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Iconicity has become a popular notion in contemporary linguistic research. This book is the first to present a synthesis of the vast amount of scholarship on linguistic iconicity which has been produced in the previous decades ranging from iconicity in phonology and morpho-syntax to the role of iconicity in language change. An extensive analysis is provided of some basic but nonetheless fundamental questions relating to iconicity in language including: what is a linguistic sign and how are linguistic signs different from signs in general? What is an iconic sign and how may iconicity be involved in language? How does iconicity pertain to the relation between language and cognition? This book offers a new and comprehensive theoretical framework for iconicity in language. It is argued that the linguistic sign is fundamentally arbitrary but that iconicity may be involved on a secondary level adding extra meaning to an utterance.

Long regarded as a peripheral issue phraseology is now taking centre stage in a wide range of fields. This recent explosion of interest undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the development of corpus linguistics research which has both demonstrated the key role of phraseological expressions in language and provided researchers with automated methods of extraction and analysis. The aim of this volume is to take stock of current research in phraseology from a variety of perspectives: theoretical descriptive contrastive cultural lexicographic and computational. It contains overview chapters by leading experts in the field and a series of case studies focusing on a wide range of multiword units: collocations similes idioms routine formulae and recurrent phrases. The volume is an invitation for experienced phraseologists to look at the field with different eyes and a useful introduction for the many researchers who are intrigued by phraseology but need help in finding their way in this rich but complex domain.

The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination – or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization – at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure involving at least two of the languages English German Dutch French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific – predominantly semantic – topics relating to German English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.

Integrational Linguistics (IL) developed by the German linguist Hans-Heinrich Lieb and others is an approach to linguistics that integrates linguistic descriptions construed as ‘declarative’ theories with a detailed theory of language that covers all classical areas of linguistics from phonology to sentence semantics and takes linguistic variation both synchronic and diachronic fully into account.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The aim of this book is to demonstrate how some controversial issues in language description are resolved in Integrational Linguistics. The four essays united here cover nearly all levels of language systems: phonetics and phonology (“The Case for Two-Level Phonology” by Hans-Heinrich Lieb on German obstruent tensing and French nasal alternation) morphology (“Form and Function of Verbal Ablaut in Contemporary Standard German” by Bernd Wiese) morphology and syntax (“Inflectional Units and Their Effects” by Sebastian Drude on the person system in Guaraní) and syntax and sentence semantics (“Topic Integration” by Andreas Nolda on ‘split topicalization’ in German).

The present volume deals with hitherto unexplored issues on the interaction of morphology and syntax. These selected and invited papers mainly concern Cushitic and Chadic languages the least-described members of the Afroasiatic family. Three papers in the volume explore one or more typological characteristics across an entire language family or branch while others focus on one or two languages within a family and the implications of their structures for the family the phylum or linguistic typology as a whole. The diversity of topics addressed within the present volume reflects the great diversity of language structures and functions within the Afroasiatic phylum.

The book introduces the concept of asymmetric events an important concept in language and cognition which for the first time in linguistic literature is identified in a more systematic way and analyzed in a number of different languages including typologically or genetically unrelated ones. Asymmetric events are two or more events of unequal status in an utterance and papers in the volume present ways in which a linguistic description of main events in a sentence is different (morphologically syntactically discursively) from a description of backgrounded events. The prototypical asymmetries involving perception cognition and language are identified in subordination nominalization and modification of various kinds but they extend to coordinate structures serial verbs spatial language and viewing arrangement as well as part - whole relations. The perspective is broadly cognitive and functional the authors use different though complementing methodologies some include corpus data and the asymmetries are shown to have a variety of stylistic and ideological implications.An in-depth analysis of manifold asymmetries in structure and function of diverse languages makes this volume of interest to linguists of different persuasion philosophers cognitive researchers discourse analysts and students of language and cognition.

This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch English French German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.

At conferences and in the literature on community interpreting there is one burning issue that reappears constantly: the interpreter’s role. What are the norms by which the facilitators of communication shape their role? Is there indeed only one role for the community interpreter or are there several? Is community interpreting aimed at facilitating communication empowering individuals by giving them a voice or in wider terms at redressing the power balance in society? In this volume scholars and practitioners from different countries address these questions offering a representative sample of ongoing research into community interpreting in the Western world of interest to all who have a stake in this form of interpreting. The opening chapter establishes the wider contextual and theoretical framework for the debate. It is followed by a section dealing with codes and standards and then moves on to explore the interpreter’s role in various different settings: courts and police healthcare schools occupational settings and social services.

This monograph is a comprehensive study of the various ways in which genericity can be expressed in Dutch dialects of Dutch and languages related to Dutch. On the basis of empirical (corpus- and questionnaire-based) data a wide range of topics are discussed which have been addressed in the literature on the semantics and pragmatics of generics. The empirical data presented in this book shed new light on issues crucial to the study of genericity. A number of widely accepted ideas are shown to be problematic. For example arguments are presented against the well-known claim that progressive forms typically exclude characterizing interpretations. Furthermore the author shows that speakers do not agree in their judgements of the acceptability of bare plurals (as well as other noun phrase types) in generic contexts. Such data are a problem for the influential thesis that bare plurals refer to kinds unambiguously.

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives i.e. speech acts such as requests commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings compliments and apologies. The third part finally contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.