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This book presents a multidisciplinary theoretical model of cultural conceptualisations and language. Viewing language as firmly grounded in cultural cognition the model draws on analytical tools and theoretical advancements in several disciplines including cognitive linguistics cognitive anthropology anthropological linguistics distributed cognition complexity science and cognitive psychology. The result is a framework that has significant implications for those disciplines as well as for applied linguistics. Applications of the model to intercultural communication cross-cultural pragmatics English as an International Language/World Englishes and political discourse analysis are explored in detail.

For further research and theoretical advancements in this newly developed field see Cultural Linguistics. Cultural conceptualisations and language [CLSCC 8]

Primarily focused on idioms and other figurative phraseology Colouring Meaning describes how the meanings of established phrases are enhanced refocused and modified in everyday language use. Unlike many studies of creativity in language this book-length survey addresses the matter at several levels from the purely linguistic level of collocation through its abstractions in colligation and semantic preference to semantic prosody and connotation. This journey through both linguistic and cognitive levels involves the examination of habitual language and its exploitations both mundane and colourful explaining the phenomena observed in terms of current psycholinguistic research as well as corpus linguistics theory and analysis. The relationships between meaning in text and meaning in the mind are discussed at length and extensively illustrated with worked case studies to offer the reader a comprehensive overview of metaphorical and other secondary meanings as they emerge in real-world communicative situations.

Journalism is often thought of as the ‘fourth estate’ of democracy. This book suggests that journalism plays a more radical role in politics and explores new ways of thinking about news media discourse. It develops an approach to investigating both hegemonic discourse and discursive fissures inconsistencies and tensions. By analysing international news coverage of post-Soviet Russia including the Beslan hostage-taking Gazprom Litvinenko and human rights issues it demonstrates the (re)production of the ‘common-sense’ social order in which one particular area of the world is more developed civilized and democratic than other areas. However drawing on Laclau Mouffe and other post-foundational thinkers it also suggests that journalism is precisely the site where the instability of this global social order becomes visible. The book should be of interest to scholars of discourse analysis journalism and communication studies cultural studies and political science and to anyone interested in ‘positive’ discourse analysis and practical counter-discursive strategies.

Dies ist der erste Teil einer zweibändigen Studie zur Genese unseres heutigen vom Anspruch her den chronologischen Verlauf der gesamten Menschheitsgeschichte strukturierenden „Epochen“-Systems. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Der Band skizziert zunächst die geistesgeschichtlichen Prämissen. Von der rudimentären paläolithischen Zeiteinteilung führt er über die ältesten schriftlich dokumentierten Ordnungsversuche in den sumerischen bzw. ägyptischen „Königlisten“ griechische und römische Autoren Petrarca Bruni und Vasari bis zu Cellarius der am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts die Drei-Zeitalter-Distinktion „Antike-Mittelalter-Neuzeit“ zum zentralen chronologischen Gliederungsprinzip der Weltgeschichte erhob. Anschließend stehen die drei klassischen von Pyrrhon Polybios bzw. Ptolemaios entwickelten „Epoché“-Konzepte sowie deren Auftauchen und Rezeption im lateinischen Europa im Fokus. Sodann wird die erstaunlich spät nämlich erst nach Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts einsetzende Transformation der „Epoché“ zur fundamentalen historiographischen Ordnungskategorie thematisiert. Schließlich verfolgen wir anhand zahlreicher Autoren sowie der kontemporären Lexikographie ihren auf Latein wie in den relevanten europäischen „Volkssprachen“ (Englisch Französisch Deutsch Spanisch Portugiesisch Italienisch) stattfindenden Divulgationsprozeß. Dabei erweist sich der Ausgang des 17. Jahrhunderts erneut als Wasserscheide. <br/>Der erste Band endet deshalb an dieser Stelle ein zweite (BSP 56 2015) analysiert die weitere Entwicklung von 1700 bis 1900. <br/><br/>This is the first part of a two-volume study of the genesis of our modern-day system of epochs which claims to structure the chronology of the entire history of mankind. The volume sets out by sketching the intellectual premises. It leads from the rudimentary Palaeolithic division of time via the oldest attempts at structuring to have been documented in written form through to the Sumerian and Egyptian “King Lists” to Greek and Roman authors to Petrarch Bruni and Vasari and finally to Cellarius who in the late 17th century introduced the distinction between the three epochs of “Antiquity the Middle Ages and the Modern Era” as the basic chronological principle of organising the history of the world. This is followed by a closer look at the three classical concepts of “Epoché” as defined by Pyrrhon Polybios and Ptolemaios respectively as well as their surfacing and reception in Latin Europe. Not until the second half of the 16th century which is an astonishingly late point in time can the transformation of “Epoché” into a fundamental category of historiographic structuring be detected. Finally by studying numerous writers as well as the contemporary lexicography we will outline the process of divulgation that took place both in Latin as well as in the relevant European “vernaculars” (English French German Spanish Portuguese Italian). In the process the late 17th century again proves to be a kind of divide. <br/>As a consequence volume one ends here; a second volume (BSP 56 2015) analyses the development up to 1900.

Languages differ regarding both the ways they group words into phrases and the surface cues they use to indicate relevant phrasing patterns. Modeling intonation in as many languages as possible has become a central goal of theoretical and empirical linguistics. However intonational research has only recently begun to devote attention to the analysis of spontaneous speech one of the central issues of this book. The volume contains eight contributions by international scholars some of them members of the Research Center on “Multilingualism” (Hamburg Germany) all of them experts on intonation and most also on multilingualism. A central goal of the present volume is to expand the cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective of phrasing focusing thereby on languages from the Romance and Germanic families among them Catalan French German Italian Occitan and Spanish. Within Spanish special attention is given to several Argentinean varieties and within Italian the Neapolitan variety is compared with the standard one.

This research monograph is an empirical and theoretical study of clause-final verbal complexes in the history of German. The book presents corpus studies of Middle High German and Early New High German and surveys of contemporary varieties of German. These investigations of the verbal complex address not only the frequencies of the word orders but also the linguistic factors that influence them. On that empirical basis the analysis adopted is the classic verb-final approach with alternative orders derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Verb Raising in these historical and modern varieties is subject to morphological prosodic and sociolinguistic restrictions suggesting that the orders in question are not driven by narrow syntax but by their effects at the interface with phonology. This study will be of interest to students and scholars studying the diachronic syntax of German West Germanic dialect syntax and the relationship between prosody and word order.

The use of technology in learning has increased dramatically. Training and education is now utilizing and almost integrated with the World Wide Web podcasts mobile and distant learning interactive videos serious games and a whole range of e-learning. However has such technology enhanced learning been effective? And how can it better serve training and education?E-learning must be 'brain friendly' so it optimizes learning to the cognitive architecture of the learners. If technology enhanced learning promotes the formation of effective mental representations and works with the human cognitive system then the learners will not only be able to acquire information more efficiently but they will also remember it better and use it. Technology should not be the driving force in shaping e-learning but rather how that technology can better serve the cognitive system.

This volume originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 16:2 (2008) and partly in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:1 (2009) explores the research frontiers in cognition and learning technology. It provides important theoretical insights into these issues as well as very practical implications of how to make e-learning more brain friendly and effective.