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This book offers for the first time a detailed comparative study of how speakers of different languages express memory concepts. While there is a robust body of psycholinguistic research that bears on how memory and language are related there is no comparative study of how speakers themselves conceptualize memory as reflected in their use of language to talk about memory. This book addresses a key question: how do speakers of different languages talk about the experience of having prior experiences coming to mind (‘remembering’) or failing to come to mind (‘forgetting’)? A complex array of answers is provided through detailed grammatical and semantic investigation of different languages including English German Polish Russian and also a number of non-Indo-European languages Amharic Cree Dalabon Korean and Mandarin. In addition the book calls for a broader interdisciplinary engagement by urging that cognitive semantics be integrated with other sciences of memory.

This volume deals with the occurrence of lexical gaps in the domain of linguistic action verbs. Though these constitute a considerable proportion of the verb inventory of many languages not all concepts of verbal communication may be expressed by lexical items in any particular one of them. Introducing a conceptual system which allows gaps to be searched for systematically this study shows which concepts of verbal communication are and which are not lexicalised in English German and Dutch. The lexicalisation patterns observed shed light on the way in which verbal behaviour is conceptualised in a particular speech community. To complete the picture the volume also addresses the question of whether communication concepts which may not be expressed by verbs may be lexicalised by fixed multiword expressions.

This monograph contains the first systematic investigation of the Japanese ‘dative subject’ construction across time and space. It demonstrates that in order to capture what speakers/writers know about how to put an utterance or a clause together it is necessary to pay attention to what they do in actual language use and in different discourse types. The work also shows the importance of diachronic perspectives to help us better understand the ways in which a particular grammatical structure is represented synchronically. By utilizing modern Japanese conversation contemporary Japanese novels and a pre-modern and modern Japanese literature corpus the study highlights the role of ‘dative subjects’ at the semantic and discourse-pragmatic levels. Specifically it demonstrates that what has been considered to be a most ‘grammatical’ aspect of Japanese actually turns out to be rather pragmatically oriented.

The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors including the semantic stylistic textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words.

The data based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples is drawn from advertising the daily press electronic communication literature spoken interaction cartoons lexical ontologies and style guides.

The coining of novel lexical items and the creative manipulation of existing words and expressions is heavily dependent on contextual factors including the semantic stylistic textual and social environments in which they occur. The twelve specialists contributing to this collection aim to illuminate creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles but also examine ‘critical creativity’ determined by language policy as well as diachronic phonetic variation in creatively-coined words. The data based either on large corpora or smaller hand-collected samples is drawn from advertising the daily press electronic communication literature spoken interaction cartoons lexical ontologies and style guides. Each study analyses novel formations in relation to their contexts of use and inevitably leads to the crucial question of creativity vs. productivity. By focussing on creative lexical formations at the level of parole these studies provide insights into morphological theory at the level of langue and ultimately seek to explain lexical creativity as a function of language use.

Negation has always been and still is a central topic in typological studies and theoretical research. Its centrality shows itself in the fact that it is not restricted to a given linguistic field but compasses the whole domain of linguistic studies. Very often works on negation are brought about in a one-sided perspective which excludes other points of view. This book on the contrary puts together studies on negation based on various theoretical frameworks and aims to cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives. The book offers contributions on negation in Old Occitan in Old Italic languages and in several modern Romance languages (Italian Roumanian French Spanish Occitan Catalan among others). It covers the diachronic dimension of negation and explores the syntactic as well as the semantico-pragmatic side of the phenomenon; aspects of negative affixation provide the morphological dimension. The originality of this volume thus lies in the multidisciplinarity of the approaches and perspectives offered.La question de la négation a toujours été et demeure un sujet central dans les recherches en linguistique théorique et typologique. Son caractère central réside en ceci qu’elle n’est pas limitée à un domaine linguistique donné mais embrasse le champ entier de la recherche linguistique. Aussi les travaux sur la négation sont-ils très souvent réalisés dans une perspective donnée qui exclut de facto d’autres points de vue ou d’autres approches. Cet ouvrage prend au contraire le parti de réunir des études dont les postulats théoriques et méthodologiques sont variés couvrant ainsi un éventail de perspectives théoriques. Le présent volume propose donc des contributions sur la négation en Ancien Occitan dans les langues de l’Italie ancienne et dans diverses langues romanes contemporaines (notamment en Italien Roumain Français Espagnol Occitan Catalan). Il couvre ainsi la dimension diachronique de la négation et s’attache à en décrire le fonctionnement d’un point de vue syntaxique aussi bien que sémantico-pragmatique. La dimension morphologique de la négation est également abordée via la problématique de l’affixation négative. L’originalité de cet ouvrage réside donc dans la multidisciplinarité des approches et des perspectives qu’il offre.

In this volume we approach the question of what it is to be European by considering the way in which citizens talk about their everyday lives as they are perceived against the background of Europe and European issues. Hence the volume will offer insights into the rarely glimpsed micro political world of ordinary talk and explore the way in which such talk in social interaction and other spheres might help us understand what Europe means to a range of its citizens. Using a range of broadly discursive approaches we will touch on inter alia issues of identity youth borders ethnicity local politics and minority languages. In the end we suggest it is a common sense view of pragmatic utility that centres what it is to be European and this is something which is continually fluid and shifting within ever changing social historical and political circumstances.

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated pragmatic and interactional character of stancetaking and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic interactional and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis corpus linguistics language description discourse analysis and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English colloquial Indonesian and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.

Languages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively ‘free’ word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that “… the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated … are far too complicated for me to even mention here let alone come to grips with” (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling. It argues that Scrambling is a concatenation effect as described in Stroik’s (1999 2000 2007) Survive analysis of minimalist syntax driven by an interpretable referentiality feature [Ref] to the middle field where syntactically encoded features for temporality and other world indices are checked. The purpose of this book is to investigate the syntactic properties of middle field Scrambling in synchronic West Germanic languages and to explore to what possible extent we can classify Scrambling as a ‘syntactic phenomenon’ within Survive-minimalist desiderata.

The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize!

Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres locations and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical aesthetic and historical questions 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts from individual texts to national literatures from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical environmental urban and political domains including issues of race and space gender and fashion popular culture and trauma science and exile ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.

With over half the languages of the world currently in danger of extinction within a century the need for high quality grammatical descriptions is more urgent than ever. Potential grammar writers however often find themselves paralyzed by the daunting task of describing a language. The papers in the present volume (originally published in Studies in Language 30:2 (2006)) provide suggestions and encouragement – from experienced grammar writers and users – regarding concrete methods for approaching the task of writing a descriptive grammar of a language. Salient "themes" emerging from the papers in this volume include: The necessity of community involvement in grammatical descriptions; The link between a grammar and the other products of a program of language documentation (a dictionary and collection of texts); The complementary functions of elicited vs. naturally occurring data; and grammatical description as 'art' as well as 'science'.