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This edited volume constitutes the first serious sustained examination of the study of children’s books for children aged from 0 to 3 with contributions by scholars working in different domains and attempting to assess the recognition of the role and influence of children’s literature on the cognitive linguistic psychological and aesthetic development of young children. This collection achieves a balance between theoretical empirical historical and cross-cultural approaches by examining the broad range of children’s books for children under three years of age ranging from early-concept books through wimmelbooks and ABC books for small children to picture books that support the young child’s acquisition of behavioral norms. Most importantly the chapters proffer new insights into the strong relationship between children’s books for young children and emergent literacy drawing on current research in children’s literature research visual literacy cognitive psychology language acquisition picture theory and pedagogy.

Over the past three decades translation has evolved from a profession practiced largely by individuals to a cottage industry model and finally to a formally recognized industrial sector that is project-based heavily outsourced and that encompasses a wide range of services in addition to translation. As projects have grown in size scope and complexity and as project teams have become increasingly distributed across geographies time zones languages and cultures formalized project management has emerged as both a business requirement and a critical success factor for language service providers. In recognition of these developments this volume examines the application of project management concepts tools and techniques to translation and localization projects. The contributors are seasoned practitioners and scholars who offer insights into the central role of project management in the language industry today and discuss best-practice approaches to the adaptation of generic project management knowledge skills tools and techniques for translation and localization projects.

This volume contributes to the emerging research on the social formation of translators and interpreters as specific occupational groups. Despite the rising academic interest in sociological perspectives in Translation Studies relatively little research has so far been devoted to translators’ social background status struggles and sense of self. The articles assembled here zoom in on the “groups of individuals” who perform the complex translating and/or interpreting tasks thereby creating their own space of cultural production. Cutting across varied translatorial and geographical arenas they reflect a view of the interrelatedness between the macro-level question of professional status and micro-level aspects of practitioners’ identity. Addressing central theoretical issues relating to translators’ habitus and role perception as well as methodological challenges of using qualitative and quantitative measures this endeavor also contributes to the critical discourse on translators’ agency and ethics and to questions of reformulating their social role.The contributions to this volume were originally published in Translation and Interpreting Studies 4:2 (2009) and 5:1 (2010).

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view language is not essentially ‘symbolic’ not represented inside minds or brains and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling expression and wordings language permeates the collective individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading its socio-cognitive consequences Shakespearean theatre what images evoke (in brain and word) and solving insight problems. Theoretically the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth it is argued that language far from being organism-centred gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment. The contributions to this volume expand on those originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:3 (2009).

Cambodian is in many respects a typical Southeast Asian language whose syntax at least on first acquaintance seems to approximate that of any SVO pidgin. On closer acquaintance however because of the richness of its idioms the language seems to be a forbiddingly alien form of “Desesperanto” – a language of which one can read a page and understand every word individually and have no inkling of what the page was all about. Like many of the languages of its genetic (Austroasiatic) family its basic root vocabulary seems to consist largely of sesquisyllabic or iambic words although there are an enormous number of unassimilated borrowings from Indic languages (which seem to play the same role in Cambodian that Latinate borrowings do in English). Morphologically Cambodian has a fairly elaborate system of derivational affixes and it is possible that the genesis of many of the most common of these affixes is related to (and undoes) the constant reduction of unstressed initial syllables in sesquisyllabic words. Again like many of the languages of Southeast Asia Cambodian exhibits in its lexicon a penchant for symmetrical decorative compounding a phenomenon which is so marginally attested in Western languages that the phenomenon has received little attention in the typological literature.

The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case animacy and semantic roles thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example what is case how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages Indo-European languages Basque Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case animacy and/or semantic roles.

The present collection of articles represents research efforts in the field of specialised languages including the analysis of research articles in disciplines as diverse as Biomedicine and Computing on the one hand and overlapping disciplines such as in Social Sciences on the other all with high relevance to English for Academic Purposes and English for specific Purposes. The volume offers empirical evidence obtained from corpus-based analyses of language both from diachronic as well as synchronic perspectives on topics such as the role of mother tongue in professional writing the analysis of conference abstracts as a genre or the analysis of visual data transfer. This collection addresses issues such as the implementation of lexicons for specialised language learning and the development of ontologies to research language patterns. The volume thus provides a rich repertoire of research methodologies in-depth analyses of specialised discourses and the identification and discussion of relevant pedagogic issues.Winner of the 4th Edition of the 'Enrique Alcaraz Research Award'

Lance Hewson's book on translation criticism sets out to examine ways in which a literary text may be explored as a translation not primarily to judge it but to understand where the text stands in relation to its original by examining the interpretative potential that results from the translational choices that have been made. After considering theoretical aspects of translation criticism Hewson sets out a method of analysing originals and their translations on three different levels. Tools are provided to describe translational choices and their potential effects and applied to two corpora: Flaubert's Madame Bovary and six of the English translations and Austen's Emma with three of the French translations. The results of the analyses are used to construct a hypothesis about each translation which is classified according to two scales of measurement one distinguishing between "just" and "false" interpretations and the other between "divergent similarity" "relative divergence" "radical divergence" and "adaptation".

Until recently mixed languages were considered an oddity of contact linguistics with debates about whether or not they actually existed stifling much descriptive work or discussion of their origins. These debates have shifted from questioning their existence to a focus on their formation and their social and structural features. This book aims to advance our understanding of how mixed languages evolve by introducing a substantial corpus from a newly-described mixed language Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people who live at Kalkaringi in northern Australia and is the result of pervasive code-switching practices. Although Gurindji Kriol bears some resemblance to both of its source languages it uses the forms from these languages to function within a unique system. This book focuses on one structural aspect of Gurindji Kriol case morphology which is from Gurindji but functions in ways that differ from its source.

The purpose of this research is to analyse the pragmatic development of language groups at different proficiency levels and to investigate the relationship between interlanguage pragmatics and grammatical competence. For this study 36 native Spanish speaking EFL learners at different proficiency levels were asked to respond in English to 24 different situations that called for the speech acts of request and apology. Results showed three important aspects. The first finding suggested that basic adult learners possess a pragmatic knowledge in their L1 that allows them to focus on the intended meaning and in most cases to assemble an utterance that conveys a pragmatic intention and satisfies the communicative demands of a social situation. The second finding revealed that there are two essential conditions to communicate a linguistic action: the knowledge of the relevant linguistic rules and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately and effectively in a specific context. The findings further suggested that advanced learners possess the grammatical knowledge to produce an illocutionary act but they need to learn the specific L2 pragmatic conventions that enable them to know when to use these grammatical forms and under which circumstances.