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Written Reliquaries: The resonance of orality in medieval English texts establishes the linguistic component of orality and oral tradition. The relics it examines are traces of spoken performance artifacts of linguistic and cultural processes. Seven case studies animate verbal acts of making promises quoting proverbs pronouncing curses speaking gibberish praying Pater Nosters invoking saints and keeping silence. The study of their resonance is enabled by a methodological conjunction of historical pragmatics and oral theory. Insights from oral theory enlighten spoken traditions which in turn may be understood in the larger historical-pragmatic context of linguistic performance. The inquiry ranges across broad as well as narrow planes of reference to trace a complex set of cultural and linguistic interactions. In this way it reconstructs relevant discursive contexts giving detailed accounts of underlying assumptions traditions and conventions. Doing so the book demonstrates that an integrated methodology not only allows access to oral discourse in both Old English and Middle English but also provides insight into the fluid medieval interchange of literacy and orality.

This volume starts from an interdisciplinary expertise of the contributors and chooses to work on the very origins of conscious qualitative states in perception. The leading research paradigm can be synthesized in ‘phenomenology to neurons to stimuli and backwards’ since as a starting point it has taken the phenomenal appearances in the visual field. Specifically the leading theme of the volume is the co-presence and interaction of diverse types of spaces in vision like the optical space of psychophysics and of neural elaboration the qualitative space of phenomenal appearances and its relation with the pictorial space of art. The contributors to the volume agree in arguing that those spaces follow different rules of organization whose specific singularity and reciprocal dependence have to be individuated as a preliminary step to understand the architecture of the conscious awareness of our environment and to conceive its potential implementation in constructing any kind of embodied intentional agents. (Series B)

The study describes a detailed and original piece of research work investigating a very important genre of human communication and that is conversation. It provides a definition of the genre of conversation by describing nine features of conversation namely multiple sources discourse coherence language as doing co-operation unfolding open-endedness artifacts inexplicitness and shared responsibility. These nine features of naturalness in conversation serve to distinguish conversation from specialized discourse types. The study illustrates the nine defining features of conversation with authentic conversational data collected surreptitiously in England. While this study is of native speakers of English the nine defining features of naturalness of English conversation are applicable to conversations conducted in other languages.

In the historical development of many languages of the IE phylum the loss of inflectional morphology led to the development of a configurational syntax where syntactic position marked syntactic role. The first of these configurations was the adposition (preposition or postposition) which developed out of the uninflected particle/preverbs in the older forms of IE by forming fixed phrases with nominal elements a pattern later followed in the development of a configurational NP (article + nominal) and VP (auxiliary + verbal). The authors follow this evolution through almost four thousand years of documentation in all twelve language families of the Indo-European phylum noting the resemblances between the structure of the original IE case system and the systemic oppositions to be found in the sets of adpositions that replaced it.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Quite apart from its theoretical analyses and proposals which in themselves amount to a new look at many traditional problems this study has a value in the collected store of information on cases and on adpositions and their usage. There is also a considerable store of etymological information that is relevant to the description of the systemic development.

This collection of studies investigates the individual micro-psychological and macro-societal factors that promote or discourage the development of child and young adult heritage language learners’ spoken and written skills in East Asian languages (Chinese Japanese and Korean). The research presented in this book is based on empirical data from various learning and social settings in the United States and Canada. The contributors are themselves mostly from East Asian immigrant backgrounds and have worked closely with students from such backgrounds. This book also speaks to the needs for future research within East Asian communities that will (a) promote East Asian heritage language development in applied linguistics (b) encourage parental community and national support for East Asian heritage language development and (c) improve the teaching of oral and written skills for heritage learners of East Asian languages in various educational settings.

This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages including Surinamese creoles Chinook Jargon Yiddish AAVE Haitian Creole Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties Nigerian Pidgin Sri Lankan Malay Papiamentu and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation agglutination negation TMAs plural marking the copula and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.

Along with its companion volume this book offers a fascinating glimpse into the current avenues of research into colour a phenomenon which daily affects all our lives in often surprising ways. The majority of the papers originated in a 2004 conference entitled ‘Progress in Colour Studies’ which was held in the University of Glasgow U.K. The contributions to this first volume which is principally linguistic and anthropological in content and to its companion on the psychological aspects of colour present either summaries of state-of-the-art colour research in various disciplines or in-depth accounts of certain aspects of such work. This volume includes approaches such as Natural Semantic Metalanguage social network analysis quantitative analysis type modification vantage theory the centrality of social norms of inference place-names and heraldry. In the process new insights are offered into the following languages: English French Portuguese Sorbian Burarra Cape Breton Gaelic Tzotzil and others.

"This collection is a much-needed remedy to the confusion about which varieties of enactivism are robust yet viable rejections of traditional representationalism approaches to cognitivism – and which are not. Hutto's paper is the pivot around which the expert commentators enactivists and non-enactivists alike sketch out the implications of enactivism for a wide variety of issues: perception emotion the theory of content cognition development social interaction and more. The inclusion of thoughtful replies from Hutto gives the volume a further degree of depth and integration often lacking in collections of essays. Anyone interested in assessing the current cutting-edge developments in the embodied and situated sciences of the mind will want to read this book."Ron Chrisley University of Sussex UK

One of the most lively and contentious issues in contemporary linguistic theory concerns the elusive boundary between semantics and pragmatics and Professor Laurence R. Horn of Yale University has been at the center of that debate ever since his groundbreaking 1972 UCLA dissertation. This volume in honor of Horn brings together the best of current work at the semantics/pragmatics boundary from a neo-Gricean perspective. Featuring the contributions of 22 leading researchers it includes papers on implicature (Kent Bach) inference (Betty Birner) presupposition (Barbara Abbott) lexical semantics (Georgia Green Sally McConnell-Ginet Steve Kleinedler & Randall Eggert) negation (Pauline Jacobson Frederick Newmeyer Scott Schwenter) polarity (Donka Farkas Anastasia Giannakidou Michael Israel) implicit variables (Greg Carlson & Gianluca Storto) definiteness (Barbara Partee) reference (Ellen Prince Andrew Kehler & Gregory Ward) and logic (Jerrold Sadock Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Andrew Hartline). These original papers represent not only a fitting homage to Larry Horn but also an important contribution to semantic and pragmatic theory.

The field of verbal aspect has been a focus for the derivation of a multiplicity of theoretical approaches ranging over decades of linguistic research. From the point of view of recent studies though there has been relatively little emphasis on the nature of the interaction of aspect with other categories and the ways in which our knowledge of aspect acts as a primary semantic contributor to the creation of other basic verbal parameters such as tense and modality. This book aims to cross some of the categorial borders using a collection of studies on the interfaces of English aspect with other grammatical domains. The studies in the book have been assembled in order to answer two central issues surrounding the nature of English aspect: the possibility of the historical co-existence of a perfective and imperfective grammatical distinction in English and the derivation of modality as an inference arising out of specific conflicts and combinations of lexical and grammatical aspect. In answering these questions a data-driven rather than a theory-driven approach is favoured and the general principles of Gricean pragmatics and grammaticalisation are applied to a wide range of empirical sources to propose alternative explanations to some long-established problems of English historical linguistics and semantics.

The three concepts of case valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause including case marking person agreement and voice. On the other hand they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case semantico-syntactic verbal classes and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory Government and Binding various versions of the Functional approach Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses) containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case valency and transitivity.

This collection of studies by leading scholars in the field focuses on the semantics of non-definite (bare and indefinite) plural NPs. The contributions in the first part concentrate on bare plurals and their cross-linguistic counterparts. They discuss applicability of the notion of ‘semantic incorporation’ to bare plurals by contrasting them to bare singulars with the aim of accounting for the interaction between the semantics of number and the degree of (in)dependency of the NP with respect to the verb. The articles in the second part examine the relationship between the semantics of number and the semantics of aspect. The contributions in the third part concentrate on non-definite numerical noun phrases by addressing a range of fundamental questions such as: the semantics of indefinite time-phrases numericals in classifier- and non-classifier languages scope interactions the at least- and exactly-readings referential properties of numericals. The volume will be welcomed by linguists interested in the semantics of number in non-definite NPs.

This study investigates the functions meanings and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in above and below the clause following morpho-syntactic semantic lexicographical pragmatic social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare’s vocatives construe both quantitatively and qualitatively habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern Shakespearean and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics stylistics Hallidayean grammar corpus linguistics cognitive linguistics socio-historical linguistics sociology and theatre semiotics. This study contributes thus not only to Shakespeare studies but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

This book presents the structure of Hindi keeping in view the sociolinguistic context of language use. It includes descriptions of sounds devices of word formation rules of phrase and sentence construction and conventions of language use in spoken and written texts incorporating the insights gained by application of recent linguistic theories. The account presented here however is free from abstruse technical vocabulary and modes of presentation that aim at justifying a particular linguistic model. This volume is primarily designed as a source of reference for linguists and educators who want to be better informed about the forms and functions of Hindi and a resource for students and teachers of Hindi.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Hindi the official language of the Republic of India is the second most widely spoken language with approximately three hundred and fifty million speakers. In its diasporic contexts it is spoken in Africa Australia Europe Fiji Guyana Surinam Trinidad United Arab Emirates United Kingdom and United States. An Indo-European language by genetic affiliation Hindi shares many characteristics with Austro-Asiatic Dravidian and Sino-Tibetan languages of the subcontinent. In addition Hindi has assimilated features of Arabic Persian and English in a variety of its functionally determined styles.

The articles of this volume are centered around two competing views on language change originally presented at the 2003 International Conference on Historical Linguistics in the two important plenary papers by Henning Andersen and William Croft. The latter proposes an evolutionary model of language change within a domain-neutral model of a ‘generalized analysis of selection’ whereas Henning Andersen takes it that cultural phenomena could not possibly be handled i.e. observed described understood in the same way as natural phenomena. These papers are models of succinct presentation of important theoretical framework. The other papers present and discuss additional models of change e.g. invisible hand-processes system-internal models functional and cognitive models. Most papers do not subscribe to the evolutionary model; instead they focus on functional factors in the selection and propagation of variants (as opposed to factors of code efficiency) or on cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. Several papers are inspired by the late Eugenio Coseriu and by Henning Andersen’s theories on language change. In particular the volume contains articles proposing interesting grammaticalization studies and extended models of grammaticalization. The clear presentation of important and competing approaches to fundamental questions concerning language change will be of high interest for scholars and students working in the field of diachrony and typology. The languages referred to in the papers include Cantonese the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages Danish English Eskimo languages German Norwegian Russian Spanish and Swedish.

This volume brings together a selection of papers from the eighteenth ‘Going Romance’ symposium held at Leiden University 9–11 December 2004. These papers cover a broad range of topics in phonology morphology syntax semantics historical linguistics and acquisition in a variety of Romance languages.

In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.

Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive if not universal has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive or passive-like constructions and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active middle reflexive) specific semantic meanings such as adversativity or tense-aspect categories (stativeperfect preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic Irish Mandarin Chinese Thai Lithuanian Mordvin and Nganasan next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory Modern Structuralist Approaches Role and Reference Grammar Cognitive Semantics Distributed Morphology and Case Grammar have been applied by the different authors.

Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites—multicultural cities border areas cross-cultural corridors multiethnic regions—that cut across national boundaries rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts but thereby reconfirm however inadvertently the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional European and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga Plovdiv Timişoara or Budapest of Transylvania or the Danube corridor – to take a few examples – reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that “treading on native grounds” means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.

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

This is the first book-length study of how point of view is manifested linguistically in dramatic texts. It examines such issues as how readers process the shifts in viewpoint that can occur within such texts. Using insights from cognitive linguistics the book aims to explain how the analysis of point of view in drama can be undertaken and how this is fruitful for understanding textual and discoursal effects in this genre. Following on from a consideration of existing frameworks for the analysis of point of view a cognitive approach to deixis is suggested as being particularly profitable for explaining the viewpoint effects that can arise in dramatic texts. To expand on the large number of examples discussed throughout the book the penultimate chapter consists of an extended analysis of a single play. This book is relevant to scholars in a range of areas including linguistics literary studies and cognitive science.

This is the first of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote address delivered by Denis Bouchard on exaptation and linguistic explanation as well as seventeen contributions by emerging and internationally recognized scholars of Spanish French Italian as well as Rumanian. While the emphasis bears on formal analyses the coverage is remarkably broad as topics range from morphology syntax semantics pragmatics and language acquisition. Each article seeks to represent a new perspective on these topics and a variety of frameworks and concepts are exploited: distributive morphology entailment theory grammaticalization information structure left-periphery polarity lattice spatial individuation thematic hierarchy etc. This volume will challenge anyone interested in current issues in theoretical Romance Linguistics.

Par le biais d’une méthode philologique historique et philosophique ce livre établit l’absence de lien direct entre Maître Eckhart et Jacob Böhme. En réalité le concept de la “philosophie mystique allemande” commençant soit disant avec Eckhart et finissant avec Böhme a son origine dans la philosophie romantique du 19ème siècle et est toujours en usage aujourd’hui. L'étude se concentre sur la théorie eckhartienne du “grunt” et de l’“abgrunt” et sur sa relation possible avec la théorie böhmienne de l’“Ungrund”. elle montre que les différences entre les deux théories sont essentielles et qu’elles aboutissent à une opposition philosophique profonde entre l’intellectualisme de Maître Eckhart et le volontarisme de Böhme. Ainsi il faudrait réviser aussi bien la relation de Böhme à Maitre Eckhart que la place de ce dernier au sein de l’histoire de la philosophie.Through methods of philology history and philosophy this book establishes that there is no direct connection between Master Eckhart and Jacob Böhme. The concept of the “German mystic philosophy” starting supposedly with Eckhart and ending with Böhme actually has its origin in the Romantic philosophy of the 19th century and and is still usual today. This study focuses on the eckhartian theory of the “grunt” and “abgrunt” and its possible relation to the böhmist theory of the “Ungrund”. It shows that the differences between both theories are significant and that they culminate in a deep philosophical opposition between the intellectualism of Master Eckhart and the voluntarism of Böhme. Thus both Böhme’s relationship to Master Eckhart and the position of the latter in the history of philosophy should be revised.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

How do media inform our representations of the Other and how does this influence intercultural / international relations? While officially dialogues between different national societies are conducted by diplomats in bilateral and multilateral settings in practice journalists also participate every day in such dialogues through the phenomenon of the “international media echo” in which they report on each others’ societies. Until now media have only been investigated for their potential role in the foreign policy of specific states. In a case study involving media in three national cultures and languages (French American and Russian) this book presents an interdisciplinary framework that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses for the study of the international media echo in an intercultural / international relations perspective. In particular the fundamental functioning of “spirals of anti-Other rhetoric” i.e. media wars is examined in a Critical Discourse Analysis approach completed with Social Identity Theory and International Relations theories.

The Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) is still in its infancy as a sub-discipline in the macrosociolinguistic tradition. It is therefore no coincidence that the editorial collaboration to produce its first definitive text Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion has involved Joshua A. Fishman often cited in the literature as one of the founders of the Sociology of Language. Tope Omoniyi brings to the collaboration an insightful and incisive critical eye for engaging with diversity in the treatment of language and religion. Together as editors they have successfully midwived the birth of SLR. The studies and debates contained in this volume revisit those themes that both of the contributory disciplines of Sociology of Language and Religion have common interest in. The contributing authors explore new methodologies and paradigms of analysis that they deem appropriate for this interesting and complex interface in an attempt to demonstrate how the shared interests of these disciplines impact social practices in various communities around the world. The ultimate objective of the discussions is to fashion tools for creating a body of new knowledge that supports the emergence of a better society. Towards this end the authors have harnessed resources from varied geographical cultural linguistic and religious constituencies without compromising analytical depth. In the process they have opened up new areas of sociolinguistic inquiry. The volume is thus presented as a highly useful reference resource both for undergraduate and postgraduate scholarship.

This volume is part of a research program which started with the publication in 1972 of Anna Wierzbicka’s groundbreaking work on Semantic Primitives. The first within the program to focus on a number of typologically similar languages it proposes a French Spanish Portuguese and Italian version of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) elaborated over the years by Wierzbicka and colleagues. Repetition is avoided through teamwork: a number of authors working on the languages under examination have had equal input in a set of five papers dealing with distinct parts of the metalanguage. Some of the findings presented here invite us to have a fresh look at what has already been achieved and to amend some of the working hypotheses of the NSM approach accordingly. The volume also contains six case studies (on Italian sfogarsi Portuguese saudades Spanish crisis French certes Spanish expressions of sincerity and Italian and Spanish diminutives respectively).