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This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists semanticists cognitivists typologists and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy heterosemy or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition construction grammar graph theory semantic maps and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

Mental illness is an increasing concern of government health services across the globe. It is timely therefore that community education about mental illness is subject to discourse analysis. Shaping Minds explores how the psychoeducational message is presented to Chinese-speaking audiences in China Taiwan and Australia. The book uniquely examines community education materials in a language rarely examined by discourse analysts but which is nevertheless spoken by around a fifth of the world’s population and constitutes an important ‘minority’ language throughout the Western world. The book identifies the discursive features that characterise the Chinese-language texts and analyses them cross-culturally highlighting the impact of cultural traditions political systems and dominant conceptions of society. These insights into how Chinese-language community health pamphlets and handbooks are positioned to shape the minds of readers will engage both discourse analysts and mental health professionals providing services to Chinese-speaking communities across the globe.

Language Resources (LRs) are sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form such as written and spoken language corpora terminological databases computational lexica and dictionaries and linguistic software tools. Over the past few decades mainly within research environments LRs have been specifically used to create optimise or evaluate natural language processing (NLP) and human language technologies (HLT) applications including translation-related technologies. Gradually the infrastructures and exploitation tools of LRs are being perceived as core resources in the language services industries and in localisation production settings. However some efforts ought yet to be made to raise further awareness about LRs in general and LRs for translation and localisation in particular to a wider audience in all corners of the world. Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation sets out to establish the state of the art of this ever expanding field and underscores the usefulness that LRs can potentially have in the process of creating adapting managing standardising and leveraging content for more than one language and culture from various perspectives.

Robert Bran­dom’s Making it Explicit (1994) marks a Copernican turn in the philosophy of mind and language as this collection of critical essays together with Brandom’s enlightening answers convincingly shows. Though faithful to Witt­genstein’s prag­ma­tic turn in spirit Brandom gives a systematic account of human sapience as a whole – by grounding our relation to the world by words on our discursive practice assessing its nor­mative basis which is instituted by scorekeeping activities and sanctioning attitudes and thus trying to avoid mystifying mentalism as well as dogmatic naturalism in our account of the human spirit. The topics emphasized in this volume concern the place of Brandom’s inferentialist and normative semantics in 20^th century philosophy of language (Frege Carnap Quine) also in comparison to cognitive linguistics (Chomsky) instrumentalist pragmatism and functionalist understanding of the use of signs (Sellars) deflation of intentionality (Brentano) the logical analysis of predicative structures (Kant) the role of constructions for understanding the constitution of objectivity by de-re-ascriptions and the problem of anti-representationalism or how to treat malapropisms (Davidson).This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (13:1 2005)

Studies in French Applied Linguistics invites the reader to adopt a broad perspective on applied linguistics illustrating the fascinating multifaceted work researchers are conducted in so many various inter-connected subfields. The five chapters of the first part are dedicated to the first and second language acquisition of French in various settings: First language acquisition by normal children from a generative perspective and by children with Specific Language Impairment; second language acquisition in Canadian immersion settings from a neurolinguistic approach to phonology and natural language processing and CALL. The six chapters of the second part explore the contribution of French in various subfields of applied linguistics such as an anthropological approach to literacy issues in Guadeloupean Kréyòl literacy issues in new technologies phonological and lexical innovations in the banlieues French in North Africa language planning and policy in Quebec as well as the emerging field of forensic linguistics from an historical perspective.

This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of the structure and communicative use of syntactic pivot constructions in German. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis this work shows that pivots emerge in interaction in response to local communicative needs.Exclusively found in spoken German pivots allow a speaker to extend an utterance beyond a possible completion point in a syntactically and prosodically unobtrusive way. Speakers utilize this basic property to promote context-specific actions: managing boundaries of speakership bridging sequential and topical junctures and dealing with different types of interactional trouble.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Through a close examination of syntactic pivots as an interactional resource this work shows that spoken linguistic structures can only be fully understood if we acknowledge the temporality of language and view grammar as usage-based and negotiable. This book thus contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of grammar and interaction.

This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered how it is remembered and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts historians sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.

This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers from the twenty-first Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics which was held on March 2–3 2007 at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah. The papers in this volume deal with a variety of topics in Arabic linguistics with a notable number of them emphasizing pragmatic aspects. The papers here included place a high value on the presentation of authentic data and explore different approaches in their analysis.

This new volume of work highlights the distinctiveness of child SLA through a collection of different types of empirical research specific to younger learners. Characteristics of children’s cognitive emotional and social development distinguish their experiences from those of adult L2 learners creating intriguing issues for SLA research and also raising important practical questions regarding effective pedagogical techniques for learners of different ages. While child SLA is often typically thought of as simple (and often enjoyable and universally effortless) in other words as “child’s play” the complex portraits of young second language learners which emerge in the 16 papers collected in this book invite the reader to reconsider the reality for many younger learners. Chapters by internationally renowned authors together with reports by emerging researchers describe second and foreign language learning by children ranging from pre-schoolers to young adolescents in home and school contexts with caregivers peers and teachers as interlocutors.

This volume provides a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on the external ecological and internal psycholinguistic factors that determine sign bilingualism its development and maintenance at the individual and societal levels. Multiple aspects concerning the dynamics of contact situations involving a signed and a spoken or a written language are covered in detail i.e. the development of the languages in bilingual deaf children cross-modal contact phenomena in the productions of child and adult signers sign bilingual education concepts and practices in diverse social contexts deaf educational discourse sign language planning and interpretation. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by a final chapter providing a critical appraisal of the major issues emerging from the individual studies in the light of current assumptions in the broader field of contact linguistics. Given the interdependence of research policy and practice the insights gathered in the studies presented are not only of scientific interest but also bear important implications concerning the perception understanding and promotion of bilingualism in deaf individuals whose language acquisition and use have been ignored for a long time at the socio-political and scientific levels.