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Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally fillers can function as a pragmatic tool in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.

Types and stereotypes is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989 the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe approaches the region’s literatures from five complementary angles focusing on literature’s participation in and reaction to key political events literary periods and genres the literatures of cities and sub-regions literary institutions and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories to contextualize them in a regional perspective and to recover individual works writers and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored.

Types and stereotypes brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets figurations of the Family Women Outlaws and Others as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region’s literary historians to students and teachers of comparative literature to cultural historians and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region.This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.literarycultures.pdf

The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999 2000 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be ‘crash-proof’. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ‘crash’. There have however been some recent developments in Minimalism – especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) – that have called the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ‘crash’ is and what a ‘crash-proof grammar’ would look like and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ is biolinguistically appealing.

Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language there are still many questions left unanswered. For example should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically syntactically or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets.

These articles were originally published in Studies in Language 32:3 (2008).

This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic focus contrastivity givenness anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts dislocations reflexives null subjects prosodic features interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan English French Georgian German Hebrew Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.

This interdisciplinary study presents the cutting-edge state of theoretical and applied research in the fascinating field of phraseology. The author elaborates key terminology and theoretical concepts of phraseology while challenging some prevailing assumptions. Exploration of phraseological meaning across sentence boundaries is supported by ample textual illustrations of stylistic use ranging from Old English to Modern English. The book contains innovative research in the discourse-level features of phraseological units from a cognitive perspective along with creative use of phraseological metaphor metonymy and allusion multimodal discourse included. The author argues for applied stylistics as a distinct area and the need to raise stylistic awareness among teachers and learners translators lexicographers and advertisers. The book offers an extensive glossary of key terms and a comprehensive bibliography. Stylistic Use of Phraseological Units in Discourse is a skilfully revised and extensively expanded new edition of the author’s previously published 'Phraseological Units in Discourse: Towards Applied Stylistics' (2001).

As of March 2017 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. It is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.

This book provides interesting and critical insights into a common university practice the academic office hour. Office hours are a discursive site for a variety of different issues ranging from administrative matters to course-related and study-related concerns. The study offers both an ethnographic account of this speech event within the socio-cultural context of a German university as well as a more detailed analysis of the interactional organization of academic consultations. It draws on natural recordings of entire office hour interactions in order to show how participants’ actions at different stages of the talk organize and accomplish the consultation. The analytical focus is set on the sequential activities teachers and students engage in as they conduct a consultation. This includes for instance how participants open an office hour talk how they establish an agenda how they manage advice-giving and how they close the consultation. As such this book will be of practical use to students and faculty members as well as scholars from different disciplines who work in the areas of institutional talk and talk-in-interaction.

This monograph investigates the morpho-syntactic and other properties of clitic pronouns in Greek and offers a grammar of proclisis and enclisis in light of Chomsky’s (1995 2001a 2005) Minimalist Program. It explores the nature of clitics as syntactic topicalizers which are probed by structurally higher verbal heads to which they move and into which they incorporate morpho-syntactically. A theory is advanced according to which cliticization derives from syntactic agreement between (the phi-features of) a clitic pronoun and a phase head v* in the case of proclisis and CM in the case of enclisis. Incorporation of the clitic into its host is argued to depend on two factors i.e. the fact that the clitic only contains a subset of the features of its host and the fact that the edge of the host is accessible. Also the syntax of strong pronouns and their relation to clitics of negated imperatives of surrogate imperatives and of free clitic ordering in Greek enclisis are also discussed. This monograph would appeal to syntacticians and morphologists as well as to those interested in Greek and more generally in clitic syntax.

In this volume Germen de Haan gives a multi-faceted view of the syntax sociolinguistics and phonology of West-Frisian. The author discusses distinct aspects of the syntax of verbs in Frisian: finiteness and Verb Second embedded root phenomena the verbal complex verbal complementation and complementizer agreement. Because Frisian has minority language status and is of interest to sociolinguists the author reviews the linguistic changes in Frisian under the influence of the dominant Dutch language and more generally reflects on how to deal with contact-induced change in grammar. Finally in three phonological articles the author discusses nasalization in Frisian the putatively symmetrical vowel inventory of Frisian and the variation between schwa + sonorant consonants and syllabic sonorant consonants.

This completely revised and expanded edition of English Prepositions Explained (EPE) originally published in 1998 covers approximately 100 simple compound and phrasal English prepositions of space and time – with the focus being on short prepositions such as at by in and on. Its target readership includes teachers of ESOL pre-service translators and interpreters undergraduates in English linguistics programs studious advanced learners and users of English and anyone who is inquisitive about the English language. The overall aim is to explain how and why meaning changes when one preposition is swapped for another in the same context. While retaining most of the structure of the original this edition says more about more prepositions. It includes many more figures – virtually all new. The exposition draws on recent research and is substantially founded on evidence from digitalized corpora including frequency data. EPE gives information and insights that will not be found in dictionaries and grammar handbooks.