehr der Seele — durch ihre Abgeschiedenheit vom Körperlichen vom Mannigfaltigen und vom Zeitlichen — in ihren Grund bzw. in den Funken der Seele wo nach Eckhart “gotes grunt mîn grunt und mîn grunt gotes grunt” ist. Der vorliegende Band revidiert nicht nur die deutschsprachige Original-Studie im Hinblick auf Debatten in der neueren Eckhart-Forschung: Auch dem Nicht-Spezialisten werden sämtliche lateinische und mittelhochdeutsche Quellen durch die Übersetzung ins Englische zugänglich gemacht.

This monograph offers an in depth investigation of nominalization processes across languages e.g. Greek Germanic Romance Hebrew Slavic. Adopting and extending the view that category formation does not involve any lexical operation (recently put forth within the framework of Distributed Morphology) it shows how the behavior of nominals as opposed to that of verbs follows from general processes operating in specific syntactic structures and is linked with the presence or absence of functional layers (T D Aspect v). It further defines criteria on the basis of which the organization of nominal functional structure can be determined. Moreover it demonstrates how nominals split into several types across languages and within a language depending on the number and the type of functional projections they include. Furthermore it substantiates the hypothesis that aspects of the syntax of DPs of nominative-accusative languages are strikingly similar to aspects of the syntax of ergative languages and discusses aspects of the syntax of the perfect. The book targets researchers in theoretical linguistics comparative syntax morphology and typology. It can also be used as a foundation book on the morpho-syntax of nominals argument structure and word formation.

The globalisation of communication networks has increased the domains of translation and is challenging ever more the translator’s role. This volume is a collection of contributions from two different conferences (Misano 1997 and Berlin 1998). (Multi)Media translation especially screen translation (TV cinema video) has made more explicit the complexities of any communication and has led us to take a fresh look at the translator’s strategies and behaviours.Several papers ponder the concepts of media and multimedia the necessity of interdisciplinarity the polysemiotic dimension of audiovisual media. Quite a few discuss the current transformations in audiovisual media policy. A great many deal with practices mainly in subtitling but also in interpreting for TV and surtitling: what are the quality parameters and the conditions to meet audience’s expectations?<br/>Finally some show the cultural and linguistic implications of screen translation. Digitalisation is changing production and broadcasting and speeding up convergence between media telecommunications and information and communication technology.<br/>Is (multi)media translation a new field of study or an umbrella framework for scholars from various disciplines? Is it a trick to overcome the absence of prestige in Translation Studies? Or is it just a buzz word which gives rise to confusion? These questions remain open: the 26 contributions are partial answers.

This work demonstrates that what is commonly called ‘preterite decay in Upper German’ (PS; cf. German Präteritumschwund) is in fact a phenomenon common to a great number of European languages all of which are in areal con-tact. However the conclusion that this is a phenomenon arising under areal influence appears clearly mistaken — not only so because it would no more than postpone the search for the real trigger of this development. It will be shown first that the preterite loss in the languages under inspection comes in different states of completion. It will be seen that the loss of the preterite under this perspective German is by no means a completed process. Second and what is more it will be argued that the trigger for this decay of the synthetic preterite and its replacement by analytic preterite forms is the specific criteria under which oral (as opposed to written) communication is executed. Counter to the rich existing literature on the topic a number of parsing principles will be claimed to be responsible for this diachronic development yielding different results due to a different execution of these principles.

Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of first word meanings; memory and related processing capacities in early word learning and understanding; and lexical representation and lexical access in early language production.

The papers on syntactic development deal with the acquisition of grammatical prosodic features for learning language specific syntactic regularities.Volume 2 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on the interaction between the development of prosodic and morphosyntactic knowledge as evidenced in the early speech of Dutch English German Portugese Spanish Danish Islandic and Swedish children sheding new light on the relation between universal and language specific aspects of language acquisition. Another section of this volume deals with new approaches to language acquisition using ERP- techniques. The papers discuss in detail the relation between the development of language skills and changes in neurophysiological aspects of the brain. The potentials of these techniques for the development of new tools for an early diagnosis of children who are at risque for developmental language disorders are also pointed out.

The closing section contains a synopsis of interactionist approaches to language acquisition a discussion of the genetic and experiential origin of primitive linguistic elements in acquisition and a discussion of structural and developmental aspects of bird song in comparison to human language.

The two volumes making up Approaches to Bootstrapping present a state-of-the art interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic overview of recent developments in first language acquisition research.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists.

Read separately or as a set of three volumes the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume.

The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English American and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar’s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism 1993 treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean A. James Arnold is Professor of French at the University of Virginia where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount see: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer_history_of_literature_in_the_caribbean.pdf

This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure) grammatical relations and relational control clause union finiteness and governed constructions.

At the same time the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored and the interplay between grammar cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that — as in biology — synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.