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The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. The twenty-third Going Romance conference was a very special one: for the first time it was not hosted by one of the Dutch universities but was co-organized by the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and held in France at the Maison du Séminaire in Nice from 3–5 December 2009.

The present volume contains a broad range of peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax phonology morphology semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages as well as selected papers from the special workshop dealing with linguistic change in relation to linguistic theory.

From the 16th century onwards Europeans encountered languages in the Americas Africa and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document and all of them witness their authors’ attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia Tamil four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context and its linguistic context is analyzed with particular attention to orthography the parts of speech system morphology and syntax. Whenever possible pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

The articles assembled in Semblance and Signification explore linguistic and literary structures from a range of theoretical perspectives with a view to understanding the extent prevalence productivity and limitations of iconically grounded forms of semiosis. With the complementary examination of large theoretical issues extensive corpus analysis in several modern languages such as Italian Japanese Sign Language and English and applied close studies across a range of artistic media this volume brings a fresh understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of iconicity. If primary and secondary modelling systems are rarely studied in tandem it is clear from this volume that their fruitful juxtaposition yields striking insight into the cognitive concerns that pervade current semiotic research.

Jiří Levý’s seminal work The Art of Translation considered a timeless classic in Translation Studies is now available in English. Having drawn on adjacent disciplines the methodology of Czech functional sociosemiotic structuralism and the state-of-the art in the West Levý synthesized his findings and experience in the field presenting them in a reader-friendly book which combines the approaches of a theoretician systemic analyst historian critic teacher practitioner and populariser. Although focused on literary translation from theoretical descriptive and historical perspectives it presents a conceptualization of a general theory addressing a number of issues discussed today. The ‘practical’ mission of the book as a theory extending to practice is based on the same historical-dialectic affinity of methods norms functions and values accounting for the translator’s agency and other contextual agents involved in the communication process. The book will be useful to translators researchers students and teachers in Translation and Literary Studies.

The emergence of symbolic culture classically identified with the European cave paintings of the Ice Age is now seen in the light of recent groundbreaking discoveries as a complex nonlinear process taking root in a remote past and in different regions of the planet. In this book the archaeologists responsible for some of these new discoveries flanked by ethologists interested in primate cognition and cultural transmission evolutionary psychologists modelling the emergence of metarepresentations as well as biologists philosophers neuro-scientists and an astronomer combine their research findings. Their results call into question our very conception of human nature and animal behaviour and they create epistemological bridges between disciplines that build the foundations for a novel vision of our lineage's cultural trajectory and the processes that have led to the emergence of human societies as we know them.

If politics is a serious matter and humour a funny one this volume investigates how and why the boundaries between the two are blurred: politics can be represented in a humorous manner and humour can have a serious intent. Political humour conveys criticism against the political status quo and/or recycles and reinforces dominant views on politics. The data analysed comes from European states with different sociopolitical histories and traditions and the methodologies adopted originate in different fields (discourse analysis folklore and cultural studies media studies sociolinguistics sociology theatre semiotics). The first part of the volume is dedicated to politicians’ humour as a means of public positioning deliberation and eventually attack against political adversaries while the second one involves political satire as realised in different genres: animation impersonation and cartoons. Last but not least the third part shows how political humour can be manipulated in public debates or become an integral part of postmodern art.

In most subtitling countries those lines at the bottom of the screen are the most read medium of all for which reason they deserve all the academic attention they can get. This monograph represents a large-scale attempt to provide such attention by exploring the norms of subtitling for television. It does so by empirically investigating a large corpus of television subtitles from Scandinavia one of the bastions of subtitling along with other European data.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The aim of the book is twofold: first to provide an advanced and comprehensive model for investigating translation problems in the form of Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs). Second to empirically explore current European television subtitling norms and to look into future developments in this area.<br/>This book will be of interest to anyone interested in gaining access to state-of-the-art tools for translation analysis or in learning more about the norms of subtitling based on empirically reliable and current material.

Summarizing her pioneering work on the semiotic analysis of gestures in conversational settings Geneviève Calbris offers a comprehensive account of her unique perspective on the relationship between gesture speech and thought. She highlights the various functions of gesture and especially shows how various gestural signs can be created in the same gesture by analogical links between physical and semantic elements. Originating in our world experience via mimetic and metonymic processes these analogical links are activated by contexts of use and thus lead to a diverse range of semantic constructions rather as from the components of a Meccano kit many different objects can be assembled. By (re)presenting perceptual schemata that mediate between the concrete and the abstract gesture may frequently anticipate verbal formulation. Arguing for gesture as a symbolic system in its own right that interfaces with thought and speech production Calbris’ book brings a challenging new perspective to gesture studies and will be seminal for generations of gesture researchers.

It has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields. Here “dialogue” has become a buzzword that promises democratic participatory processes of mutual learning and knowledge co-production. But what does “dialogue” actually entail in the fields in which it is practised and how can we analyse those practices in ways that take account of their complexities?

The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory action research and science and technology studies.

It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how dialogue is enacted in the fields of planned communication public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical reflexive approach is taken that interrogates the complexities tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of “dialogue” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of the dialogic turn.

This monograph sets out to derive the effects of standard constraints on displacement like the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) and the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED) from more basic principles in a minimalist approach. Assuming that movement via phase edges is possible only in the presence of edge features on phase heads simple restrictions can be introduced on when such edge features can be inserted derivationally. The resulting system is shown to correctly predict MLC/CED effects (including certain exceptions like intervention without c-command and melting). In addition it derives operator-island effects a restriction on extraction from verb-second clauses and island repair by ellipsis. The approach presupposes that syntactic operations apply in a fixed order: Timing emerges as crucial. Thus the book provides new arguments for a strictly derivational organization of syntax. Accordingly it should be of interest not only to all syntacticians working on islands but more generally to all scholars interested in the overall organization of grammar.