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The history of English writing is to a considerable extent the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts from Ælfric’s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old Middle and Modern English periods this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume.

The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech illustrates how recent findings about primary intersubjectivity participant perception and mirror neurons afford a new understanding of children’s nature dialogue and language.

Based on recent infancy research and the mirror neurons discovery studies of early speech perception comparative primate studies and computer simulations of language evolution this book offers replies to questions as: When and how may spoken language have emerged? How is it that infants so soon after birth become so efficient in their speech perception? What enables 11-month-olds to afford and reciprocate care? What are the steps from infant imitation and simulation of body movements to simulation of mind in conversation partners?

Stein Bråten is founder and chair of the Theory Forum network with some of the world’s leading infancy primate and brain researchers who have contributed to his edited volumes for Cambridge University Press (1998) and John Benjamins Publishing Company (2007). (Series B)

John Sinclair’s work is widely known and has had a far-reaching influence particularly in the areas of corpus linguistics lexis phraseology lexicography grammar and discourse analysis. This collection of papers written by former colleagues at Birmingham University looks at some key writings by John Sinclair with the intention of showing why his ideas are of lasting significance. Contributions deal with the Cobuild Project (directed by Sinclair) and its innovative first dictionary; collocation and the Open Choice and Idiom Principles; the interactions between and interdependence of phraseology and grammar; semantic prosody; and the construction of meaning in text. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2 (2007).

This book explores the nature of stative verbs their eventuality structure and the patterns of argument realization. The study shows that there is no single class of stative verbs. Rather several distinct groups of verbs are found: Verbs that undergo a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity; verbs that allow for a stative reading only; and verbs that seem to have an intermediate status (verbs of position and verbs of internal causation). The study concludes that there is a discrete boundary between stative and eventive verbs excluding any intermediate status. Stativity arises because the aspectual operators DO and BECOME are absent in the lexical-semantic structure. Eventivity arises if one of these is present. A minimalist view on argument realization and event structure completes the book: Theta features on the arguments are checked against the aspectual heads within the verb phrase.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in adjacent disciplines such as linguistic pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis psycholinguistics gender and translation studies. The volume effectively offers an overview of the range of phenomena falling in the broad category of ‘conversational humor’ and convincingly argues for the many different functions humor can fulfill bypassing simplistic humor theories reducing humor to one function. All the articles draw on empirical material from different countries and cultures comprising conversations among friends and family talk in workplace situations humor in educational settings and experimental approaches to humor in interaction. The book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of humor studies pragmatics and (socio-)linguistics.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical cognitive grammatical social cultural variational interactional or discursive angles this first volume reviews basic notions that pervade the pragmatic literature such as deixis implicitness speech acts context and the like. It situates the field of pragmatics broadly defined as the cognitive social and cultural science of language use in relation to a general concept of communication and the discipline of semiotics. It also touches upon the non-verbal aspects of language use and even ventures a comparison with non-human forms of communication. The introductory chapter moreover explains why a highly diversified field of scholarship such as pragmatics can be regarded as a potentially coherent enterprise.

This collection of articles highlights a selection of on-going research projects. Phonological morphological and syntactic issues are addressed by international experts on Maltese. The diachronic development of Maltese its age-long contact with Italo-Romance and the present diglossic situation with co-official English are the topics of a variety of contributions to this volume. The repercussions that the promotion of Maltese to the status of official working language of the EU has on the Maltese lexicon are discussed. A project on the sociolinguistics of non-native Maltese-English is presented. The problems posed by the creation of electronic resources for Maltese are equally focused upon. The papers amply demonstrate that Maltese Linguistics can stand on its own outside the traditional field of Oriental Studies.

Ce volume se propose d’évaluer la place de Pomponazzi dans la philosophie de la Renaissance à la fois son ancrage dans des traditions médiévales et sa force d’innovation. A côté de contributions sur le De immortalitate animae (1516) ses antécédents les débats qu’il a suscités le volume comprend aussi des interventions sur d’autres questions de philosophie de la nature ou sur la liberté et le destin ainsi qu’une contribution davantage centrée sur l’interprétation qui a été réservée à la pensée de Pomponazzi au début du XXe siècle. Les textes de Pomponazzi et notamment le traité sur l’âme apparaissent ainsi comme des textes frontaliers. Leur étude permet d’évaluer le transfert de certaines thématiques philosophiques médiévales et en particulier de la noétique aristotélicienne alexandriste et averroïste dans le contexte intellectuel de la Renaissance au sein d’une réflexion générale sur le sens anthropologique et éthique de la finitude constitutive de la nature humaine. This book proposes to evaluate the importance and signification of Pietro Pomponazzi in the philosophy of the Renaissance. It considers both its rooting in Medieval traditions and its innovative force. Besides contributions on Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae (1516) its antecedens and the debates that arose the volume contains contributions on other aspects of the philosophy of nature or on liberty and fate and one dedicated to the interpretation of Pomponazzi at the beginning of the twentieth century. So the texts of Pomponazzi and especially his treatise on the soul appear as frontier texts. Their study allows an evaluation of the transfer of some medieval thematics especially of Aristotelian Alexandrinian and Averroist noetics in the intellectual context of Renaissance inside a general reflection upon the anthropological and ethical meaning of the finitude which is constitutive of human nature.

Psyche and the Literary Muses focuses on the psychology of literature from an empirical point of view rather than the more typical psychoanalytic position and concentrates on literary content rather than readers or writers. The book centers on the author’s quantitative studies of brief literary and quasi-literary forms ranging from titles of short stories and names of literary characters to clichés and quotations from literary sources in demonstrating their contribution to the topics of learning perception thinking emotions creativity and especially person perception and aging. More broadly Psyche bears on literary studies art and psychology in general as well as interdisciplinarity. This book deepens the understanding and appreciation of literature for scholars academics and the general reader.

Vocalize-to-Localize? Meerkats do it for specific predators… And babies point with their index finger toward targets of interest at about nine months well before using language-specific that-demonstratives. With what-interrogatives they are universal and as relativizers and complementizers play an important role in grammar construction. Some alarm calls in nonhumans display more than mere localization: semantics and even syntax. Instead of telling another monomodal story about language origin in this volume advocates of representational gestures semantically transparent but with a problematic route toward speech meet advocates of speech with a problematic route toward the lexicon. The present meeting resulted in contributions by 23 specialists in the behaviour and brain of humans including comparative studies in child development and nonhuman primates aphasiology and robotics. The near future will tell us if the present crosstalk — between researchers in auditory and in visual communication systems — will lead to a more integrative framework for understanding the emergence of babbling and pointing two types of neural control whose coordination could pave the way toward the word and syntax.

The contributions to this volume were previously published as Interaction Studies 5:3 (2004) and 6:2 (2005).