Browse Books

Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics provides readers with a much-needed insight into the development of pragmatic competence an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics. The longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments. The analysis focuses on developments in these learners’ knowledge of discourse structure pragmatic routines and internal modification. Findings present valuable information pertaining to the process of acquisition of pragmatic competence. They also point to the favourable but imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. A comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues an in-depth analysis and an extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in interlanguage pragmatics cross-cultural pragmatics German as a foreign language and study abroad research.

Comparing Japanese and American interaction Language Social Structure and Culture argues that language use is instrumental in the construction of social structure and culture. In order to ground the work in empirical evidence verbal interaction in similar situations – Japanese and American cooking classes – is compared. Unlike other studies of verbal interaction a genre analysis approach is used to examine regular patterns at three levels of language use: interaction discourse and grammar. Collectively these patterns exhibit both similarities and differences across the classes in the two cultures creating the unique event that has been institutionalized as a cooking class in each culture. In concluding the author suggests that genre analysis is a useful approach for cross-cultural research in that it provides information about situation-specific language use but also information about what aspects of linguistic structure are likely to become conventionalized across languages and cultures across situations and across time.

The present volume originally prepared to celebrate Jan Firbas' 80th birthday unfortunately is presented only belatedly to commemorate one of the most outstanding personalities of functional and structural linguistics. Its contributors have been inspired by the richness and penetrating invention of Firbas contained in his analysis of functional sentence perspective and of many other aspects of sentence and discourse.

This is the third of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages” which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical lexical referential social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 3: Czech Danish French German Greek Japanese Oriya Polish Serbian Swahili and Swedish.

The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment showing that speakers of languages like English attach relative clauses differently than do speakers of languages like Spanish. Fernández reports the findings of an investigation with monolinguals and bilinguals tested using speeded ("on-line") and unspeeded ("off-line") methodology with materials in both English and Spanish. The experiments reveal similarities across the groups when the procedure is speeded but differences with unspeeded questionnaires: The monolinguals replicate the standard cross-linguistic differences while bilinguals have language-independent preferences determined by language dominance — bilinguals process stimuli in either of their languages according to the general preferences of monolinguals of their dominant language.

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is pragmatic and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a method of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian a priori ‘new theory’ of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through how we become aware of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception motion memory imagination speech everyday social interactions) cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g. a protocol for visual attention) but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming intense emotions social tensions altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically that is to say blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

The Interfaces: Deriving and Interpreting Omitted Structures is a collection of never-before-published papers that explore the nature of the interfaces of syntax with semantics phonology and discourse. The papers investigate the various ways in which elliptical structures are related to these interfaces. As such they not only make a valuable contribution to generative linguistic research but more generally help to deepen our understanding of the relation between form and meaning in natural language.

In the book’s introductory chapter the editors address general issues related to current work on ellipsis and the syntax/semantics syntax/phonology and syntax/discourse interfaces. The rest of the book is organized into three parts. The first examines PF-deletion accounts of elliptical structures; the second investigates these structures from the perspective of the syntax/semantic interface; and the third explores these from a perspective that concentrates on the relation between semantics and focus and discourse structure. Together the papers collected in this volume offer a convincing demonstration of the value of collaborative research on the ‘interfaces’.

These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College University of Cambridge in September 2000. They include papers on negation temporality modality evidentiality eventualities grammar and conceptualization grammaticalization metaphor cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by amongst many others Les Bruce Ilinca Crainiceanu Thorstein Fretheim Saeko Fukushima Ronald Geluykens Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach Klaus von Heusinger K. M. Jaszczolt Susumu Kubo Akiko Kurosawa Eva Lavric Didier Maillat Márta Maleczki Steve Nicolle Sergei Tatevosov L. M. Tovena Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Languages are dying at an alarming rate all over the world. Estimates range from 50% to as much as 90% by the end of the century. This collection of original papers tries to strike a balance between theoretical practical and descriptive approaches to language death and language maintenance. It provides overviews of language endangerment in Africa Eurasia and the Greater Pacific Area. It also presents case studies of endangered languages from various language families. These descriptive case studies not only provide data on the degree of endangerment and the causes of language death but also provide a general sociolinguistic and typological characterization the language(s) under discussion and the prospects of language maintenance (if any). The volume will be of interest to all those concerned with the ongoing extinction of the world’s linguistic diversity.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

This book features a fascinating and extended focal interview with Professor John J. Gumperz who ranges over his long career trajectory and reflects on his scientific achievements and how they relate to the contemporary linguistic scene. In this way the reader is presented with a snapshot introduction to Gumperz's work in a contemporary context.

A number of commentaries provide a stimulating and illuminating series of theoretical and applied encounters with Gumperz's work from different perspectives. In so doing they shed new light on Gumperz's seminal contribution to the study of language and interaction. In his Response Essay and in a final discussion Gumperz clarifies his views on many of the topics discussed in the volume as well as sharing with readers his views on some other approaches to language and interaction that are closely aligned to his own.

Sociolinguistics the ethnographic approach to language language and social interaction intercultural communication communicative conventions contextualization – these are some of the key terms which Professor John J. Gumperz discusses in this wide ranging and searching interview about his career as an anthropological linguist and sociolinguist interested in cultural diversity and intercultural communication.

John J. Gumperz Professor Emeritus of Anthropology University of California Berkeley is one of the founders of Sociolinguistics whose early work on speech communities and on the relationship of linguistic to social boundaries helped lay the basis for much current work in the field. Since the 1970s he has concentrated on a theory and methods of discourse analysis that can account for the intrinsic diversity of today’s communicative environments.

His publications include: Language in Social Groups (1962); Ethnography of Communication (1964) and Directions in Sociolinguistics (1972/2002) both coedited with Dell Hymes; Discourse Strategies (1982); Language and Social Identity (1982); and Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (1996) coedited with Steven Levinson. He is currently working on a collection of studies New Ethnographies of Communication (coedited with Marco Jacquemet); and Language in Social Theory.