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Based on recent research in formal linguistics this volume provides a thorough description of the whole system of Romanian Noun Phrases understood in an extended sense that is in addition to nouns pronouns and determiners it examines all the adnominal phrases: genitive-marked DPs adjectives relative clauses appositions prepositional phrases complement clauses and non-finite modifiers. The book focuses on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface but also includes a systematic morphological description of the language. The implicitly comparative description of Romanian contained in the book can serve as a starting point for the study of the syntax/semantics of Noun Phrases in other languages regardless of whether or not they are typologically related to Romanian. This book will be of special interest to linguists working on Romanian Romance languages comparative linguistics and language typology especially because Romanian is relevant for comparative linguistics not only as a Romance language but also as part of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund.

This volume is an important contribution to the diachrony of non-canonical subjects in a typological perspective. The questions addressed concern the internal mechanisms and triggers for various changes that non-canonical subjects undergo ranging from semantic motivations to purely structural explanations. The discussion encompasses the whole life-cycle of non-canonical subjects: from their emergence out of non-subject arguments to their expansion demise or canonicization focusing primarily on syntactic changes and changes in case-marking. The volume offers a number of different case studies comprising such languages as Italian Spanish Old Norse and Russian as well as languages less studied in this context such as Latin Classical Armenian Baltic languages and some East Caucasian languages. Typological generalizations in the form of recurrent developmental paths are offered on the basis of data presented in this volume and in the literature.

This volume further complicates and advances the contemporary perspective on language endangerment by examining the outcomes of the most commonly cited responses to language endangerment i.e. language documentation language revitalization and training. The present collection takes stock of many complex and pressing issues such as the assessment of the degree of language endangerment the contribution of linguistic scholarship to language revitalization programs the creation of successful language reclamation programs the emergence of languages that arise as a result of revitalization efforts after interrupted transmission the ethics of fieldwork and the training of field linguists and language educators. The volume’s case studies provide detailed personal accounts of fieldworkers and language activists who are grappling with issues of language documentation and revitalization in the concrete physical and socio-cultural settings of native speaker communities in different regions of the world.

How do people listen in a conversation especially in an intercultural setting and how do they shift from listener to speaker in the particular context? This book investigates listenership behaviours of a tutor and a student in the context of academic supervision sessions at a university in the UK comparing British tutor - British student conversations with British tutor - Japanese student conversations in English. A new research methodology a time-aligned multimodal corpus analysis is introduced for analysing listenership and turn-taking structure synthesising visual data with verbal data in timeline. The method also integrates discourse-pragmatic and conversation analytic approaches with the corpus-based analysis. This work reports strategies in use of response tokens for framework shifts and multi-functional nature of hand gestures observed in the conversations. Therefore this book is highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students who study pragmatic and discursive practice in intercultural settings using multimodal corpora.

This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages including Spanish Catalan Brazilian and European Portuguese Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.

Chinese Language Narration: Culture cognition and emotion is a collection of papers presenting original research on narration in Mandarin especially as it contrasts to what is known regarding narration in English. One chapter addresses dinner table conversation between Chinese immigrant parents and children in the United States compared to non-immigrant peers. Other chapters consider evaluation patterns in Mandarin versus English referencing strategies coherence patterns socioeconomic differences among Taiwanese Mandarin-speaking children and differences in narration due to Specific Language Impairment and schizophrenia. Several chapters address developmental concerns. Distinctive aspects of narration in Mandarin are linked to larger issues of autobiographical memory. Mandarin is spoken by far more people than any other language yet narration in this language has received notably less attention than narration in Western languages. This collective effort is a critical addition to our understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in how people make sense of experiences through narrative.

The linguistic typology of motion event encoding is one of the central topics in Cognitive Linguistics. A vast body of typological contrastive and psycholinguistic research has shown the potential but also the limitations of the original distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. This volume contains ten original papers focusing specifically on the variation and change of motion event encoding in individual languages and language families. The authors show that some of the central claims about motion event encoding need careful re-examination and reformulation and that individual languages and language families are more variable across space and time than even a refined typology could neatly capture at this time. The volume thus contributes to a more detailed and fine-grained foundation for the investigation of conceptual causes and consequences of different motion-event encoding strategies.

This volume proposes a new way to address the classical question concerning the relation between language cognition and culture from the perspective of two basic systems: deixis and the pronominal system. It investigates the linguistic structuring of basic concepts of person place and time in Romance languages disclosing structural differences that may be related to mental parameters and other extra-linguistic circumstances and thus possibly linked to a light revision of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The methodological and theoretical focus is based on the discursive and pragmatic functional approach to deixis. The articles concern linguistic variation and language change and most of the studies adopt cross linguistic perspectives primarily among Romance languages but also with a classical perspective from Ancient Greek discussing the existence of universal categorical patterns. The studies reveal similarities and differences between Romance languages mutually and set the stage for comparisons between Romance and non-Romance languages. These similarities and differences are subject to change in connection with cultural developments in society and offer in this volume a coordinated effort in exploring the linguistic expressions of these extra-linguistic concepts.

This book of selected papers from the Critical Link 6 conference addresses the impact of a rapidly changing reality on the theory and practice of community interpreting. The recent social political and economic developments have led to phenomena of direct concern to the field for example multilingualism in traditionally monolingual societies the emergence of rare language pairs or new language-related problems in immigration application procedures social welfare institutions and prisons. Responding to the need for critical reflection as well as practical solutions the papers in this volume approach the changing landscape of community interpreting in its diversity. They deal with political social cultural institutional ethical technological professional and educational aspects of the field and will thus appeal to academics practitioners and policy-makers alike. Specifically they explore topics such as interpreting roles communication strategies ethics vs. practice interpreting vs. culture brokering interpreting strategies in different interactional contexts and interpreter training and education.

This book focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses providing new descriptive insights and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change. The sixteen contributions included in this volume represent a variety of diverse views and approaches but all share the common goal of throwing light on a crucial dimension of discourse: the dialogic interactivity between the spoken and written. Their foci range from papers addressing general issues related to corpus analysis of spoken dialogue to papers focusing on specific cases employing a variety of analytical tools including qualitative and quantitative analysis of small and large corpora. The present volume constitutes a highly valuable tool for applied linguists and discourse analysts as well as for students instructors and language teachers.