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This volume brings together current research by international scholars on the varieties of English spoken in Ireland. The papers apply contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches and frameworks to a range of topics. A number of papers explore the distribution of linguistic features in Irish English including the evolution of linguistic structures in Irish English and linguistic change in progress employing broadly quantitative sociolinguistic approaches. Pragmatic features of Irish English are explored through corpus linguistics-based analysis. The construction of linguistic corpora using written and recorded material form the focus of other papers extending and analyzing the growing range of corpus material available to researchers of varieties of English including diaspora varieties. Issues of language and identity in contemporary Ireland are explored in several contributions using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The volume will be of interest to linguists generally and to scholars with an interest in varieties of English.

Starting in 1498 contact between Ibero-Romance and Asian languages has taken place along a vast stretch of the coastlines of continental and insular Asia producing a string of contact varieties which are among the least visible in the field of Creole Studies. This volume the first one dedicated to the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creoles of Asia brings together comparative studies on various issues across the Ibero-Asian creoles and beyond by specialists in these languages. This type of cross-linguistic analysis allows progress on many fronts including the reconstruction of past stages of the languages the explanation of observed similarities and differences the identification and consolidation of typological/taxonomic clusters or the assessment of the linguistic effects of different contact equations. The volume provides a timely window onto aspects of current research on the Ibero-Asian creoles including unsettled debates and ways in which their study can contribute to advance several areas of linguistic enquiry.

The volume brings together seventeen peer-reviewed revised papers originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16) held in August 2010 at the University of Pécs Hungary. This selection aims to show how theoretical and empirical approaches can be combined in the historical investigation of the English language what insights and exact information can be obtained about language change in the history of English with the help of tools like historical corpora or with inter- and transdisciplinary methods. The volume is arranged around five thematic headings. The first discusses dialects and regional variation from the viewpoint of contact linguistics and phonological morphological and lexical change. The second has syntactic variation and grammaticalization as its focus. Papers on grammatical changes in nominal and pronominal constructions are presented in part three. The integration of loanwords in Middle English is discussed in part four and the last investigates communicative intentions in historical discourse. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The volume should appeal to linguists interested in historical aspects of dialect and discourse studies historical pragmatics contact linguistics grammaticalization theory corpus linguistics and of course language change.

Dialogue interpreting which takes place in institutional settings such as legal proceedings healthcare contexts work meetings or media talk has attracted increasing attention in translation language and communication studies. Drawing on transcribed sequences of authentic talk this volume raises questions about aspects of interpreting that have been taken for granted challenging preconceived notions about differences between professional and non-professional interpreting and pointing in new directions for future research. Collecting contributions from major scholars in the field of dialogue interpreting and interaction studies the volume offers new insights into the relationship between interpreting and mediating. It addresses a wide readership including students and scholars in translation and interpreting studies mediation and negotiation studies linguistics sociology communication studies conversation analysis discourse analysis.

Exploring a largely uncharted territory of cultural history and linguistic ethnography Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness offers in-depth analyses and perceptive interpretations of the conveyance of social-relational meaning in times (long) past and across historical cultures.

A collection of essays from the pens of authoritative historical (pragma)-linguistics researchers the volume examines the forms and functions of historical (im)politeness varying from single utterances and act sequences to fully-fledged (im)polite speech encounters and genres with a focus on their period- and culture-bound appraisal. What is more the book sheds light on what is still very dimly seen: diachronic trends in ‘relational work’ and the cultural-societal factors behind patterns of sociopragmatic change.

The volume reviews theoretical concepts methods and analytical approaches to improve our present-day understanding of the historical understanding of relational practices of the distant as well as the more recent past. Since it includes newly established themes and positions and breaks new ground this collection furthers considerably the field of historical (im)politeness research.

This volume was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12:1/2 (2011).

How do readers make sense of a picture a photograph or a map in literary narratives in which visual signs play a critical role? How do authors accomplish their various objectives in constructing such complex texts? What strategies and techniques do they use to project fictional worlds and to provide their readers with the means for orienting themselves there? This book investigates the dynamics of the imaginary diagrams created by cartographers photographers and writers of narratives giving ample evidence of how mapping practices have inspired the imagination of a vast number of authors from Thomas More up to contemporary writers. A special focus is on the effects created by the projection of photographs into the narrative space and how our seemingly effortless interpretation of photographs and even maps masks complex cognitive processes. The theoretical horizon of this study encompasses the fields of cartography mental maps iconicity research and the spatial turn in cultural studies.

This volume brings together five papers offering cross-linguistic analyses of pragmatic markers involving modality supplemented by three book reviews on the same topic. The contrastive method based on monolingual or translation corpora does not only provide interesting insights about differences with respect to the semantics and the formal encoding of semantics between cognate elements in different languages but also appears to be a very useful tool to refine the semantic analysis of markers within a given language. The reader will also discover among the results of the original empirical research collected in this volume insights that contribute to typological and theoretical issues surrounding pragmatic markers such as the bottom-up identification of cross-linguistic pragmatic or discourse functions the establishment of semantic maps and the formulation of hypotheses about implicational hierarchies in the diachronic development of pragmatic markers on the basis of synchronic evidence especially in the framework of grammaticalization/pragmaticalization theory. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of Languages in Contrast 10:2 (2010).

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew offers an innovative perspective on sentential syntax in which sentence patterns are introduced as constructions within the general framework of Construction Grammar. Drawing on naturally occurring data collected from the Internet the study challenges the prevailing view of predication as the sole mechanism of sentence formation and introduces the idea of patterning as a complementary sometimes even alternative mechanism. Major sentence patterns of English and Hebrew are systematically presented targeting both their form and their function. A contrastive analysis of the sentence patterns in these two languages results in postulating a typological group in which cognitive motivations are shown to account for both similarities and differences within the typology.

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew will appeal to scholars of constructional approaches cognitive linguistics typology syntax as well as anyone interested in English and Hebrew.

Context is a core notion of linguistic theory. However while there are numerous attempts at explaining single aspects of the notion of context these attempts are rather diverse and do not easily converge to a unified theory of context. The present multi-faceted collection of papers reconsiders the notion of context and its challenges for linguistics from different theoretical and empirical angles. Part I offers insights into a wide range of current approaches to context including theoretical pragmatics neurolinguistics clinical pragmatics interactional linguistics and psycholinguistics. Part II presents new empirical findings on the role of context from case studies on idioms unarticulated constituents argument linking and numerically-quantified expressions. Bringing together different theoretical frameworks the volume provides thought-provoking discussions of how the notion of context can be understood modeled and implemented in linguistics. It is essential for researchers interested in theoretical and applied linguistics the semantics/pragmatics interface and experimental pragmatics.

Multiple interrogatives questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?) have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects subject-auxiliary inversion and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis) presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English Russian and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax semantics and language acquisition as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.