Browse Books

Winner of ABC's award for Distinguished Publication for 2006

This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia New Zealand and China. It is also one of those inspired by contrastive rhetoric but has contributed innovatively and uniquely by incorporating research findings from genre analysis in particular the sociocognitive genre perspective into this cross-cultural study.



On the one hand the endeavor represents an in-depth theoretical exploration by considering not only discourse community and cognitive structuring but also the deep semantics of genre and intertextuality while broadening genre study by integrating insights from cross-cultural communication as well as the Chinese perspectives. On the other hand the book also addresses pragmatic issues. As a particular feature it solicits professional members’ intercultural viewpoints; thus confirming the shared social "stock of knowledge" employed in the culturally defined writing conventions.

Last but not least this book explores the implications for genre education and training and develops an appropriate model for cross-cultural genre learning which encourages learning through legitimate peripheral participation and intercultural learning in business organizations.

This collection of 19 papers celebrates the coming of age of the field of politeness studies now in its 30th year. It begins with an investigation of the meaning of politeness especially linguistic politeness and presents a short history of the field of linguistic politeness studies showing how such studies go beyond the boundaries of conventional linguistic work incorporating as they do non-language insights. The emphasis of the volume is on non-Western languages and the ways linguistic politeness is achieved with them. Many if not most studies have focused on Western languages but the languages highlighted here show new and different aspects of the phenomena.The purpose of linguistic politeness is to aid in successful communication throughout the world and this volume offers a balance of geographical distribution not found elsewhere including Japanese Thai and Chinese as well as Greek Swedish and Spanish. It covers such theoretical topics as face wakimae social levels gender-related differences in language usage directness and indirectness and intercultural perspectives.

Interpreters who work with signed languages and those who work strictly with spoken languages share many of the same issues regarding their training skill sets and fundamentals of practice. Yet interpreting into and from signed languages presents unique challenges for the interpreter who works with language that must be seen rather than heard. The contributions in this volume focus on topics of interest to both students of signed language interpreting and practitioners working in community conference and education settings. Signed languages dealt with include American Sign Language Langue des Signes Québécoise and Irish Sign Language although interpreters internationally will find the discussion in each chapter relevant to their own language context. Topics concern theoretical and practical components of the interpreter’s work including interpreters’ approaches to language and meaning their role on the job and in the communities within which they work dealing with language variation and consumer preferences and Deaf interpreters as professionals in the field.

Telephone helplines have become one of the most pervasive sites of expert-lay interaction in modern societies throughout the world. Yet surprisingly little is known of the in situ language-based processes of help-seeking and help-giving behavior that occurs within them. This collection of original studies by both internationally renowned and emerging scholars seeks to improve upon this state of affairs. It does so by offering some of the first systematic investigations of naturally-occurring spoken interaction in telephone helplines. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis each of the contributors offers a detailed investigation into the skills and competencies that callers and call-takers routinely draw upon when engaging one another within a range of helplines. Helplines in the US the UK Australia Scandinavia The Netherlands and Ireland dealing with the provision of healthcare emotional support and counselling technical assistance and consumer rights tourism and finance make up the studies in the volume. Collectively and individually the research provides fascinating insight into an under-researched area of modern living and demonstrates the relevance and potential of helplines for the growing field of institutional interaction.

This book will be of interest to students of communication applied linguistics discourse and conversation sociology counselling technology and work social psychology and anthropology.

This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses and its relation to other kinds of copular structures predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.

This book offers a comparative study of the Germanic languages. It promotes a new approach to the OV vs. VO classification according to which all clauses have a universal base where the internal argument is always merged in SpecVP. Word order differences and their correlates result from an interaction of checking conditions the EPP and different types of verb movement and from parametric variation concerning the location of the subject of predication in the I- or in the C-system. In the discussion of a range of impersonal constructions in German Dutch Afrikaans Yiddish Icelandic the Mainland Scandinavian languages and English it is shown that crosslinguistic variation as regards e.g. the distribution of the expletive in impersonal passives and the occurrence of a Definiteness Effect in Transitive Expletive Constructions is mainly due to the choice of different kinds of 'expletive' elements (each associated with different featural make-ups which force them to show up in different positions) namely true expletives event arguments and quasi-arguments whereas expletive pro is shown not to exist.

This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish English Finnish German Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages which enables cross-linguistic comparisons. The notion of 'construction' is brought together with an interactional perspective; the fact that constructions cannot always be clearly analysed as either syntactic or lexico-semantic has its reflection in this volume. So far there have been fewer attempts at interactionally oriented work on lexical and semantic phenomena than on syntactic constructions. In this volume several papers show the interactional relevance of word selection and lexical semantic issues. In the future studies on syntax and lexico-semantics in interaction will enrich realistic grammars of our languages and cross-linguistic description of comparable practices of organizing talk in interaction will be invaluable for the study of both inter-European and international communication.

The book claims that philosophy can be defined by its distinct rhetoric. This rhetoric is shaped by two values: humanism and critique. Humanism is defined as preferring the individual human deliberation to any external authority or method. Self-conviction is the touchstone of truth in philosophy. Critique is defined as suspecting your beliefs and convictions. This is the reason why the book uses Nietzsche’s definition of "the will to truth" – "the will not to deceive not even myself" – for explaining the nature of philosophical thinking and argumentation. This rhetorical analysis reveals that the danger of self-deception is a constitutive yet irresolvable problem of philosophy.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The subjects of the book are: the relations between philosophy and rhetoric the speaker and the addressee of philosophical arguments the subordination of logic to rhetoric in philosophy and the philosophical problem of self-deception. <br/>This work unburdened with philosophers’ jargon fits well in the current critical debate about the relevance of pragmatic features of the concepts of subjectivity and truth.

This monograph presents a new model of the internal syntax of nominal phrases. The model is mainly based on Scandinavian since with the wide range of variation that Scandinavian displays in the nominal domain despite the close genetic relationship between the different varieties Scandinavian is particularly well-suited for explorations into nominal syntax. Among the topics covered are the basic syntactic structure of nominal phrases definiteness adjective phrases possessors relative clauses and nominal predicates. The model is however meant to be a tool for analysing the nominal phrases of any language. While the base-generated structure is taken to be universally uniform the model allows for variation in the feature makeup of individual elements in the phonological realisation of the features and in the movements that may or may not apply. Hence as shown in the final chapter patterns found in languages outside of Scandinavian can also be accounted for within the model.

This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded first and foremost as a rich and complex communication system inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function (ii) information structure (iii) collocations and formulaic language (iv) language learning and (v) discourse and culture.