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This collection of original papers by eminent phoneticians linguists and sociologists offers the most recent findings on phonetic design in interactional discourse available in an edited collection. The chapters examine the organization of phonetic detail in relation to social actions in talk-in-interaction based on data drawn from diverse languages: Japanese English Finnish and German as well as from diverse speakers: children fluent adults and adults with language loss. Because similar methodology is deployed for the investigation of similar conversational tasks in different languages the collection paves the way towards a cross-linguistic phonology for conversation. The studies reported in the volume make it clear that language-specific constraints are at work in determining exactly which phonetic and prosodic resources are deployed for a given purpose and how they articulate with grammar in different cultures and speech communities.

Chinese as an aspect language has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed which covers both the lexical and sentential levels thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions and associated misleading conclusions about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.

In the modular design of generative theory the syntax–semantics interface has accounted all along for meanings at the level of Logical Form. The syntax–pragmatics interface on the other hand is the result of what one may call the ‘pragmatic turn’ in the linguistic theory where content is partitioned into given and new information. In other words the structural division of the clause has been subjected to criteria of information or discourse structure. Both interfaces require a structurally descriptive inventory whose specific shapes can be motivated on theory-internal grounds only. The present collection of original articles develops the concept of these interfaces further. The papers in the first section focus on the syntax–semantics interface those in the second section on the syntax–pragmatics interface.

This new collection of contributions to the field of Cognitive Technology (CT) provides the (to date) widest spectrum of the state of the art in the discipline — a disciple dedicated to humane factors in tool design. The reader will find here a summary of past research as well as an overview of new areas for future investigations. The collection contains an extensive CT agenda identifying many as yet unsolved CT-related design issues. An exciting new development is the concept of ‘natural technology’. Some examples of natural technologies are discussed and the merits of empirical investigations (into what they are and how they develop) of interest to cognitive scientists and designers of new (corrective digital) technologies are pointed out. Another distinctive feature of the collection is that it provides examples of scientists’ tools; important too is its emphasis on ethics in tool design. The collection ends with a provocative coda (any responses can appear in the new annual CT forum of the Pragmatics and Cognition journal). The collection will appeal to all scientists humanists and professionals interested in the interface between human cognitive processes and the technologies that augment them.

On March 7 1277 Etienne Tempier Bishop of Paris condemned a list of 219 theological and philosophical theses. This condemnation had a lasting impact on the teaching of philosophy and theology at the late-medieval universities and many philosophical and theological texts of this time contain references to the “Parisian articles.” In the fifteenth century probably in Paris between 1418 and 1454 an anonymous commentary on this well-known document was written which is presented here for the first time. A quotation in the treatise De universali reali by Jean de Maisonneuve (Johannes de Nova Domo) allowed tracing this text back to the circle of this Parisian master.

Apart from the first critical edition of the commentary on the basis of all seven known manuscripts the volume also contains a comprehensive analysis of the text. The detailed discussion of philosophical and theological problems such as God’s absolute and ordained power (potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata) is accompanied by a historical analysis of the validity of the condemnation. The volume is completed by an appendix which contains further texts as well as indexes of authorities and names.

Am 7. März 1277 verurteilte der Pariser Bischof Stephan Tempier 219 philosophische und theologische Thesen. Diese Verurteilung hatte einen lang andauernden Einfluss auf die philosophische und theologische Lehrtätigkeit an den spätmittelalterlichen Universitäten und viele philosophische und theologische Texte dieser Zeit enthalten Hinweise auf die »Pariser Artikel«. Zu diesem wohlbekannten Verurteilungsdekret entstand im 15. Jahrhundert vermutlich in Paris zwischen 1418 und 1454 ein anonym überlieferter Kommentar der hier erstmalig vorgestellt wird. Aufgrund eines Zitats in der Abhandlung De universali reali des Jean de Maisonneuve (Johannes de Nova Domo) konnte dieser Text dem Umfeld dieses Pariser Magisters zugeordnet werden.

Neben der ersten kritischen Edition des Kommentars auf der Grundlage aller sieben bekannten Handschriften enthält der Band auch eine umfassende Analyse des Textes. Die detaillierte Diskussion philosophischer und theologischer Probleme wie Gottes prinzipiell uneingeschränkter Macht (potentia Dei absoluta) und seiner tatsächlich eingeschränkten Machtausübung innerhalb der von ihm gewollten Ordnung (potentia Dei ordinata) wird begleitet von einer historischen Analyse der Rechtskräftigkeit der Verurteilung. Der Band wird vervollständigt durch einen Anhang mit weiteren Texteditionen und abgerundet durch umfangreiche Indizes.

The late twentieth-century transition from a paper-oriented to a media-oriented society has triggered the emergence of Audiovisual Translation as the most dynamic and fastest developing trend within Translation Studies. The growing interest in this area is a clear indication that this discipline is going to set the agenda for the theory research training and practice of translation in the twenty-first century. Even so this remains a largely underdeveloped field and much needs to be done to put Screen Translation Multimedia Translation or the wider implications of Audiovisual Translation on a par with other fields within Translation Studies. In this light this collection of essays reflects not only the “state of the art” in the research and teaching of Audiovisual Translation but also the professionals’ experiences. The different contributions cover issues ranging from reflections on professional activities to theory the impact of ideology on Audiovisual Translation and the practices of teaching and researching this new and challenging discipline.In expanding further the ground covered by the John Benjamins’ book (Multi)Media Translation (2001) this book seeks to provide readers with a deeper insight into some of the specific concepts problems aims and terminology of Audiovisual Translation and by this token to make these specificities emerge from within the wider nexus of Translation Studies Film Studies and Media Studies. In a quickly developing technical audiovisual world Audiovisual Translation Studies is set to become the academic field that will address the complex cultural issues of a pervasively media-oriented society.

This volume contains a selection of fifteen papers presented at three consecutive meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics held in Washington D.C. (January 2001); Coimbra Portugal (June 2001); and San Francisco (January 2002). The fifteen articles offer a balanced sampling of creolists’ current research interests. All of the contributions address questions directly relevant to pidgin/creole studies and other contact languages. The majority of papers address issues of morphology or syntax. Some of the contributions make use of phonological analysis while others study language development from the point of view of acquisition. A few papers examine discourse strategies and style or broader issues of social and ethnic identity. While this array of topics and perspectives is reflective of the diversity of the field there is also much common ground in that all of the papers adduce solid data corpora to support their analyses. The range of languages analyzed spans the planet as approximately twenty contact varieties are studied in this volume.

Every five years the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (CIPL) organises a world congress for linguists. And every five years the Committee faces the challenge of presenting a programme at the highest possible level. The CIPL Executive Committee decided for the Congress planned for 2003 in Prague to focus on four major topics which play an important role in today’s linguistic debate: 1. Typology 2. Endangered Languages 3. Methodology and Linguistics (including fieldwork) and 4. Language and the mind. Leading experts have introduced the four themes in their plenary lectures in the course of the congress which served as a basis for the articles presented in the current volume. This book should be a welcome tool for all linguists wishing to find their way quickly in current developments. A CD-Rom containing the full proceedings of the Prague Congress is included.

This book examines in detail the acceptability status of sentences in the following five English constructions and elucidates the syntactic semantic and functional requirements that the constructions must satisfy in order to be appropriately used: There-Construction (One’s) Way Construction Cognate Object Construction Pseudo-Passive Construction and Extraposition from Subject NPs. It has been argued in the frameworks of Chomskyan generative grammar relational grammar conceptual semantics and other syntactic theories that the acceptability of sentences in these constructions can be accounted for by the unergative–unaccusative distinction of intransitive verbs. However this book shows through a wide range of sentences that none of these constructions is sensitive to this distinction. For each construction it shows that acceptability status is determined by a given sentence's semantic function as it interacts with syntactic constraints (which are independent of the unergative–unaccusative distinction) and with functional constraints that apply to it in its discourse context.

As a subject of universal appeal spatial demonstratives have been studied extensively from a variety of disciplines. What marks the present study as distinct is that it is an English-Chinese comparative study set in a cognitive-linguistic framework and that the methodology features a parallel corpora-based discourse analysis approach. The framework illuminates the nature of the demonstratives’ basic and extended meaning and use the connections between them and the mechanisms that govern and constrain their trends of extension. The corpora place the English and Chinese demonstratives in comparable discourse contexts and processes providing an “ecological” environment for the observation of how their behavior fits into the respective structural and discourse systems of the two languages. The study also illuminates important issues such as the subjectivity of language language as a representational system and a vehicle of communication the interface between form and function and the role of context in discourse comprehension.