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In Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World the discourse of politicians and policy-makers in Britain links languages other than English and therefore speakers of these languages with civil disorder and threats to democracy citizenship and nationhood. These powerful arguments travel along ‘chains of discourse’ until they gain the legitimacy of the state and are inscribed in law. The particular focus of this volume is on discourse linking ‘race riots’ in England in 2001 with the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 which extended legislation to test the English language proficiency of British citizenship applicants.

Adrian Blackledge develops a theoretical and methodological framework which draws on critical discourse analysis to reveal the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures; on Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic nature of discourse to demonstrate how voices progressively gain authority; and on Bourdieu’s model of symbolic domination to illuminate the way in which linguistic-minority speakers may be complicit in the misrecognition or valorisation of the dominant language.

This book offers an HPSG-based discourse grammar for a controlled language (Air Traffic Control) that allows the identification of well-formed discourse patterns. A formalisation of discourse theoretical structures that occur especially in crisis situations that involve potential aviation disasters is introduced. Of particular importance in this context are discourse sequences that help secure uptake among the crew and between crew and tower in order to coordinate actions that might result in avoiding a potential disaster. In order to describe the relevant phenomena an extended HPSG formalism is used. The extension concerns the capability of modelling speech acts as proposed by Searle & Vanderveken (1985). The grammar is modelled by employing XML as a denotational semantics and is applied to the corpus data. This work thus lays the foundation for the automatic recognition of discourse structures in aviation communication.

This volume brings together papers which address a range of issues regarding the syntax of function words and functional categories in the Germanic languages. The works offered in this volume derive specifically from comparative studies of Germanic; at the same time they all bear directly on long-standing problems in syntactic theory and universal grammar. The contributions include novel theoretical and empirical approaches to infinitives the syntax and acquisition of Verb Second the structure and interpretation of present tense the syntax and semantics of reflexives the relationship between expletive syntax and the EPP the syntax of possession and the DP-internal syntax of pronouns. Some contributions present the results of experimental research which provide an entirely fresh perspective on previously unchallenged claims.

For a long time prepositions seemed to enjoy a clandestine status in linguistic research. This has changed with a novel path of inquiry into the inner structure of complex prepositional expressions. In a unique approach to the examination of the outer syntax of prepositions the author uses established and new syntactic and statistical tests to achieve a convincing hierarchy of thematic roles expressed by prepositional phrases. From an antisymmetric point of departure the author presents an overview of possible derivations that result in the observed different word orders of PPs in VO and OV languages. It leads to a refreshing new proposal of how to include morphology into syntax. The plausibility of this model is underscored by a wide range of explanatory data. This book is indispensable for linguists interested in the syntax of modifiers.

This book analyses and describes Speech and Thought Presentation (S&TP) in French from a broad theoretical perspective building bridges between linguistic stylistic and narratological frameworks that have until now been developed separately. It combines the French théorie de l’énonciation and different Anglo-Saxon approaches of reported discourse into a harmonious whole in order to create a new and exciting paradigm for our conception of S&TP strategies. Basing its findings on actual corpora and going beyond the canonical categories of reported discourse it shows that the study of S&TP strategies is essential to our understanding of phenomena as diverse as the evolution and categorization of literary genres the production and staging of ‘orality’ in literature the various conceptualizations of the notion of ‘Truth’ in fiction and non-fiction the expression of points of view in narrative the structuring of rhetorical strategies and the construction of the ‘Self’ versus the representation of the ‘Other’ in discourse.

This book presents a large-scale corpus-driven study of progressives in 'real' English and 'school' English combining an analysis of general linguistic interest with a pedagogically motivated one. A systematic comparative analysis of more than 10000 progressive forms taken from the largest existing corpora of spoken British English and from a small corpus of EFL textbook texts highlights numerous differences between actual language use and textbook language concerning the distribution of progressives their preferred contexts favoured functions and typical lexical-grammatical patterns. On the basis of these differences a number of pedagogical implications are derived the integration of which then leads to a first draft of an innovative concept of teaching progressives - a concept which responds to three key criteria in pedagogical description: typicality authenticity and communicative utility. The analysis also demonstrates that many existing accounts of the progressive are inappropriate in several respects and that not enough attention is being paid to lexical-grammatical relations.! Winner of the "Wissenschaftspreis Hannover 2006" for outstanding research monographs !

The body as the common ground for objectivity and (inter)subjectivity is a phenomenon with a perplexing plurality of registers. Therefore this innovative volume offers an interdisciplinary approach from the fields of neuroscience phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of body image and body schema have a firm tradition in each of these disciplines and make up the conceptual anchors of this volume.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Challenged by neuropathological phenomena neuroscience has dealt with body image and body schema since the beginning of the twentieth century. Halfway through the twentieth century phenomenology was inspired by child development and elaborated a specifically phenomenological account of body image and schema. Starting from the mirror stage this source of inspiration is shared with psychoanalysis which develops the concept of body image in interaction with the clinic of the singular subject. In this volume the creative encounter of these three perspectives on the body opens up present-day paths for conceptualisation research and (clinical) practice. (Series B)

The present book describes the English language in all its facets as spoken in present-day Dublin the capital of the Republic of Ireland. It covers the entire range of its history since the first arrival of English there several hundred years ago. Apart from the evolution of English in the capital the book also concentrates on the significant changes which have been taking place in the speech of Dublin in the past 15 years or so. The rapid change of Dublin English is seen as a correlate to the many social and economic developments which have occurred in recent years. The type of linguistic change in Dublin is driven by dissociation (the mirror-image of accommodation) and will be of particular interest to scholars working within the ‘language variation and change’ framework as it will to those more generally concerned with varieties of English and their specific profiles vis à vis more standard forms of English.

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication in neuro-cognitive bio-adaptive evolutionary terms. The fact that context the core notion of pragmatics is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance has been well known since Aristotle Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality" what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor’s current rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science theory of personality personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

This book aims to appraise sociolinguistic work devoted to the form and function of storytelling and to examine in detail the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental discursive resource across a range of contexts. The chapters presented here bring together some of the most recent work in the theory and practice of narrative analysis from a broad sociolinguistic perspective. They address some of the questions left implicit whenever stories are brought within the analytic frame of sociolinguistics: What exactly do we mean by 'story'?; what kind of social and contextual variations can determine the production and shape of situated stories and what are the core elements of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource?; how is the relationship between narrative discourse and social context articulated in the construction of cultural identities? The data come both from institutional settings such as workplaces courtrooms schools and the media as well as from informal everyday settings.