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Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Michael Bamberg,
Anna De Fina and
Deborah Schiffrin
The different traditions that have inspired the contributors to this volume can be divided along three different orientations one that is rooted predominantly in sociolinguistics a second that is ethnomethodologically informed and a third that came in the wake of narrative interview research. All three share a commitment to view self and identity not as essential properties of the person but as constituted in discursive practices and particularly in narrative. Moreover since self and identity are held to be phenomena that are contextually and continually generated they are defined and viewed in the plural as selves and identities. In the attempt of moving closer toward a process-oriented approach to the formation of selves and identities this volume sets the stage for future discussions of the role of narrative and discourse in this generation process and for how a close analysis of these processes can advance an understanding of the world around us and within this world of identities and selves.
Mental States : Volume 2: Language and cognitive structure
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Andrea C. Schalley and
Drew Khlentzos
The contributions to this volume focus on what language and language use reveals about cognitive structure and underlying cognitive categories. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking essays from linguists and psychologists within this volume investigate the insights conceptual categorization can give into the organization and structure of the mind and specific mental states. Topics and linguistic phenomena discussed include narratives and story telling language development figurative language linguistic categorization linguistic relativity and the linguistic coding of mental states such as perceptions and beliefs. With contributions at the forefront of current debate this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in language and the cognitive structures that support it.
Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing IV : Selected papers from RANLP 2005
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Nicolas Nicolov,
Kalina Bontcheva,
Galia Angelova and
Ruslan Mitkov
This volume brings together selected and revised papers from the international conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” held in Borovets Bulgaria in September 2005. The best papers have been selected for this volume with the aim to reflect the most promising and significant trends in natural language processing. The volume covers a wide variety of topics in Natural Language Processing including information extraction indexing latent semantic analysis dependency parsing anaphora and referring expressions spam analysis document classification rhetorical relations textual entailment question answering ontologies word sense disambiguation machine translation treebanks and corpora.
Mental States : Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Andrea C. Schalley and
Drew Khlentzos
Collecting the work of linguists psychologists neuroscientists archaeologists artificial intelligence researchers and philosophers this volume presents a richly varied picture of the nature and function of mental states. Starting from questions about the cognitive capacities of the early hominin homo floresiensis the essays proceed to the role mental representations play in guiding the behaviour of simple organisms and robots thence to the question of which features of its environment the human brain represents and the extent to which complex cognitive skills such as language acquisition and comprehension are impaired when the brain lacks certain important neural structures. Other papers explore topics ranging from nativism to the presumed constancy of categorization across signed and spoken languages from the formal representation of metaphor actions and vague language to philosophical questions about conceptual schemes and colours. Anyone interested in mental states will find much to reward them in this fine volume.
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics : Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume XIX: Urbana, Illinois, April 2005
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Elabbas Benmamoun
This volume offers a selection from the papers presented at the 2005 Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The papers cover a variety of topics in Arabic Linguistics ranging from the lexicon phonology syntax and computational linguistics.
Dictionary Visions, Research and Practice : Selected papers from the 12th International Symposium on Lexicography, Copenhagen 2004
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Henrik Gottlieb and
Jens Erik Mogensen
This book is about dictionaries and dictionary making. In six thematic sections it presents nineteen contributions covering a wide field within lexicography: Online Lexicography Dictionary Structure Phraseology in Dictionaries LSP Lexicography Dictionaries and the User plus Etymology History and Culture in Lexicography. Some chapters focus on theoretical aspects others report on dictionary work in the making and still others compare and analyze existing dictionaries. Common to all authors however is the concern for the dictionary user. Trivial as it may seem the fact that dictionaries are meant to fulfill the needs of specific user groups has only recently achieved widespread recognition in the lexicographical literature. This volume shows the many ramifications of this functional approach to lexicography by presenting twenty-two authors representing the state of the art in eleven countries: Canada Denmark Germany Great Britain Iceland Israel Latvia The Netherlands Poland South Africa and Spain.
Metapragmatics in Use
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Wolfram Bublitz and
Axel Hübler
This collection of papers fills a gap in current research on both metapragmatics and pragmatics in that it combines data-based pragmatic analysis with metapragmatic theory and focuses on the ways in which metadiscourse is actually used. The 12 contributions investigate speech acts and verbal (as well as non-verbal) expressions which highlight (meta-)linguistic aspects of ongoing discourse and thus provoke a deviation from the latter’s original direction and purpose. All case studies discuss ways and means which interactants employ to resolve diverging pragmatic expectations in communication. The papers analyze authentic examples from English and other languages (and cultures) including Thai Chinese and Japanese and center around three principal domains of communication: ordinary everyday interaction interaction in educational contexts and in specialized discourse. The introductory chapter locates the various contributions within a systematically broader theoretical framework. The wide scope of the collection its empirical orientation and the reader-friendly form of presentation should appeal to anyone interested in pragmatics whether scholar or student.
Talking about Motion : A crosslinguistic investigation of lexicalization patterns
Dec 2007
Book
Author(s):
Luna Filipović
This is a corpus-based study of lexicalization of motion events in Serbo-Croatian and English with contrasting examples from Spanish French Italian Mandarin Chinese and Albanian. Talmy’s typology (1985) provides the backdrop for the analysis and the focus is on intratypological differences that affect habitual presence or absence of information in motion expressions crosslinguistically as well as “pattern clashing” in translation. This fresh look at issues regarding linguistic typology lexical and construction meaning and spatio-temporal construals in language and experience results in a more finely grained classification of verbalized motion events. The study offers an eclectic overview of different theoretical approaches and insists on theoretically unbiased set of tools and principles that can be used in studies of any cognitive domain in any language. It provides an in-depth discussion of current issues in cognitive linguistics in particular and suggests systematic implementation of the research findings in applied and interdisciplinary studies of language.
Dialogue and Culture
Dec 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Marion Grein and
Edda Weigand
The volume deals with the relationship between language dialogue human nature and culture by focusing on an approach that considers culture to be a crucial component of dialogic interaction. Part I refers to the so-called ‘language instinct debate’ between nativists and empiricists and introduces a mediating position that regards language and dialogue as determined by both human nature and culture. This sets the framework for the contributions of Part II which propose varying theoretical positions on how to address the ways in which culture influences dialogue. Part III presents more empirically oriented studies which demonstrate the interaction of components in the ‘mixed game’ and focus in particular on specific action games politeness and selected verbal means of communication.
Argument Structure
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Eric J. Reuland,
Tanmoy Bhattacharya and
Giorgos Spathas
Recent developments in the generative tradition have created new interest in matters of argument structure and argument projection giving prominence to the discussion on the role of lexical entries. Particularly the more traditional lexicalist view that encodes argument structure information on lexical entries is now challenged by a syntactic view under which all properties of argument structure are taken up by syntactic structure. In the light of these new developments the contributions in this volume provide detailed empirical investigations of argument structure phenomena in a wide range of languages. The contributions vary in their response to the theoretical questions and address issues that range from the role of specific functional heads and the relation of argument projection with syntactic processes to the position of argument structure within a broader clausal architecture and the argument structure properties of less studied categories.
History of Linguistics 2005 : Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHOLS X), 1–5 September 2005, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Douglas A. Kibbee
As each period in the history of the language sciences has chosen to focus on different key questions the study of that history promises to open our eyes to the variety of interesting questions that can be asked and answered – taking off the blinders of contemporary preoccupations. September 1–5 2005 linguists from twenty-five countries gathered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to share their passion for the history of their discipline. This volume is a distillation of many fine contributions from that conference shedding light on the many different approaches to the study of language.
Traditions of Controversy
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Marcelo Dascal and
Han-liang Chang
Controversies may be particularly prominent in one or another culture. Yet there is hardly any culture where they do not exist. This book assumes that the practice of controversy along with its theorization constitutes – in each of the cultures and disciplines where it develops – a tradition. Whether there are enough shared elements in these traditions to consider them as fundamentally universal or not is something that can only be determined on the basis of a rich sample of controversies and theorizations thereof belonging to different traditions. This is what this volume provides to the reader. By presenting side by side controversies from the East and from the West from the ancient past up to the present from different domains of scholarship and action the reader is in a position not only to admire the widespread nature role and richness of the phenomenon but also to begin to evaluate its variety as well as universality. While the editors have purposefully avoided comparative studies of traditions of controversy in order to focus on each tradition so to speak from its practitioners’ point of view some of the chapters take a bird’s eye view and exemplify how such studies can be systematically conducted. In a world that is globalizing itself at a fast pace the awareness of the multiplicity of traditions of controversy is fundamental for ensuring both that the integration of the various perspectives is harmonious and that each one of them is granted its place in a plural universe.
Anthropology of Color : Interdisciplinary multilevel modeling
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Robert E. MacLaury,
Galina V. Paramei and
Don Dedrick
The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology linguistics psychology semiotics and a variety of other fields by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005 : Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Sergio Baauw,
Frank Drijkoningen and
Manuela Pinto
The conference series Going Romance is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages are put in an interactive perspective giving space to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume features a selection of 18 articles (out of 28) that were presented during the 19th meeting at Utrecht University December 8-10 2005. Included in this volume are four papers that were presented by invited speakers: Belletti Delais-Roussarie & Rialland Notley & Van der Linden & Hulk and Ordóñez; these reflect both issues discussed in the general session as well as themes of the workshop on acquisition. A number of reknown Romance linguists (Saltarelli di Sciullo Zubizarreta) also contributed to the volume. In general contributions bear on a variety of topics in the field of morphology syntax semantics and pragmatics and include the perspective from acquisition.
Gestural Communication in Nonhuman and Human Primates
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Katja Liebal,
Cornelia Müller and
Simone Pika
Research into gestures represents a multifaceted field comprising a wide range of disciplines and research topics varying methods and approaches and even different species such as humans apes and monkeys. The aim of this volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 5:1/2 (2005)) is to bring together the research in gestural communication in both nonhuman and human primates and to explore the potential of a comparative approach and its contribution to the question of an evolutionary scenario in which gestures play a significant role. The topics covered include the spontaneous natural gesture use in social groups of apes and monkeys but also during interactions with humans gestures of preverbal children and their interaction with language speech-accompanying gestures in humans as well as the use of sign-language in human and nonhuman great apes. It addresses researchers with a background in Psychology Primatology Linguistics and Anthropology but it might also function as an introduction and a documentation state of the art for a wider less specialised audience which is fascinated by the role gestures might have played in the evolution of human language.
Romance Linguistics 2006 : Selected papers from the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New Brunswick, March-April 2006
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
José Camacho,
Nydia Flores-Ferrán,
Liliana Sánchez,
Viviane Déprez and
María José Cabrera
This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics phonology psycholinguistics sociolinguistics. The volume contains scholarly research in areas such as parenthetical null topic construction expletives number and language change performative verbs in colonial court Spanish aspect shift palatilization in Romanian melodic contours in Majorcan Catalan variation in verb type and position and deviance in early child bilingualism among many others. It is a well-rounded selection of research topics that will enrich and widen our understanding of Romance languages.
Coreference, Modality, and Focus : Studies on the syntax–semantics interface
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Luis Eguren and
Olga Fernández-Soriano
This volume is a collection of selected papers originally presented at the XVIth Colloquium on Generative Grammar that was held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. All the papers deal with current issues within the generative framework mostly paying attention to phenomena pertaining to the syntax-semantics interface. The major concerns are coreference relations modals and modality and focus/ellipsis. More specifically the contributions present research findings from different languages often adopting a comparative perspective and include studies on sub-extraction from subjects and objects; on obviation and Control structures; on specificity and Weak Crossover effects; and on reconstruction without movement as well as papers that address the scopal interactions between tense/aspect and modals; the syntactic and semantic properties of different types of left-periphery operators; and the role focus plays in elliptical constructions.
Play Frames and Social Identities : Contact encounters in a Greek primary school
Nov 2007
Book
Author(s):
Vally Lytra
This book is a sociolinguistic study of children’s talk and how they interact with one another and their teachers in multilingual multicultural and multiethnic schools. It is based on tape recordings and ethnographic observations of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children at an Athens primary school. It offers the reader a unique look into the ways in which children draw upon their rich interactional histories and share transform and recontextualize linguistic and other semiotic resources in circulation to construct play frames and explore adopt resist available as well as novel social roles and identities. Drawing on ethnographically informed approaches to discourse the book shows the ways in which verbal phenomena such as teasing joking language play music making and chanting can provide a productive locus for the study of the negotiation of social identities and roles at school. This book will be of interest to scholars researchers and students of sociolinguistics discourse analysis cultural studies and multicultural education. It will also be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.
Silence in Intercultural Communication : Perceptions and performance
Nov 2007
Book
Author(s):
Ikuko Nakane
How and why is silence used interculturally? Approaching the phenomenon of silence from multiple perspectives this book shows how silence is used perceived and at times misinterpreted in intercultural communication. Using a model of key aspects of silence in communication – linguistic cognitive and sociopsychological – and fundamental levels of social organization – individual situational and sociocultural - the book explores the intricate relationship between perceptions and performance of silence in interaction involving Japanese and Australian participants. Through a combination of macro- and micro- ethnographic analyses of university seminar interactions the stereotypes of the ‘silent East’ is reconsidered and the tension between local and sociocultural perspectives of intercultural communication is addressed. The book has relevance to researchers and students in intercultural pragmatics discourse analysis and applied linguistics.
Noun Phrases in Creole Languages : A multi-faceted approach
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Marlyse Baptista and
Jacqueline Guéron
This volume offers a thorough examination of the syntactic semantic pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases in a wide variety of creole (and non-creole) languages including Cape Verdean Creole Santome Papiamentu Guinea-Bissau Creole Mindanao Chabacano Réunionnais Creole Lesser Antillean Haitian Creole Mauritian Creole Seychellois Sranan Jamaican Creole Berbice Dutch Creole and African American English. Comparative studies also consider the determiner systems of Middle and Modern French European Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese Spanish Ewe Fon and Gun. This compilation of 16 chapters brings together descriptive theoretical diachronic and synchronic studies that focus on the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in creoles. The contributions demonstrate the variety and complex nature of determiner systems in creoles and their widespread use of bare nouns in comparison to their source languages. This volume is evidence of the relevance of creole languages to theories of language creation language change and linguistic theory in general.
The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Mengistu Amberber
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.
Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage : A methodological analysis of theory and research
Nov 2007
Book
Author(s):
Gerard J. Steen
Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage aims to map the field of this development in theory and research from a methodological perspective. It raises the question when exactly evidence for metaphor in language and thought can be said to count as converging. It also goes into the various stages of producing such evidence (conceptualization operationalization data collection and analysis and interpretation). The book offers systematic discussion of eight distinct areas of metaphor research that emerge as a result of approaching metaphor as part of grammar or usage language or thought and symbolic structure or cognitive process.
Conceptual Structure in Lexical Items : The lexicalisation of communication concepts in English, German and Dutch
Nov 2007
Book
Author(s):
Kristel Proost
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.
Missionary Linguistics III / Lingüística misionera III : Morphology and Syntax. Selected papers from the Third and Fourth International Conferences on Missionary Linguistics, Hong Kong/Macau, 12–15 March 2005, Valladolid, 8–11 March 2006
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Otto Zwartjes,
Gregory James and
Emilio Ridruejo
This third volume on Missionary Linguistics focuses on morphology and syntax. It contains a selection of papers derived from the international conferences on missionary linguistics held in Hong Kong/Macau and Valladolid. As with the previous two volumes (2004 on general issues and 2005 on orthography and phonology) this volume looks at methodology and descriptive techniques from a historical point of view offering articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics typologists and descriptive linguists. It presents research into languages such as Tarasco (Pur’épecha) Massachusett Nahuatl Conivo Sipibo Guaraní Vietnamese Tamil Southern Min Chinese dialects Mandarin Chinese Arabic Tagalog and other Austronesian languages such as Yapese and Chamorro.
Grammar in Use across Time and Space : Deconstructing the Japanese ‘dative subject’ construction
Nov 2007
Book
Author(s):
Misumi Sadler
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.
Reciprocal Constructions
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Vladimir P. Nedjalkov
This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other The poets admire each other’s poems) have often been the subject of language-particular studies but it is only in this work that a truly global comparative picture emerges. Nine stage-setting chapters dealing with general and theoretical matters are followed by 40 chapters containing in-depth descriptions of reciprocals in individual languages by renowned specialists. The introductory papers provide a conceptual and terminological framework that allows the authors of the individual chapters to characterize their languages in comparable terms making it easy for the reader to see points of commonality between languages and constructions that have never been compared before. This set of volumes is an indispensable starting point and will be a lasting reference work for any future studies of reciprocals.
Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts
Nov 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Judith Munat
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.
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.
Voicing in Dutch : (De)voicing – phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Jeroen van de Weijer and
Erik Jan van der Torre
This volume focuses on the phonology phonetics and psycholinguistics of voicing-related phenomena in Dutch. Dutch phonology has played a touchstone role in the past few decades where competing phonological theories regarding laryngeal representation have been concerned. Debates have focused on the phonetic facts (Is final neutralization complete or incomplete? Are the assimilation rules phonetic or phonological?) and the most adequate phonological analyses (Is [voice] a binary feature? What constraints are necessary? What is the best way of implementing the role of morphology?). This volume summarises and adds fuel to these debates on several fronts by providing an overview of analyses so far (rule-based as well as constraint-based) and proposing a new one by drawing attention to new facts such as exceptions to final devoicing in certain dialects and the behaviour of loanwords and by re-examining the phonetic state of affairs and the behaviour of voiced voiceless and partially devoiced segments in psycholinguistic experiments.
La négation dans les langues romanes
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Franck Floricic
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.
Child Second Language Acquisition : A bi-directional study of English and Italian tense-aspect morphology
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Sonia Rocca
As one of the first books in child second language acquisition (SLA) this book focuses on the core area of tense-aspect morphology reporting on three L1-Italian children learning L2 English vs. three L1-English children learning L2 Italian. An innovative longitudinal/bidirectional research design where two languages represent both source and target show effects of language transfer in learners that because of their age still have potential to become native-speakers of the target. An unusual feature of this book is that relevant studies of acquisition of L2 Italian some heretofore only in Italian are reviewed incorporated into the study and made available to a more general audience. Though the main focus is on child SLA crucial comparisons to both first language acquisition vs. adult SLA are presented. This approach will thus be of interest more generally to readers in first and second language acquisition and child development.
The Discourse of Europe : Talk and text in everyday life
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Sharon Millar and
John Wilson
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.
Constructing a Sociology of Translation
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Michaela Wolf and
Alexandra Fukari
The view of translation as a socially regulated activity has opened up a broad field of research in the last few years. This volume deals with central questions of the new domain and aims to contribute to the conceptualisation of a general sociology of translation. Interdisciplinary in approach it discusses the role of major representatives of sociology like Pierre Bourdieu Bruno Latour Bernard Lahire Anthony Giddens or Niklas Luhmann in establishing a theoretical framework for a sociology of translation. Drawing on methodologies from sociology and integrating them into translation studies the book questions some of the established categories in this discipline and calls for a redefinition of long-assumed principles. The contributions show the social involvement of translation in various fields and focus especially on the translator’s position in an emerging sociology of translation Bourdieu’s influence in conceptualising this new sub-discipline methodological questions and a sociologically oriented meta-discussion of translation studies.
Stancetaking in Discourse : Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Robert Englebretson
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.
The Language of Pain : Expression or description?
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Chryssoula Lascaratou
How is the universal yet private and subjective experience of pain talked about by different people in everyday encounters? What does the analysis of pain-related lexico-phraseological choices grammatical structures and linguistic metaphors reveal as to how pain is perceived and experienced? Are pain utterances primarily used to express or to describe this experiential domain? This is the first book that investigates such questions from both a functional and a cognitive perspective: it combines two converging usage-based theoretical models in a systematic linguistic inquiry of the construal of pain in everyday language. This work is based on a specialised electronic corpus of Greek naturally-occurring dialogues in a health care context the underlying assumption being that in the absence of factual evidence intuition about language cannot reliably detect or predict patterns of usage. Comparing Greek with English data this book significantly contributes to the development of this research field cross-linguistically.
Scrambling and the Survive Principle
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Michael T. Putnam
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.
Motion, Transfer and Transformation : The grammar of change in Lowland Chontal
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Loretta O’Connor
Typologies are critical tools for linguists but typologies like grammars are known to leak. This book addresses the question of typological overlap from the perspective of a single language. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca a language of southern Mexico change events are expressed with three types of predicates and each predicate type corresponds to a different language type in the well-known typology of lexicalization patterns established by Talmy and elaborated by others. O’Connor evaluates the predictive powers of the typology by examining the consequences of each predicate type in a variety of contexts using data from narrative discourse stimulus response and elicitation. This is the first detailed look at the lexical and grammatical resources of the verbal system in Chontal and their relation to semantics of change. The analysis of how and why Chontal speakers choose among these verbal resources to achieve particular communicative and social goals serves both as a documentation of an endangered language and a theoretical contribution towards a typology of language use.
Modernism
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Astradur Eysteinsson and
Vivian Liska
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.
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.
Saami Linguistics
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Ida Toivonen and
Diane Nelson
The papers in this volume describe and analyze an array of intriguing linguistic phenomena as they occur in the Saami languages ranging from etymological nativization of loanwords to the formation of deadjectival and denominal verbs. Saami displays a number of characteristics that are unusual from a cross-linguistic perspective including partial agreement on verbs a three-way quantity distinction in consonants and spectacular consonant gradation. The eight papers presented here approach these and other issues from diverse theoretical perspectives in morphology phonology and syntax. The volume includes an extensive research bibliography which will be helpful for anyone interested in Saami linguistics.
Perspectives on Grammar Writing
Oct 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Thomas E. Payne and
David J. Weber
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'.
To Understand a Cat : Methodology and philosophy
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Sam S. Rakover
To understand a cat: methodology and philosophy rests on the realization that the everyday behavior of a cat (but other animals too) should be understood through a new approach namely methodological dualism. It appeals to mechanistic explanation models and to mentalistic explanation models. It puts up the methodological idea that these models have to be combined in one theoretical structure according to the scientific game-rules. This approach shows that specific mentalistic explanations are generated from explanation models or schemes which meet the demands of the scientific games-rules; and it proposes a new theoretical structure called the multi-explanation theory to generate particular theories which provide us with efficient explanations for behavioral phenomena. The book delves deep into anthropomorphism and the complex question of whether a cat has consciousness and free will and examines the intricate relations of the mental the computational and the neurophysiological.(Series A)
Eriugenas negative Ontologie
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Sebastian Florian Weiner
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.
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.
Locality and Information Structure : A cartographic approach to Japanese
Oct 2007
Book
Author(s):
Yoshio Endo
This monograph presents a systematic exploration of Japanese syntax within the cartographic approach paying special attention to the locality effects induced by discourse-based features such as topic and focus. Although the main focus is on Japanese syntax implications of the analyses developed are investigated from a broader comparative perspective. Unlike previous works on Japanese generative syntax this book is based partially on informant surveys including the distribution of adverbials and the categorical status of nominative-Case-marked adverbials as well as an exhaustive survey of ditransitive predicates in terms of word formation and idioms in Koujien one of the most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries. A systematic syntactic study of the nature of clause-final particles in Japanese an area previously only explored in the framework of discourse analysis is also presented. It is shown that the EPP may be satisfied by such discourse-related elements as topic and focus and by these sentence final particles.
Beyond Coherence : The syntax of opacity in German
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Vera Lee-Schoenfeld
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.
Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Contact Languages
Sept 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Magnus Huber and
Viveka Velupillai
This collection of selected conference papers from three SPCL meetings brings together a cross-fertilization of approaches to the study of contact languages. The articles are grouped into three coherent sections dealing with respectively phonetics and phonology including Optimality Theory; synchronic analyses of both morphology and syntax; and diachronic tracings of language change with special focus on sound patterns as well as semantics. An added value of the volume is that most of the articles are in various ways significant for more than one linguistic subgrouping and there is a significant overlap of interests; the sections also cover sociolinguistic subjects give both theoretical and functional linguistic analyses of language data and discuss issues of grammaticalization. Thus in discussing a number of issues relevant far beyond the study of pidgin and creole languages as well as providing a wealth of linguistic data this volume also contributes to the broader field of linguistics in general.
Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Christiane Dalton-Puffer
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.
Discourse on the Move : Using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Douglas Biber,
Ulla Connor and
Thomas A. Upton
Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach the functional components of a genre are determined first and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters biology/biochemistry research articles and university classroom teaching.
Dialog Theory for Critical Argumentation
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Douglas N. Walton
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.
Expressing the Same by the Different : The subjunctive vs the indicative in French
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Igor Dreer
This volume offers an alternative sign-oriented analysis of the distribution of the French Indicative and Subjunctive. It rejects both government and functions attributed to both moods and shows that the distribution of the Indicative and the Subjunctive is motivated by their invariant meanings. The volume illustrates the close interaction between the Indicative and the Subjunctive as linguistic signs and signs of other grammatical systems contextually associated with the invariant meanings of both moods. Special consideration is given to the use of the Indicative and the Subjunctive in texts of different styles and genres.This volume also deals with the diachronic disfavoring of the Subjunctive and especially of the Imperfect Subjunctive that occurred from Old French to Contemporary French. It is argued that this disfavoring was motivated by the narrowing of the invariant meaning of the Contemporary French Subjunctive. All hypotheses are supported by contextualized examples and frequency counts.
Selves in Two Languages : Bilinguals’ verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese
Sept 2007
Book
Author(s):
Michèle Koven
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.
Memory, Psychology and Second Language Learning
Aug 2007
Book
Author(s):
Mick Randall
This book explores the contributions that cognitive linguistics and psychology including neuropsychology have made to the understanding of the way that second languages are processed and learnt. It examines areas of phonology word recognition and semantics examining ‘bottom-up’ decoding processes as compared with ‘top-down’ processes as they affect memory. It also discusses second language learning from the acquisition/learning and nativist/connectionist perspectives. These ideas are then related to the methods that are used to teach second languages primarily English in formal classroom situations. This examination involves both ‘mainstream’ communicative approaches and more traditional methods widely used to teach EFL throughout the world. The book is intended to act both as a textbook for students who are studying second language teaching and as an exploration of issues for the interested teacher who would like to further extend their understanding of the cognitive processes underlying their teaching.Mick Randall is currently Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Head of the Institute of Education at the British University in Dubai. He has taught courses in second language learning and teaching applied linguistics and psychology in a number of different contexts. He has a special interest in the cognitive processing of language and in the psycholinguistics of word recognition spelling and reading.
Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind : A defense of content-internalism and semantic externalism
Aug 2007
Book
Author(s):
John-Michael Kuczynski
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)
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)
Cognitive Technologies and the Pragmatics of Cognition
Aug 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Itiel E. Dror
Technology has long been a helpful aid in human cognitive activities. With its growing sophistication and usage technology is now taking a more intrinsic and active role in human cognition. The shift from an external aid to being an internal component of cognitive processing reflects a revolution in technology cognition and their interaction. The creation of such ‘cognitive technologies’ transforms the traditional instrumental function of technology to a constitutive role that shapes and defines cognition itself. This book which was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 13:3 (2005) explores the new horizon of these ‘cognitive technologies’ and their interactions with humans.
Nominal Determination : Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence
Aug 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Elisabeth Stark,
Elisabeth Leiss and
Werner Abraham
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).
Creativity and Convention : The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech
Aug 2007
Book
Author(s):
Rosa E. Vega Moreno
This book offers a pragmatic account of the interpretation of everyday metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. Using the framework of Relevance Theory it reanalyses the results of recent experimental research on figurative utterances and provides a novel account of the interplay of creativity and convention in figurative interpretation showing how features ‘emerge’ during metaphor comprehension and how literal meaning contributes to idiom comprehension. The central claim is that the mind is rather selective when processing information and that in the pragmatic interpretation of both literal and figurative utterances this selectivity often results in the creation of new (‘ad hoc’) concepts or the standardization of pragmatic routines. With this approach the comprehension of metaphors and idioms requires no special pragmatic principles or procedures not required for the interpretation of ordinary literal utterances but follows from an automatic tendency towards selective processing which is itself a by-product of Sperber and Wilson’s Cognitive Principle of Relevance.
Historical Linguistics 2005 : Selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Madison, Wisconsin, 31 July - 5 August 2005
Aug 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Joseph C. Salmons and
Shannon Dubenion-Smith
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.
Embodiment in Cognition and Culture
Aug 2007
Book
Editor(s):
John Michael Krois,
Mats Rosengren,
Angela Steidele and
Dirk Westerkamp
This volume shows that the notions of embodied or situated cognition which have transformed the scientific study of intelligence have the potential to reorient cultural studies as well. The essays adapt and amplify embodied cognition in such different fields as art history literature history of science religious studies philosophy biology and cognitive science. The topics include the biological genesis of teleology the dependence of meaning in signs upon biological embodiment the notion of image schema and the concept of force in cognitive semantics pictorial self-portraiture as a means to study self-perception the difference between reading aloud and silent reading as a way to make sense of literary texts intermodal (kinesthetic) understanding of art psychosomatic medicine laughter as a medical and ethical phenomenon the valuation of laughter and the body in religion and how embodied cognition revives and extends earlier attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. (Series A)
Small Stories, Interaction and Identities
Aug 2007
Book
Author(s):
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
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?
Language Attrition : Theoretical perspectives
Aug 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Barbara Köpke,
Monika S. Schmid,
Merel Keijzer and
Susan Dostert
This collection of articles provides theoretical foundations and perspectives for language attrition research. Its purpose is to enable investigations of L1 attrition to avail themselves more fully and more fundamentally of the theoretical frameworks that have been formulated with respect to SLA and bilingualism. In the thirteen papers collected here experts in particular disciplines of bilingualism such as neurolinguistics formal linguistics contact linguistics and language and identity provide an in-depth perspective on L1 attrition which will make the translation of theory to hypothesis easier for future research.
Parentheticals
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Nicole Dehé and
Yordanka Kavalova
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.
A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent
Jul 2007
Book
Author(s):
Sol Azuelos-Atias
A Pragmatic Analysis of Legal Proofs of Criminal Intent is a detailed investigation of proofs of criminal intent in Israeli courtrooms. The book analyses linguistic pragmatic interpretative and argumentative strategies used by Israeli lawyers and judges in order to examine the defendant’s intention. There can be no doubt that this subject is worthy of a thorough investigation. A person’s intention is a psychological phenomenon and therefore unless the defendant chooses to confess his intent it cannot be proven directly – either by evidence or by witnesses’ testimonies. The defendant’s intention must be inferred usually from the overall circumstances of the case; verbal and situational contexts cultural and ideological assumptions and implicatures should be taken into account. The linguistic analysis of these inferences presented here is necessarily comprehensive: it requires consideration of a variety of theoretical frameworks including speech act theory discourse analysis argumentation theory polyphony theory and text linguistics.
Speaking of Colors and Odors
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Martina Plümacher and
Peter Holz
How to speak of colors and odors? In many cases we have to think about an adequate description of a perceived odor or shade of color. Words are not fluently available.The contributions discuss color and odor perception and its linguistic representation from different disciplinary angles: from neurobiology neuropsychology psycholinguistics cognitive linguistics and philosophy. They show that linguistic representation of colors and odors depends highly on cultures of communication. Experts are skilled in discerning finer differences between their sense impressions and have at their disposal a special language which non-experts do not master. The color and odor vocabulary is rare if there is no cultural habit to communicate the very sense impression. In cases where individuals have to speak of their sensory experiences more precisely they often turn to metaphors. The contributions discuss the lack of inter-individual conventions of naming and describing odors – compared to the more expanded linguistic representation of colors.
Studies on Old High German Syntax : Left sentence periphery, verb placement and verb-second
Jul 2007
Book
Author(s):
Katrin Axel-Tober
This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.
History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe : Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume III: The making and remaking of literary institutions
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Marcel Cornis-Pope and
John Neubauer
The third volume in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe focuses on the making and remaking of those institutional structures that engender and regulate the creation distribution and reception of literature. The focus here is not so much on shared institutions but rather on such region-wide analogous institutional processes as the national awakening the modernist opening and the communist regimentation the canonization of texts and censorship of literature. These processes which took place in all of the region’s cultures were often asynchronous and subjected to different local conditions. The volume’s premise is that the national awakening and institutionalization of literature were symbiotically interrelated in East-Central Europe. Each national awakening involves a language renewal an introduction of the vernacular and its literature in schools and universities the creation of an infrastructure for the publication of books and journals clashes with censorship the founding of national academies libraries and theaters a (re)construction of national folklore and the writing of histories of the vernacular literature. The four parts of this volume are titled: (1) Publishing and Censorship (2) Theater as a Literary Institution (3) Forging Primal Pasts: The Uses of Folk Poetry and (4) Literary Histories: Itineraries of National Self-images.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
Spanish in Contact : Policy, Social and Linguistic Inquiries
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Kim Potowski and
Richard Cameron
This volume covering a range of topics such as Spanish as a heritage language in the United States policy issues pragmatics and language contact sociolinguistic variation and contact and Bozal (Creole) Spanish will serve the interests of linguists educators and policy makers alike. It provides cutting edge research on varieties of Spanish spoken by children teenagers and adults in places as diverse as Chicago New York New Mexico and Houston; Valencia and Galicia; the Andean highlands; and the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The emphasis is on spoken Spanish although researchers also investigate code-switching in the lyrics of bachata songs and the presence of creole in Cuban and Brazilian literature. This collection will be of interest wherever Spanish is spoken.
History of Linguistics 2002 : Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, 27-30 August 2002, São Paulo - Campinas
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Eduardo Guimarães and
Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros
This volume brings together a selection of revised papers originally presented at ICHoLS IX (São Paulo/Campinas). The papers in the first section deal with studies ranging from the Latin model in post-Renaissance grammars to new scientific propositions at the turn of the 19th century; the second part carries articles devoted to a variety of topics in 19th and 20th century linguistics; and in the third section are united papers based on plenary presentations ranging from ancient Greek reflections upon language to developments in Brazilian linguistics beginning with the implantation of structuralist work by Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) in the 1960s. In the concluding contribution a survey of advances in the history of the language sciences is offered.
Functional Perspectives on Grammar and Discourse : In honour of Angela Downing
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Christopher S. Butler,
Raquel Hidalgo Downing and
Julia Lavid-López
This book a tribute to Angela Downing consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product text comprehension integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian English Icelandic Spanish Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday’s division into ideational textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar and cover a wide range of areas including aspect argument structure noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations pronominal clitics theme in relation to writing skills discourse structures and markers the role of attention in conversation the functions of topic phatic communion subjectification formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.
Europe and the Mediterranean as Linguistic Areas : Convergencies from a historical and typological perspective
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Paolo Ramat and
Elisa Roma
This volume is a collection of 12 papers which originated from a research project on ‘Europe and the Mediterranean from a linguistic point of view: history and prospects’. The papers deal with specific morphosyntactic aspects of language structure and evolution. The comparative perspective is adopted both from a synchronic (typological) and a diachronic (historical) angle focusing in particular on possible contact phenomena. Therefore methodological key words of this book are areal typology and linguistic area. The issues addressed cover such diverse aspects of language structure and change as verb morphology relative clause formation Noun Phrase determination demonstrative systems possessive markers in Noun Phrases conjunctive disjunctive and adversative constructions non-canonical object marking impersonal constructions reduplication and early translations of the Gospels. These topics are discussed particularly in relation to Romance Germanic Celtic and Semitic languages both modern and ancient. This book will interest researchers in typological historical functional and general linguistics.
Connectives in the History of English
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Ursula Lenker and
Anneli Meurman-Solin
Clausal connection is one of the key building blocks of language and thus a field where a wide range of syntactic semantic pragmatic and cognitive phenomena meet. The availability of large databases as well as considerable advances in corpus-linguistic methods have strengthened the interest in the history of features linking clauses or larger chunks of text. The papers in this volume combine a thorough corpus-based analysis of the history of individual connectives their co-occurrence patterns and patterns of variation and change from both intra- and inter-systemic perspectives with a variety of methodological tools ranging from sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis to pragmatics text linguistics and discourse analysis. Drawing on quantitatively and qualitatively improved data the studies reconstruct the history of a wide range of connectives in English from various new theoretical perspectives.
Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies : Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Yves Gambier,
Miriam Shlesinger and
Radegundis Stolze
Like previous collections based on congresses of the European Society of Translation Studies (EST) this volume presents the latest insights and findings in an ever-changing ever-challenging domain. The twenty-six papers carefully chosen from about 140 presented at the 4th EST Congress offer a bird's eye view of the most pressing concerns and most exciting vistas in Translation Studies today. The editors' final choices reflect a focus on quality of approach originality of topic and clarity of presentation and aim at capturing the most salient developments in the contemporary theory methodology and technology of TS. As always in EST the themes covered relate to translation as well as interpreting. They include discussion of a broad range of text-types and skopoi and a diversity of themes such as translation universals translation strategies translation and ideology perception of translated humor translation tools etc. Many of the papers force us to take a fresh look at seemingly well established paradigms and familiar notions while also making recourse to work being done in other disciplines (Semiotics Linguistics Discourse Analysis Contrastive Studies).
Imperative Clauses in Generative Grammar : Studies in honour of Frits Beukema
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Wim van der Wurff
This volume contains ten articles exploring a wide range of issues in the analysis of the imperative clause from a generative perspective. The language data investigated in detail in the articles come from Dutch English German (old) Scandinavian Spanish and South Slavic; there is further significant discussion of data from other Germanic and Romance languages. The phenomena addressed (in several cases in more than one article leading to some lively debate about contentious issues) include the following: the nature and interpretation of imperative subjects; the properties of participial imperatives; clitic behavior; restrictions on topicalization; word order; null arguments; negative imperatives; and imperatives in embedded clauses. The volume has a substantial introduction sketching the results of earlier generative work on the topic (most of it scattered across disparate outlets) the issues left open by this earlier work and the contribution to further insight and understanding made by the book's articles.
Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse : Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice
Jul 2007
Book
Author(s):
Senko K. Maynard
Using theoretical concepts of self perspective and voice as an interpretive guide and based on the Place of Negotiation theory this volume explores the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse i.e. the use of language in specific ways for foregrounding personalized expressive meanings. Personalized expressive meanings include psychological emotive interpersonal and rhetorical aspects of communication encompassing broad meanings such as feelings of intimacy or distance emotion empathy humor playfulness persona sense of self identity rhetorical effects and so on. Nine analysis chapters explore the meanings functions and effects observable in the indices of linguistic creativity focusing on discourse creativity (style mixture borrowing others’ styles genre mixture) rhetorical creativity (puns metaphors metaphors in multimodal discourse) and grammatical creativity (negatives demonstratives first-person references). Based on the analysis of verbal and visual data drawn from multiple genres of contemporary cultural discourse this work reveals that by creatively expressing in language we share our worlds from multiple perspectives we speak in self’s and others’ many voices and we endlessly create personalized expressive meanings as testimony to our own sense of being.
Context and Appropriateness : Micro meets macro
Jul 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Anita Fetzer
This book departs from the premise that context and appropriateness represent complex relational configurations which can no longer be conceived as analytic primes but rather require the accommodation of micro and macro perspectives to capture their inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context and appropriateness from interdisciplinary perspectives. The papers use different theoretical frameworks such as situation theory speech act theory cognitive pragmatics sociopragmatics discourse analysis argumentation theory and functional linguistics. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights in particular cognition negotiation of meaning sequentiality recipient design and genre.
Prototypical Transitivity
Jul 2007
Book
Author(s):
Åshild Næss
This book presents a functional analysis of a notion which has gained considerable importance in cognitive and functional linguistics over the last couple of decades namely 'prototypical transitivity'. It discusses what prototypical transitivity is why it should exist and how it should be defined as well as how this definition can be employed in the analysis of a number of phenomena of language such as case-marking experiencer constructions and so-called ambitransitives. Also discussed is how a prototype analysis relates to other approaches to transitivity such as that based on markedness. The basic claim is that transitivity is iconic: a construction with two distinct independent arguments is prototypically used to refer to an event with two distinct independent participants. From this principle a unified account of the properties typically associated with transitivity can be derived and an explanation for why these properties tend to correlate across languages can be given.
Cognitive English Grammar
Jul 2007
Book
Author(s):
Günter Radden and
René Dirven
Cognitive English Grammar is designed to be used as a textbook in courses of English and general linguistics. It introduces the reader to cognitive linguistic theory and shows that Cognitive Grammar helps us to gain a better understanding of the grammar of English. The notions of motivation and meaningfulness are central to the approach adopted in the book. In four major parts comprising 12 chapters Cognitive English Grammar integrates recent cognitive approaches into one coherent model allowing the analysis of the most central constructions of English. Part I presents the cognitive framework: conceptual and linguistic categories their combination in situations the cognitive operations applied to them and the organisation of conceptual structures into linguistic constructions. Part II deals with the category of ‘things’ and their linguistic structuring as nouns and noun phrases. It shows how things are grounded in reality by means of reference quantified by set and scalar quantifiers and qualified by modifiers. Part III describes situations as temporal units of various layers: internally as types of situations; and externally as located relative to the time of speech and grounded in reality or potentiality. Part IV looks at situations as relational units and their structuring as sentences. Its two chapters are devoted to event schemas and space and metaphorical extensions of space.
Cognitive English Grammaroffers a wealth of linguistic data and explanations. The didactic quality is guaranteed by the frequent use of definitions and examples a glossary of the terms used overviews and chapter summaries suggestions for further reading and study questions. For the Key to Study Questions click here.
Cognitive English Grammaroffers a wealth of linguistic data and explanations. The didactic quality is guaranteed by the frequent use of definitions and examples a glossary of the terms used overviews and chapter summaries suggestions for further reading and study questions. For the Key to Study Questions click here.
Methods in Cognitive Linguistics
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez,
Irene Mittelberg,
Seana Coulson and
Michael J. Spivey
Methods in Cognitive Linguistics is an introduction to empirical methodology for language researchers. Intended as a handbook to exploring the empirical dimension of the theoretical questions raised by Cognitive Linguistics the volume presents guidelines for employing methods from a variety of intersecting disciplines laying out different ways of gathering empirical evidence. The book is divided into five sections. Methods and Motivations provides the reader with the preliminary background in scientific methodology and statistics. The sections on Corpus and Discourse Analysis and Sign Language and Gesture describe different ways of investigating usage data. Behavioral Research describes methods for exploring mental representation simulation semantics child language development and the relationships between space and language and eye movements and cognition. Lastly Neural Approaches introduces the reader to ERP research and to the computational modeling of language.
Political Discourse in the Media : Cross-cultural perspectives
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Anita Fetzer and
Gerda Eva Lauerbach
This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab Dutch British Finnish Flemish French German Israeli Swedish US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks such as conversation analysis discourse analysis pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics particularly multimodality cognition context genre and recipient design.
Connectives as Discourse Landmarks
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Agnès Celle and
Ruth Huart
This set of eleven articles by linguists from four different European countries and a variety of theoretical backgrounds takes a new look at the discourse functions of a number of English connectives from simple coordinators (and but) to phrases of varying complexity (after all the fact is that). Using authentic spoken and written data from varied sources the authors explore the ways in which current uses of connectives result from the interaction of syntax semantics and prosody both over time and through diversity of discourse situations. Most adopt an integrative approach in which speaker-listener or writer-reader relationships are viewed as part and parcel of the linguistic properties of each marker. Because it combines functional generative and enunciative approaches into a coherent whole with a common explanatory aim this book will be of interest to linguists corpus-linguists and all those who investigate the semantics-pragmatics interface.
The Copy Theory of Movement
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Norbert Corver and
Jairo Nunes
This volume brings together papers which address issues regarding the copy theory of movement. According to this theory a trace is a copy of the moved element that is deleted in the phonological component but is available for interpretation at L(ogical) F(orm). Thus far the bulk of the research on the copy theory has mainly focused on interpretation issues at LF. The consequences of the copy theory for syntactic computation per se and for the syntax–phonology mapping in particular have received much less attention in the literature despite its crucial relevance for the whole architecture of the model. As a contribution to fill this gap this volume congregates recent work that deals with empirical and conceptual consequences of the copy theory of movement for the inner working of syntactic computations within the Minimalist Program with special emphasis on the syntax–phonology mapping.
Text Corpora and Multilingual Lexicography
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Wolfgang Teubert
The contributions in this volume (first published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 6 (2001)) evolved from the EU-funded project Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure (TELRI) and deal with various aspects of multilingual corpus linguistics. The topics reach from building parallel corpora over annotation issues and questions concerning terminology extraction to bilingual and multilingual lexicography; the statistical properties of parallel corpora and the practice of translators; and the role of corpus linguistics for multilingual language technology.
Bilingual Lexicography from a Communicative Perspective
Jun 2007
Book
Author(s):
Heming Yong and
Jing Peng
This stimulating new book as the premier work introducing bilingual lexicography from a communicative perspective is launched to represent original thinking and innovative theorization in the field of bilingual lexicography. It treats the bilingual dictionary as a system of intercultural communication and bilingual dictionary making as a dynamic process realized by sets of choices characterizing the overall nature of the dictionary. It examines the dictionary and dictionary making by using a model of lexicography which stresses the three-way relationship of compiler dictionary context and user and incorporates them into a unified coherent framework. Throughout the study special focus is on English and Chinese bilingual lexicography. It will serve not only as a valuable guide to those interested in dictionary compilation and theoretical inquiries but also as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in bilingual lexicography.
Deconstructing Creole
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Umberto Ansaldo,
Stephen Matthews and
Lisa Lim
Deconstructing Creole is a collection of studies aimed at critically assessing the idea of creole languages as a homogeneous structural type with shared and peculiar patterns of genesis. Following up on the critical discussion of notions of ‘creole exceptionalism’ as historical and ideological constructs this volume tests the basic assumptions that underlie current attempts to present ‘creole structure’ as a special type from typological as well as sociohistorical perspectives. The sum of the findings presented here suggests that careful empirical investigation of input varieties and contact environments can explain the structural output without recourse to an exceptional genesis scenario. Echoing calls to dissolve the notion of ‘creolization’ as a special diachronic process this volume proposes that theoretically grounded approaches to the notions of simplicity complexity transmission etc. do not warrant considering so-called ‘creole’ languages as a special synchronic type.
Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language : Essays in honor of David McNeill
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Susan D. Duncan,
Justine Cassell and
Elena T. Levy
Each of the 21 chapters in this volume reflects a view of language as a dynamic phenomenon with emergent structure and in each gesture is approached as part of language not an adjunct to it. In this all of the authors have been influenced by David McNeill's methods for studying natural discourse and by his theory of the human capacity for language. The introductory chapter by Adam Kendon contextualizes McNeill’s research paradigm within a history of earlier gesture studies. Chapters in the first section Language and Cognition emphasize what McNeill refers to as the intrapersonal plane. Many of the chapters adduce evidence for McNeill's claim that gestures can serve as a window onto the speaker's mind. Chapters in the second section Environmental Context and Sociality emphasize the interpersonal plane and exemplify McNeill's focus on how moment-to-moment language use is determined by contextual factors. The final section of the volume Atypical Minds and Bodies concerns lessons to be learned from studies of aphasic patients autistic children and artificial humans.
What Counts as Evidence in Linguistics : The case of innateness
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Martina Penke and
Anette Rosenbach
What counts as evidence in linguistics? This question is addressed by the contributions to the present volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Studies in Language 28:3 (2004). Focusing on the innateness debate what is illustrated is how formal and functional approaches to linguistics have different perspectives on linguistic evidence. While special emphasis is paid to the status of typological evidence and universals for the construction of Universal Grammar (UG) this volume also highlights more general issues such as the roles of (non)-standard language and historical evidence. To address the overall topic the following three guiding questions are raised: What type of evidence can be used for innateness claims (or UG)?; What is the content of such innate features (or UG)?; and How can UG be used as a theory guiding empirical research? A combination of articles and peer commentaries yields a lively discussion between leading representatives of formal and functional approaches.
Translation as a Profession
Jun 2007
Book
Author(s):
Daniel Gouadec
Translation as a profession provides an in-depth analysis of the translating profession and the translation industry. The book starts with a presentation of the diversity of translations and an overview of the translation-localisation process. The second section describes the translation profession and the translators’ markets. The third section considers the process of ‘becoming’ a translator from the moment people find out whether they have the required qualities to the moment when they set up shop or find a job with special emphasis on how to find and hold on to clients avoiding basic mistakes. The fourth section concentrates on the vital professional issues of costs rates deadlines time to market productivity ethics standards qualification certification and professional recognition. The fifth section is devoted to the developments that have provoked ongoing changes in the profession and industry such as ICT and the impact of industrialisation internationalisation and globalisation. The final section is devoted to the major issues involved in translator training. A glossary is provided together with a list of Websites for further browsing.
Receptive Multilingualism : Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Jan D. ten Thije and
Ludger Zeevaert
Receptive multilingualism refers to the language constellation in which interlocutors use their respective mother tongue while speaking to each other. Since the mid-nineties receptive multilingualism is promoted by the European commission on par with other possibilities of increasing the mobility of the European citizens. Throughout the last ten years a marked increase in the research on this topic has been observable. This volume reveals new perspectives from different theoretical frameworks on linguistic analyses of receptive multilingualism in Europe. Case studies are presented from contemporary settings along with analyses of historical examples theoretical considerations and finally descriptions of didactical concepts established in order to transfer and disseminate receptive multilingual competence. The book contains results from research carried out at the Research Center on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg as well as contributions by various international scholars working in the field of receptive multilingualism.
Natural Language Processing for Online Applications : Text retrieval, extraction and categorization. Second revised edition
Jun 2007
Book
Author(s):
Peter Jackson and
Isabelle Moulinier
This text covers the technologies of document retrieval information extraction and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>
The Soft Power of War
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Lilie Chouliaraki
This book which was originally published as a Special Issue of Journal of Language & Politics 4:1 (2005) takes the war in Iraq as an exemplary case through which to demonstrate the changing nature of contemporary power. The book convincingly argues that the effective study of international politics depends today upon our understanding of the interplay between hard (military economic) and soft (symbolic) power. One might say between the politics of territory guns or money and the language of narrating the world in coherent and persuasive stories. Bringing together different strands of discourse analysis with social historical and to an extent political analysis all contributions seek to illustrate the ways in which a variety of public genres from political speeches to computer games and from educational material to newspaper reports produce influential knowledge about the war and shape the ethical and political premises upon which the legitimacy of this war and a ‘vision’ of the emergent world order rests.
Connectivity in Grammar and Discourse
Jun 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Jochen Rehbein,
Christiane Hohenstein and
Lukas Pietsch
In this collection of carefully selected papers connectivity is looked at from the vantage points of language contact language change language acquisition multilingual communication and related domains based on various European and Non-European languages. From typological and multilingual perspectives the focus of investigation is on the grammatical architecture of a number of linguistic devices that interconnect units of text and discourse. The volume is organized along central concepts: A general section deals with connectivity in language change and language acquisition subdivisions are devoted to pronouns topics and subjects the role of finiteness in text and discourse coordination and subordination and particles adverbials and constructions. The editors’ preface introduces connectivity as an object of linguistic research.
In Translation – Reflections, Refractions, Transformations
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Paul St-Pierre and
Prafulla C. Kar
With contributions by researchers from India Europe North America and the Caribbean In Translation – Reflections refractions transformations touches on questions of method and on topics – including copyright cultural hybridity globalization identity construction and minority languages – which are important for the disciplinary development of translation studies but also of interest to other fields as well most notably comparative literature cultural studies and world literature. The volume provides a forum for new voices to be heard alongside those of well-established scholars and for current concerns to express themselves often focusing on practices in areas of the world other than Europe or North America which have until now tended to dominate the field. Acknowledging difference and celebrating it the contributions conceive of translation as a process which reconstitutes and transforms which brings renewal and growth an interaction in a new context a new reading a new writing.
The Critical Link 4 : Professionalisation of interpreting in the community. Selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings, Stockholm, Sweden, 20-23 May 2004
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Cecilia Wadensjö,
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and
Anna-Lena Nilsson
This book is a collection of papers presented in Stockholm at the fourth Critical Link conference. The book is a well-balanced mix of academic research and texts of a more practical professional character.The introducing article explicitly addresses the issue of professionalism and how this has been dealt with in research on interpreting. The following two sections provide examples of recent research applying various theoretical approaches. Section four reports on the development of current more or less local standards. Section five raises issues of professional ideology. The final section tells about new training initiatives and programmes. All contributions were selected because of their relevance to the theme of professionalisation of interpreting in the community.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume is the fourth in a series documenting the advance of a whole new empirical and professional field. It is of central interest for all people involved in this development interpreters researchers trainers and others.
Linguistic Theory and South Asian Languages : Essays in honour of K. A. Jayaseelan
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Josef Bayer,
Tanmoy Bhattacharya and
M.T. Hany Babu
The South Asian languages mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure serial verb constructions cleft- and question formation to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be issues of binding theory and raising and issues of complementation the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan one of present-day India’s most influential linguists.
Narrow Syntax and Phonological Form : Scrambling in the Germanic languages
May 2007
Book
Author(s):
Gema Chocano
‘Scrambling’ the kind of word order variation found in West Germanic languages has been commonly treated as a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic ‘Object Shift’. This book questions this view and defends a unified analysis on the basis of strictly syntactic and phonological evidence. Given that its main conclusions are drawn from German data it also sheds light on several problematic aspects of the grammar of this language which have traditionally resisted a principled account. Prominent among these are: the inconsistent behaviour of German coherent infinitives with respect to extraction of their internal arguments; the existence of a less ‘liberal’ type of ‘Scrambling’ within topicalised VPs; the link between reordering possibilities and headfinalness; the asymmetry exhibited by monotransitive and ditransitive structures with respect to the interaction between ‘Scrambling’ and the unmarked word order and finally certain anomalies in the reordering of the lower arguments of ditransitive predicates that assign inherent case.
The Language of Business Studies Lectures : A corpus-assisted analysis
May 2007
Book
Author(s):
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
New opportunities in the global workplace have heightened interest in business studies. In response to this trend this book presents an in-depth analysis of a corpus of authentic business studies lectures focusing on spoken academic disciplinary and professional features (e.g. speech rate interactive devices specialized lexis) that are crucial to comprehension but often problematic for non-native speakers. The investigation adopts an original multi-pronged approach including quantitative qualitative and comparative analyses. It utilizes techniques drawn mainly from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis but also integrates observational and ethnographic methods to provide unique extra-linguistic insights. The study is thus a full-circle interpretive account of this dynamic spoken genre where academia and profession converge. The book shows how business studies lectures are characterised by a synergy of discourses and communicative channels that reflect the community of practice highlighting the need to help international business students develop multiple literacies to overcome present and future challenges.
Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues : Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy
May 2007
Book
Author(s):
Terry Walker
This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760 a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials Depositions and for comparative purposes Drama Comedy.
Anaphors in Text : Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Monika Schwarz-Friesel,
Manfred Consten and
Mareile Knees
This volume contains a careful selection of papers concerned with actual research questions on anaphoric reference a subject of current interest with various linguistic subdisciplines. This is reflected in this book as it methodically covers broadly invested approaches from cognitive neurolinguistic formal and computational perspectives each contribution representing the respective ‘state of the art’ on a high theoretical and empirical level. The volume contains three thematic parts: Anaphors in Cognitive Text- and Discourse Linguistics; The Syntax and Semantics of Anaphors; and Neurolinguistic Studies on the reception of anaphoric reference. The contributions investigate several Indo-European languages.
The Grammar–Pragmatics Interface : Essays in honor of Jeanette K. Gundel
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Nancy Hedberg and
Ron Zacharski
This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax pragmatics and reference and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics construction grammar and genre theory to formal semantics as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.
Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP : Studies in honour of Heribert Picht
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Bassey E. Antia
This book deals with the oft-neglected tensions between perspicuity and fuzziness in specialised communication. It describes the manifestations functions and implications of indeterminacy phenomena in a range of LSP specialisations where it has been customary to expect precision and consistency. The volume presents case studies and methodological frameworks that draw on theoretical anthropological and cognitive linguistics safety-critical translating history and theory of terminology studies development of ontologies software localisation jurisprudence macroeconomics and interoperability of digital knowledge representation resources. With chapters by leading scholars drawn from eleven countries this book contributes to the benchmarking of indeterminacy scholarship in LSP studies and is a fitting tribute to its dedicatee Professor Heribert Picht who even in retirement remains a constant presence in LSP and terminology studies. The book should be of interest to scholars of the aforementioned areas.
Corpus-Based Perspectives in Linguistics
May 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Yuji Kawaguchi,
Toshihiro Takagaki,
Nobuo Tomimori and
Yoichiro Tsuruga
UBLI has conducted field surveys since 2002 and built spoken language corpora for French Spanish Italian (Salentino dialect) Russian Malaysian Turkish Japanese and Canadian multilinguals. This volume features new research presented at the UBLI second workshop on Corpus Linguistics – Research Domain which was held on September 14 2006. The first part consisting of eleven presentations to this workshop shows a wide range of subjects within the area of corpus-based research such as dictionary linguistic atlas dialect translation ancient texts non-standard texts sociolinguistics second language acquisition and natural language processing. The second part of this volume comprises ten additional contributions to both written and spoken corpora by the members and research assistants of UBLI.
On Being Moved : From mirror neurons to empathy
Apr 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Stein Bråten
In this collective volume the origins neurosocial support and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Entailing a paradigmatic revolution in the intersection of developmental social and neural sciences two radical turnabouts are entailed. First no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects with disembodied minds without windows to each other except as mediated by culture. Supported by a mirror system specified in this volume by some of the discoverers modes of participant perception have now been identified which entail embodied simulation and co-movements with others in felt immediacy. Second no longer can be retained the Piagetian attribution of infant egocentricity. Pioneers who have broken new research grounds in the study of newborns protoconversation and early speech perception document in the present volume infant capacity for interpersonal communion empathic identification and learning by altercentric participation. Pertinent new findings and results are presented on these topics:<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>(i) Origins and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy<br/>(ii) Neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity participant perception and simulation of mind<br/>(iii) From preverbal sharing and early speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity<br/>(iv) New windows on other-centred movements and moments of meeting in therapy and intervention. (Series B)
The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition
Apr 2007
Book
Editor(s):
Michel Aurnague,
Maya Hickmann and
Laure Vieu
Despite a growing interest for space in language most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs prepositions postpositions case markings…). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities their status in linguistic descriptions and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems formal accounts of linguistic data and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.