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Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities : Celebrating the work of Gillian Sankoff
Sept 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Miriam Meyerhoff and
Naomi Nagy
This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the world’s speech communities are multilingual much of sociolinguistics ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap investigating social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada USA South Africa Australia Papua New Guinea Solomon Islands Vanuatu) it explores: connections between the fields of creolistics language/dialect contact and language acquisition; how the study of variation and change particularly in cases of additive bilingualism is central to understanding social and linguistic issues in multilingual communities; how changing language ideologies and changing demographics influence language choice and/or language policy and the pivotal place of multilingualism in enacting social power and authority and a rich array of new empirical findings on the dynamics of multilingual speech communities.
Phonology : A cognitive grammar introduction
Sept 2008
Book
Author(s):
Geoffrey S. Nathan
This textbook introduces the reader to the field of phonology from allophones to faithfulness and exemplars. It assumes no prior knowledge of the field and includes a brief review chapter on phonetics. It is written within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics but covers a wide range of historical and contemporary theories from the Prague School to Optimality Theory. While many examples are based on American and British English there are also discussions of some aspects of French and German colloquial speech and phonological analysis problems from many other languages around the world. In addition to the basics of phoneme theory features and morphophonemics there are chapters on casual speech first and second language acquisition and historical change. A final chapter covers a number of issues in contemporary phonological theory including some of the classic debates in Generative Phonology (rule ordering abstractness ‘derivationalism’) and proposals for usage-based phonologies.
Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism : Re-examining the Age Factor
Sept 2008
Book
Author(s):
Silvina Montrul
Age effects have played a particularly prominent role in some theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition. This book takes an entirely new perspective on this issue by re-examining these theories in light of the existence of apparently similar non-native outcomes in adult heritage speakers who unlike adult second language learners acquired two or more languages in childhood. Despite having been exposed to their family language early in life many of these speakers never fully acquire or later lose aspects of their first language sometime in childhood. The book examines the structural characteristics of "incomplete" grammatical states and highlights how age of acquisition is related to the type of linguistic knowledge and behavior that emerges in L1 and L2 acquisition under different environmental circumstances. By underscoring age of acquisition as a unifying factor in the study of L2 acquisition and L1 attrition it is claimed that just as there are age effects in L2 acquisition there are also age effects or even perhaps a critical period in L1 attrition. The book covers adult L2 acquisition attrition in adults and in children and includes a comparison of adult heritage language speakers and second language learners.
St Helenian English : Origins, evolution and variation
Sept 2008
Book
Author(s):
Daniel Schreier
This volume provides the first-ever sociolinguistic analysis of English on the island of St Helena the oldest variety of English in the Southern Hemisphere. It is based on a concise synchronic profile of the variety (describing its segmental phonology and morphosyntax) and an evaluation of diachronic material in the form of letters court cases ghost stories etc. The analysis is embedded into a theoretical framework of contact linguistics (contact dialectology and pidgin/creole linguistics) and builds upon the social and sociodemographic development of the community. The aims of this book are to trace the origins and evolution of the variety to pinpoint the forms of English it affiliates with today and the inputs it derived from historically and to investigate whether local contact scenarios have led to the formation of regionally distinctive varieties across the island. Insights from St Helenian English thus challenge us to rethink principles of classification that are applied to determine the status of post-colonial varieties of English.
Textual Translation and Live Translation : The total experience of nonverbal communication in literature, theater and cinema
Sept 2008
Book
Author(s):
Fernando Poyatos
After the many interdisciplinary perspectives on nonverbal communication offered by the author in his previous seven John Benjamins books which have generated a wide range of scholarly applications the present monograph is dominated by a very broad concept of translation. This treatment of translation includes theater and cinema (enriching our intellectual-sensorial experience of both 'reading act' and 'viewing act') and offers among other topics: sensorial-intellectual-emotional pre- and post-reading interactions with books; mute or audible 'oralization' of texts; the translator's linguistic and nonverbal-cultural fluency and implicit textual paralanguage and kinesics; translating functions of pictorial illustrations; the blind's text and film perception; the foreign reader's cultural background and circumstances; theater and cinema spectators' total sensory-intellectual experience of plays and films beyond staging or projection; the multiple interrelationships between cinema and theater performers spectators and their environments of special interest to all those involved in the theater; and the translator's challenging textual perception of sounds and movements. Over 800 literary quotations and two virtually exhaustive English inventories of sound- and movement-denoting words with many examples offer serious students of translation language or literature a rich reference and drill source.
The Limits of Syntactic Variation
Sept 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Theresa Biberauer
Against the background of the past half century’s typological and generative work on comparative syntax this volume brings together 16 papers considering what we have learned and may still be able to learn about the nature and extent of syntactic variation. More specifically it offers a multi-perspective critique of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic variation evaluating the merits and shortcomings of the pre-Minimalist phase of this enterprise and considering and illustrating the possibilities opened up by recent empirical and theoretical advances. Contributions focus on four central topics: firstly the question of the locus of variation whether the attested variation may plausibly be understood in parametric terms and if so what form such parameters might take; secondly the fate of one of the most prominent early parameters the Null Subject Parameter; thirdly the matter of parametric clusters more generally; and finally acquisition issues.
Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages
Sept 2008
Book
Editor(s):
K. David Harrison,
David S. Rood and
Arienne Dwyer
This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak remember record analyze and archive as much as possible of our common human heritage that is linguistic diversity. The window of opportunity for documentation is narrower than the actual lifetime of a language and is now rapidly closing for many languages represented in this volume. The authors of these papers unveil newly collected data from previously poorly known and endangered languages. They organize highly complex linguistic facts - paradigms affixes vowel patterns - while pointing out the theoretically challenging aspects of these. Beyond this they reflect on the social and human dimensions discussing particular problems of nostalgia and modernity memory and forgetting and obsolescence and ethics while viewing language as not merely data on a page but as a living creation in the minds and mouths of its speakers.
Interdependence of Diachronic and Synchronic Analyses
Aug 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Folke Josephson and
Ingmar Söhrman
The focus of this volume is the interdependence of diachrony and synchrony in the investigation of syntactic structure. A diverse set of modern and ancient languages is investigated from this perspective including Hittite the Classical languages Old Norse Coptic Bantu languages Australian languages and Creoles. A variety of topics are covered including TAM diathesis valency case marking cliticization and grammaticalization. This volume should be of interest to
syntacticians typologists and historical linguists with an interest in syntax and morphology.
Constructing the Self
Aug 2008
Book
Author(s):
Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Constructing the Self analyzes the narrative conception of self filling a serious gap in philosophy and grounding discussion in other disciplines. It answers the questions:
• What are the connections between our interpretations selfhood and conscious phenomenal experience?
• Why do we believe that our interpretations of our life-defining events are narrative in nature?
• From the myriad of thoughts actions and emotions which constitute our experiences how do we choose what is interpretively important the tiny subset that composes the self?
By synthesizing the different approaches to understanding the self from philosophy of mind developmental psychology psychopathology and cognitive science this monograph gives us deeper insight into what being minded being a person and having a self are as well as clarifies the difference and relation between conscious and unconscious mental states and normal and abnormal minds. The explication also affords new perspectives on human development and human emotion. (Series A)
• What are the connections between our interpretations selfhood and conscious phenomenal experience?
• Why do we believe that our interpretations of our life-defining events are narrative in nature?
• From the myriad of thoughts actions and emotions which constitute our experiences how do we choose what is interpretively important the tiny subset that composes the self?
By synthesizing the different approaches to understanding the self from philosophy of mind developmental psychology psychopathology and cognitive science this monograph gives us deeper insight into what being minded being a person and having a self are as well as clarifies the difference and relation between conscious and unconscious mental states and normal and abnormal minds. The explication also affords new perspectives on human development and human emotion. (Series A)
The Perfect Time Span : On the present perfect in German, Swedish and English
Aug 2008
Book
Author(s):
Björn Rothstein
This book is the first book-length study on the Swedish present perfect. It provides an in-depth exploration of the present perfect in English German and Swedish. It is claimed that only a discourse-based ExtendedNow-approach fully accounts for the present perfect. The main claim is that the length of the ExtendedNow-interval varies cross-linguistically. The book is couched within the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory and also within Distributed Morphology. It is shown that Swedish provides empirical evidence against all previous research in the field. The following questions are investigated: Is it possible to assign a single uniform meaning to the present perfect? How can we account for the different readings of the perfect? How can we account for the cross-linguistic variation? These issues are addressed from a comparative perspective by integrating previous research on the present perfect. This book is of interest to all those working in the field of tense and aspect.
Germanic Future Constructions : A usage-based approach to language change
Aug 2008
Book
Author(s):
Martin Hilpert
This study offers a Construction Grammar approach to the historical development and modern usage of future constructions in English German Dutch Danish and Swedish. On the basis of corpus data constructions such as English be going to or German werden are analyzed as symbolic units that convey a range of temporal and modal meanings. A special focus lies on the main verbs that occur with these constructions. Statistical co-occurrence patterns between constructions and lexical items guide the semantic analyses in this study: It is argued that a construction that conventionally occurs with main verbs such as write or speak differs functionally from a construction that typically occurs with verbs such as rain or increase. The same approach is also applied historically: If a construction co-occurs with different main verbs at subsequent stages in time this is seen as a sign of semantic change.
The Syntax of Jamaican Creole : A cartographic perspective
Aug 2008
Book
Author(s):
Stephanie Durrleman
This book offers an in-depth study of the overall syntax of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole the first since Bailey (1966). The author a Jamaican linguist meticulously examines distributional and interpretative properties of functional morphology in Jamaican Creole (JC) from a cartographic perspective (Cinque 1999 2002; Rizzi 1997 2004) thus exploring to what extent the grammar of JC provides morphological manifestations of an articulate IP CP and DP. The data considered in this work offers new evidence in favour of these enriched structural analyses and the instances where surface orders differ from the underlying functional skeleton are accounted for in terms of movement operations. This investigation of Jamaican syntax therefore allows us to conclude that the 'poor' inflectional morphology typical of Creole languages in general and of (basilectal) Jamaican Creole in particular does not correlate with poor structural architecture. Indeed the free morphemes discussed as well as the word order considerations that indicate syntactic movement to designated projections serve as arguments in favour of a rich underlying functional map.
Language Contact and Contact Languages
Aug 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Peter Siemund and
Noemi Kintana
This new volume on language contact and contact languages presents cutting-edge research by distinguished scholars in the field as well as by highly talented newcomers. It has two principal aims: to analyze language contact from different perspectives – notably those of language typology diachronic linguistics language acquisition and translation studies; and to describe explain and elaborate on universal constraints on language contact. The individual chapters offer systematic comparisons of a wealth of contact situations and the book as a whole makes a valuable contribution to deepening our understanding of contact-induced language change. With its broad approach this work will be welcomed by scholars of many different persuasions.
English Adjective Comparison : A historical perspective
Aug 2008
Book
Author(s):
Victorina González-Díaz
The present work contributes to a better understanding of the English system of degree by means of a study of a number of aspects in the evolution of adjective comparison that have so far either been considered controversial or not been accounted for at all. As will be shown the diachronic aspects analysed will also have synchronic implications. Furthermore unlike previous synchronic as well as diachronic accounts of adjective comparison this monograph does not concentrate only on the ‘standard’ comparative strategies (i.e. inflectional and periphrastic forms) but also deals with double periphrastic comparatives thus providing an analysis of the whole range of comparative structures in English.
The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation
Aug 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Jorge Díaz-Cintas
While complementing other volumes in the BTL series in its exploration of the state of the art of translator training this collection of essays is solely focused on audiovisual translation one of the most complex and dynamic areas of the translation discipline. The book offers an easily accessible yet comprehensive introduction to the fascinating subject of translating films video games and other audiovisual material. Offering a balance between theory and practice the main aim of this volume is to provide a wealth of teaching and learning ideas in areas such as subtitling dubbing and voice-over without forgetting the newer fields of subtitling for the deaf and audio description for the blind. The Didactics of Audiovisual Translation offers exercises and more on a companion website highlighting its fundamentally interactive approach and the activities proposed can be adapted to different learning environments and used with different language combinations: https://benjamins.com/sites/btl.77
Adapting Health Communication to Cultural Needs : Optimizing documents in South-African health communication on HIV and AIDS
Aug 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Piet Swanepoel and
Hans Hoeken
The question of what constitutes effective health communication has been addressed mainly by scholars working in American and European cultural contexts. Many people who could benefit most from effective health communication however come from different cultures. A prime example is the threat posed by HIV/AIDS to the people of South Africa. Although it is generally acknowledged that health communication needs to be tailored to the target audience’s characteristics with cultural background being one of the most salient ones little research has been done on how to achieve this. In this book we bring together leading scholars in the field of health communication as well as communication scholars from South Africa. As such it can serve as an example of the promises and the limitations of general health communication theories to local praxis as well as provide guidelines for the development of better health communication in South Africa.
Between Text and Image : Updating research in screen translation
Aug 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Delia Chiaro,
Christine Heiss and
Chiara Bucaria
Over the past decade interest in research on screen translation has increased sharply while at the same time fast moving technological breakthroughs are continually modifying and renewing both products and well-established methods of linguistic mediation. Thus as more scholars choose to devote their energies to investigating this multi-faceted field there is an ever-growing need to map out where the discipline stands and where it is going in terms of research.
This book sets out to establish the state of the art of this ever expanding field and at the same time to underscore the work of scholars following new paths of investigation both in terms of innovative linguistic mediations being examined and pioneering experimental design.
The volume includes descriptions of sophisticated electronic databases and corpora of audiovisual products for the big and small screen and the rationale behind them e.g. how they are created and programmed for querying; technical limitations; homogeneity in querying languages. Furthermore Between Text and Image also includes a number of cutting edge studies in audience perception of audiovisual products i.e. empirically based viewer centred studies which are still rare yet essential if we wish to gain a thorough understanding of the field.
Finally the volume does not fail to ignore examples of original research carried out from both a traditional linguistic viewpoint and from a more cultural perspective.
This book sets out to establish the state of the art of this ever expanding field and at the same time to underscore the work of scholars following new paths of investigation both in terms of innovative linguistic mediations being examined and pioneering experimental design.
The volume includes descriptions of sophisticated electronic databases and corpora of audiovisual products for the big and small screen and the rationale behind them e.g. how they are created and programmed for querying; technical limitations; homogeneity in querying languages. Furthermore Between Text and Image also includes a number of cutting edge studies in audience perception of audiovisual products i.e. empirically based viewer centred studies which are still rare yet essential if we wish to gain a thorough understanding of the field.
Finally the volume does not fail to ignore examples of original research carried out from both a traditional linguistic viewpoint and from a more cultural perspective.
Dictionary Use in Foreign Language Writing Exams : Impact and implications
Jul 2008
Book
Author(s):
Martin East
This book provides an in-depth analysis of what happens when intermediate level learners of a foreign language use a bilingual dictionary when writing. Dictionaries are frequently promoted to people learning a foreign language. Nevertheless teachers often talk about their students’ inability to use dictionaries properly especially when they write and this can be problematic. This book paints a comprehensive picture of the differences a dictionary makes and brings out the implications for language learning teaching and testing practices. It draws on research in which participants in three studies took writing tests in two test conditions – with and without a dictionary. They were also asked what they thought about the two test types. Their performances and opinions were analyzed in a variety of ways. Conclusions from the data highlight some of the practical issues to be kept in mind if we want to help foreign language learners to use bilingual dictionaries effectively when writing.
English Historical Linguistics 2006 : Selected papers from the fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25 August 2006. Volume II: Lexical and Semantic Change
Jul 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Richard Dury,
Maurizio Gotti and
Marina Dossena
The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo 2006). Alongside studies of syntax morphology and dialectology published in two sister volumes many innovative contributions focused on semantics pragmatics and register variation. A rich variety of state-of-the-art studies and plenary lectures by acknowledged world experts in the field bears witness to the quality of the scholarly interest in this field of research. In all the contributions well-established methods combine with new theoretical approaches in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored or have only just begun to be investigated. The accurate peer-reviewed selection ensures the methodological homogeneity of the papers.
Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization
Jul 2008
Book
Editor(s):
Elena Seoane and
María José López-Couso
This volume and its companion oneRethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization entails via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions. Some of the theoretical issues discussed in the sixteen articles included in the volume are the nature of grammaticalization and related processes such as anti- re- and degrammaticalization the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization the role of frequency in grammaticalization and the interplay between information structure and grammaticalization. Other topics covered are the grammaticalization of composite predicates in English the emergence of modal particles in German and particle clusters in Dutch and the grammaticalization of various modal auxiliaries in Spanish and in Swedish.