Browse Books

This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages including Arabic Japanese Polish and Spanish and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical semantic stylistic and historical aspects the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language in what way they are psychologically real and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics the book may be used in courses on discourse structure pragmatics semantics language acquisition and syntax as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

Discourse of Course comes after Jan Renkema’s Introduction to Discourse Studies (2004) for undergraduates. The new book is a collection of twenty short papers. It is a capita selecta course and meant for graduate programs. The aim of this book is threefold:

• to present material for advanced courses in discourse studies;

• to unfold a stimulating display of research projects to future PhD students;

• to give an overview of new developments after the 2004

Introduction to Discourse Studies.

This publication fulfills both the teacher's need for a state-of-the-art overview of the main topics in discourse and the student's need to acquire standards for developing research plans in theses and dissertations. It gives a combination of approaches from very different schools in discourse studies ranging from argumentation theory to genre theory from the study of multimodal metaphors to cognitive approaches to coherence analysis. This book is not only meant to serve as a textbook but also as a reference book for researchers who want an update for various main topics in the field.

Ioane Petritsi a twelfth-century Georgian philosopher translated from Greek into Georgian The Elements of Theology of the Neoplatonist Proclus (fifth century) and wrote a Commentary on the entire text with a preface and a postface. Petritsi tried to prove the priority of the Proclean One over all other ontological hypostases its transcendence and its omnipresence together with the thesis that all things depend on the One including even matter. In his Commentary Petritsi also referred to other works of Proclus besides The Elements of Theology as well as to many other ancient Greek philosophers. Although Petritsi’s Commentary is an important milestone in the history of the medieval Christian philosophical interpretations of ancient Platonism to date this text written in Old Georgian has remained almost unknown for western scholarship. This is the first time that the complete text of Petritsi’s Commentary is being published in a western language. The present book provides a German translation of the complete text with an introduction notes indices and bibliography. Der mittelalterliche georgische Philosoph Ioane Petrizi übersetzte im 12. Jahrhundert die Stoicheiosis theologike des Neuplatonikers Proclus (5. Jh.) ins Alt-Georgische und verfasste zu dem gesamten Text der Stoicheiosis einen umfangreichen Kommentar den er zusätzlich mit einem Prolog und einem Epilog versah. Petrizi versucht in seinem Kommentar die ontologische Vorrangigkeit des Proklischen Einen über alle anderen Hypostasen ebenso zu beweisen wie dessen Transzendenz bei gleichzeitiger Allanwesenheit im Seinskontinuum. Zudem vertritt er die These dass alle Dinge vom Einen abhängen sogar die Materie. Dabei berücksichtigt Petrizi neben der Stoicheiosis auch andere Werke Proclus’ ebenso wie zahlreiche weitere Texte antiker griechischer Philosophen. Damit wird Petrizis Kommentar zu einer bedeutenden Schrift für die Erforschung und das Verständnis der mittelalterlichen christlichen Philosophie und ihrer Aneignung des (spät-)antiken Platonismus. Trotz seiner Bedeutung ist Petrizis Text von der westlichen Forschung bisher kaum zur Kenntnis genommen worden. Die vorliegende Übersetzung ins Deutsche ist die erste komplette Übersetzung dieses Textes in eine westliche Sprache überhaupt. Neben der Übersetzung bietet diese Ausgabe eine Einleitung Anmerkungen Indices und eine Bibliografie.

Despite its potential influence on the standard language there is still relatively little written about the language of the young. This book gives new insight into some important areas of their language such as identity construction reflected for instance in prosodic patterns and language choice the use of discourse markers and slang in a contrastive perspective the pragmatics of fixed expressions and the impact of English on the teenage vernacular. Most of the articles are corpus-based and all represent naturally occurring spontaneous conversation. The book will be of interest to linguists university students and anyone interested in today’s adolescent language and language change.

Whereas Africa as a typological area is often associated with extensive verb morphology and verb serialization this collection of studies shows that there is tremendous typological diversity at the clausal level. Verb serialization in the Khoisan area contrasts with extensive case-marking in languages of northeastern Africa which also use converbs and light verb plus coverb constructions. Although the categorial distinction between nouns and verbs is generally clear in African languages a number of them nevertheless provide intricate analytical challenges in this respect. Whereas some languages are strongly head marking at the clausal level others manifest an interesting mixture of alternative strategies for the coding of participants. The analysis of information packaging and related issues such as split ergativity Differential Object Marking and discourse-configurational properties also play a role in several contributions. The collection contains not only innovative analyses for the respective language families these languages belong to but also material relevant for the current debate in theoretical linguistics concerning lexical specification as against construction-based approaches towards argument structure.

Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue shows contemporary oral history at work in a variety of contexts levels and engagements. The issues developed in the book correspond to different stages of research: preparing and conducting the interview evaluating and analyzing the collected material publishing in the broad sense of speaking to different audiences and finally addressing the dilemmas and philosophical reflections with an emphasis on ethics. This book aims to address oral history from two perspectives. The first is the perspective of oral history as dialoguing the second is the presentation of concrete situations research persons and their own stories as built on the solid ground of discourse and within a concrete context. The chapters embody the experiences of the authors their efforts and successes as well as their failures in dialoguing with narrators. Unveiled in this book is the extensive breadth of contemporary oral history work bridging epistemological and methodological horizons.

Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change offers the first comprehensive description of Indian English and its emerging regional standard in a corpus-linguistic framework. Drawing on a wealth of authentic spoken and written data from India (including the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English) this book explores the dynamics of variation and change in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary Indian English. The aims are to document the extent of lexical and grammatical nativization at the beginning of the twenty-first century and compare contemporary Indian English to other varieties around the world (for example British and American English). The results are relevant to sociolinguists variationists and lexicologists seeking to investigate ongoing language change in emerging standard varieties of English. With its strong empirical foundation and its comparative outlook the book is also of interest to anyone looking for an introduction to the corpus-based description of varieties of English.

The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study tackles a linguistic or social phenomenon and approaches it with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods always embedded in the socio-historical context. The volume presents new information on linguistic variation and change while evaluating and developing the relevant theoretical and methodological tools. The writers form one of the leading research teams in the field and as compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence have an informed understanding of the data in all its depth. This volume will be of interest to scholars in historical linguistics sociolinguistics and socio-pragmatics but also e.g. social history. The approachable style of writing makes it also inviting for advanced students.

This book looks at mediaeval English drama using the theoretical frameworks of historical sociopragmatics and dialogue analysis. It focuses on the collection of cycle plays known as the N.Town Plays preserved in a manuscript from the fifteenth century. The book examines various linguistic markers that are important for the expression of social relations and pragmatic stance: pronouns and terms of address modal markers performatives and sequential structures such as question-answer imperative-compliance etc. These elements are examined separately and then brought together to arrive at a more integrated analysis of dramatic dialogue and of the dynamics of interaction it portrays. A separate chapter is devoted to tracing the same mechanisms on a different communication level i.e. in 'dialogue' with the audience which is particularly relevant to the instructional purposes of the plays. The book will be useful to students and scholars of pragmatics historical linguistics dialogue studies and drama studies.

Is creolization an abrupt or a gradual process? In this volume leading scholars provide both comparative and case studies that outline their working definitions and their views on the particular or average time depth or key processes necessary for contact language formation providing a state-of-the art assessment of the theory of gradual creolization. Authors scrutinize the roles of nativization demography initial settlement language composition koineization adstrate presence bilingualism as well as a variety of structural features in pidgins creoles and other contact languages world-wide. From Pacific to Atlantic French- English- Dutch- Portuguese- and other-lexified restructured varieties are covered. Syntactic lexical phonological historical and socio-cultural studies are grouped into Part 1 Linguistic analysis and Part 2 Social reconstruction. This volume provides the multi-faceted groundwork and expert discussion that will help formulate further a model of gradual creolization as called for by the work of the late Jacques Arends.