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Recently there has been an upsurge of interest in the work Periphyseon of the early medieval philosopher John Scot Eriugena. Previous research has classified the book either as a piece of Neoplatonic philosophy or as part of the Latin dialectic tradition which has led to one-sided interpretations. The present publication focuses instead on the philosophical claims defended in the Periphyseon itself examines its originality and discusses the soundness of its argumentation. As a result a hitherto unnoticed basic thought of the work has been uncovered namely the concept of a negative ontology according to which all substance is completely incomprehensible. This notion constitutes the greatest innovation of Eriugena’s thought. In keeping with his negative ontology Eriugena downgrades the fourfold division of nature that he had presented at the beginning of his work. A critical survey of the current readings of Eriugena as a Neoplatonist and idealist completes this book.

In jüngerer Zeit rückt das Werk Periphyseon des frühmittelalterlichen Denkers Johannes Scottus Eriugena zunehmend in den Fokus der philosophischen Forschung. Die bisherigen Untersuchungen ordnen das Werk entweder der neuplatonischen Denkrichtung oder der lateinischen Dialektiktradition zu und richten dementsprechend ihre Interpretation daran aus. Die vorliegende Veröffentlichung hingegen betrachtet vorrangig die Darstellung und Argumentation im Periphyseon selbst prüft detailliert den Innovationsgehalt und die Überzeugungskraft der Aussagen. Als Ergebnis zeigt sich ein bislang ungesehener Grundgedanke des Werks der einer negativen Ontologie. Diese Ontologie verneint jegliche Bestimmbarkeit aller Substanz. Sie macht die eigentliche Innovation in Eriugenas Denken aus. Im Hinblick auf diese löst er die zu Anfang des Werks präsentierte Vierteilung der Gesamtnatur wieder auf. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der bisherigen Einordnung Eriugenas als Neuplatoniker und Idealist rundet das Buch ab.

The overarching theme of this volume is one of the central concerns of syntactic theory: How local is syntax and what are the measures of syntactic locality? It is argued here that movement and anaphoric relations are governed by a unified concept of locality: the phase. On an empirical level Beyond Coherence brings together three strands of research on German syntax: ‘coherence’ the study of (reduced) infinitive constructions; the possessor dative construction with a dative nominal playing the dual role of possessor and affectee; and binding the distribution of anaphors and pronominals. These apparently disparate areas of research intersect in that the locality constraints on the possessor dative construction and binding allow the two phenomena to serve as probes for infinitival clause size. Offering a Minimalist ‘possessor raising’ and phase-based binding account this work culminates in a discussion of the phase as the key to the various opacity effects observed in the book.

The label CLIL stands for classrooms where a foreign language (English) is used as a medium of instruction in content subjects. This book provides a first in-depth analysis of the kind of communicative abilities which are embodied in such CLIL classrooms. It examines teacher and student talk at secondary school level from different discourse-analytic angles taking into account the interpersonal pragmatics of classroom discourse and how school subjects are talked into being during lessons. The analysis shows how CLIL classroom interaction is strongly shaped by its institutional context which in turn conditions the ways in which students experience use and learn the target language. The research presented here suggests that CLIL programmes require more explicit language learning goals in order to fully exploit their potential for furthering the learners’ appropriation of a foreign language as a medium of learning.

Because of the need to devise systems for electronic communication on the internet multi-agent computing is moving to a model of communication as a structured conversation between rational agents. For example in multi-agent systems an electronic agent searches around the internet and collects certain kinds of information by asking questions to other agents. Such agents also reason with each other when they engage in negotiation and persuasion. It is shown in this book that critical argumentation is best represented in this framework by the model of reasoned argument called a dialog in which two or more parties engage in a polite and orderly exchange with each other according to rules governed by conversation policies. In such dialog argumentation the two parties reason together by taking turns asking questions offering replies and offering reasons to support a claim. They try to settle their disagreements by an orderly conversational exchange that is partly adversarial and partly collaborative.

Bilinguals often report that they feel like a different person in their two languages. In the words of one bilingual in Koven’s book “When I speak Portuguese automatically I'm in a different world…it's a different color.” Although testimonials like this abound in everyday conversation among bilinguals there has been scant systematic investigation of this intriguing phenomenon. Focusing on French-Portuguese bilinguals the adult children of Portuguese migrants in France this book provides an empirically grounded theoretical account of how the same speakers enact experience and are perceived by others to have different identities in their two languages. This book explores bilinguals’ experiences and expressions of identity in multicultural multilingual contexts. It is distinctive in its integration of multiple levels of analysis to address the relationships between language and identity. Koven links detailed attention to discourse form to participants’ multiple interpretations how such forms become signs of identity and to the broader macrosociolinguistic contexts that structure participants’ access to those signs. The study of how bilinguals perform and experience different identities in their two languages sheds light on the more general role of linguistic and cultural forms in local experiences and expressions of identity.

What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences for example:

• One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g.

Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer). • Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing.

• The mind cannot be understood in terms of folk-psychological concepts (e.g. belief desire intention).

• One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven.

• Thoughts are sentence-tokens and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic not the semantic properties of those tokens.



In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind John-Michael Kuczynski argues that these implausible but widely held views are direct consequences of a popular doctrine known as content-externalism this being the view that the contents of one’s mental states are constitutively dependent on facts about the external world. Kuczynski shows that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between on the one hand what is literally meant by linguistic expressions and on the other hand the information that one must work through to compute the literal meanings of such expressions.

The second half of the present work concerns the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Underlying CTM is an acceptance of conceptual atomism – the view that a creature can have a single concept without having any others – and also an acceptance of the view that concepts are not descriptive (i.e. that one can have a concept of a thing without knowing of any description that is satisfied by that thing). Kuczynski shows that both views are false one reason being that they presuppose the truth of content-externalism another being that they are incompatible with the epistemological anti-foundationalism proven correct by Wilfred Sellars and Laurence Bonjour. Kuczynski also shows that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as “computation” “syntax” “algorithm” and “formal truth”; and he provides novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms. (Series A)

The following theoretical-empirical points on the DP are discussed: Article and its referential-anaphoric properties by Abraham (Determiners in Centering Theory); Bartra (On bare NPs in Old Spanish and Catalan); identification of all functional nominal categories by Stvan (Bare singular count nouns); Kupisch & Koops (Specificity and negation); Jäger (History of German indefinite determiners); typological comparison of the interaction of nominal and verbal determination by Abraham (Discourse-functional crystallization of the or­ig­inal demonstrative); Leiss (Covert (in)definiteness and aspect in Old Icelandic Goth­ic Old High German); Lohndal (Double definiteness during Old Norse); emergence of DP in ontogeny/phylogeny by Osawa (DP TP and aspect in Old English and L1 acquisition); Bittner (Early functions of definites in L1 acquisition); Wood (Demonstratives and possessives emergent from Old English); Bauer ((in)defin­ite articles in Indo-European) and Stark (Variation in nominal indefiniteness in Romance).

This volume contains 22 revised papers originally presented at the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held August 2005 in Madison Wisconsin USA. The papers cover a broad range of languages including well-studied languages of Europe but also Aramaic Zoque and Uto-Aztecan Japanese and Korean Afrikaans and the Pilbara languages of Australia. The theoretical approaches taken are equally diverse often bringing together aspects of ‘formal’ and ‘functional’ theories in a single contribution. Many of the chapters provide fresh data including several drawing on data from electronic corpora. Topics range from traditional comparative reconstruction to prosodic change and the role of processing in syntactic change.

Narrative research is frequently described as a diverse enterprise yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they tend to be autobiographical and elicited in interviews. This book sets out to carve out a space alongside this narrative canon for stories that have not made it to the mainstream of narrative and identity analysis yet they abound as well as being crucial sites of subjectivity in everyday interactional contexts. By labelling those stories as ‘small’ the book emphasizes their distinctiveness both interactionally and as an antidote to the tradition of ‘grand’ narratives research. Drawing primarily on the audio-recorded small stories of a group of female adolescents that was studied ethnographically in a town in Greece the book follows a language-focused and practice-based approach in order to provide fresh answers and perspectives on some of the perennial questions of narrative analysis: How can we (re)conceptualize the mainstay concepts of tellership structure and evaluation in small stories? How do the participants’ telling identities connect with their larger social identities? Finally what does the project of storying self (and other) mean in small stories and how can it be best explored?

This volume offers a unique collection of articles investigating the often neglected phenomenon of parentheticals which are commonly seen as expressions interrupting the linear structure of a host utterance but lacking a structural relation to it. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to the subject as well as a range of research articles addressing questions including the syntactic link between parenthetical and frame utterance the relation between syntactic and prosodic form the usage and interpretation of parentheticals and many more. It embraces research findings from different European languages (English German Dutch Romance) and covers an array of forms of syntactic interpolations (from one-word parentheticals to clausal) and a range of methodologies including empirical research corpus research and theoretical analyses. The collection underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a multi-faceted phenomenon such as parentheticals.