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A face strikes us immediately as sad and so too do a mourner a willow tree a house on a prairie and a group of onlookers. The spontaneous emergence of affective and other qualities of people things places and events falls under the heading of physiognomy a phenomenon discussed since at least Aristotle and a key feature of evolutionary theory psychology and perception as well as professional practice (“profiling”) and popular talk. However physiognomy is a controversial topic because of a suspect history and is often renamed as non-verbal communication.

The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered examines this venerable attractive and contentious topic within the unique perspective of research-oriented psychology. Included are the processes involved primarily perceptual; origins mainly evolutionary; and social-cultural factors as supplements. Discussed within a holistic-experiential (phenomenological)-aesthetic framework are physiognomy’s ties to the arts as well as emotions synesthesia learning development and personality. Empirical investigations are summarized including the author’s.

This monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts and also to investigate salient features of context. This allows a broader discussion of the role of this language in Scotland and how different ways of constructing a language can percolate through society appearing in both important elite texts and discussions among ordinary people. It thus contributes to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots but also expands the range of possible applications for critical discourse analysis approaches.

This volume presents recent developments in the linguistics of humour. It depicts new theoretical proposals for capturing different humorous forms and phenomena central to humour research thereby extending its scope. The 15 contributions critically survey and develop the existing interpretative models or they postulate novel theoretical approaches to humour in order to better elucidate its workings. The collection of articles offers cutting-edge interdisciplinary explorations encompassing various realms of linguistics (semantics pragmatics stylistics cognitive linguistics and language philosophy) as well as drawing on findings from other fields primarily: sociology psychology and anthropology. Thanks to careful overviews of the relevant background literature the papers will be of use to not only researchers and academics but also students. Albeit focused on theoretical developments rather than case studies the volume is illustrated with interesting research data such as the discourse of television programmes and series films and stand-up comedy as well as jokes.

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English Old High German and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories even though they descended from a common ancestor language the contributions present in-depth empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change grammaticalisation and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.

This volume presents an in-depth study of the so-called irregular Past Tense (sing/sang) and Noun Plural (foot/feet) forms with Internal Vowel Alternation (IVA) in English demonstrating that they possess both a fixed phonological and semantic regularity. The innovative sign-oriented analysis and inductive methodology employed in this study are further supported by additional first language acquisition data experimental studies and historical evidence. The data culled from multiple linguistic anthologies dictionaries and thesauri have shown that although the IVA process comprises a relatively small number of nominal and verbal forms in Modern English IVA originally was a prevalent and productive process in Old English Indo-European and other language families. The results of this empirical study present and introduce a novel classification based on the regular and systematic iconic-phonological and semantic nature of all these diverse IVA processes both nominal and verbal that has been maintained throughout the history of English.

These new translations of Bernat Metge’s Libre de Fortuna e Prudència (1381) into Spanish (verse) and English (prose) make this key early work by 14th-century Catalonia’s most challenging writer available to the wider audience it has longed deserved. As with Metge’s masterwork Lo somni (The Dream) recently translated by Cortijo Ocaña and Elisabeth Lagresa (Benjamins 2013) the writing of The Book of Fortune and Prudence seems to have been precipitated by a larger crisis in Catalan society in this case an all-too-familiar-sounding banking crisis. Drawing on sources ranging from Boethius to the Roman de la Rose to Arthurian fable Metge unveils the workings of the world through his two allegorical women Fortune (good and bad) and Prudence in a search for consolation in the midst of inexplicable reversals of fortune--those of others and perhaps his own. But as in the Somni Metge refuses here to offer pat solutions to the crises of his day offering what is perhaps one of our earliest glimpses of the impact of new ideas coming from Italy in the Iberian Peninsula. The work is written in the popular noves rimades form (octosyllabic rhymed couplets) in the challenging mix of Occitan and Catalan common to verse writing in 14th century Catalonia. Cortijo’s and Martines’s tri-lingual edition together with its fine introduction and notes is an extremely valuable contribution as it makes this unduly neglected text of the later Iberian Middle Ages available for students and other readers in a broadly accessible yet scholarly form. (Prof. John Dagenais UCLA)

Viewing literature as one among other forms of communication Roger D. Sell and his colleagues evaluate writer-respondent relationships according to the same ethical criterion as applies for dialogue of any other kind. In a nutshell: Are writers and readers respecting each other’s human autonomy? If and when the answer here is “Yes!” Sell’s team describe the communication that is going on as ‘genuine’. In this latest book they offer new illustrations of what they mean by this and ask whether genuineness is compatible with communicational directness and communicational indirectness. Is there a risk for instance that a very direct manner of writing could be unacceptably coercive or that a more indirect manner could be irresponsible or positively deceitful? The book’s overall conclusion is: “Not necessarily!” A directness which is truthful and stimulates free discussion does respect the integrity of the other person. And the same is true of an indirectness which encourages readers themselves to contribute to the construction and assessment of ideas stories and experiences – sometimes literary indirectness may allow greater scope for genuineness than does the directness of a non-literary letter. By way of illustrating these points the book opens up new lines of inquiry into a wide range of literary texts from Britain Germany France Denmark Poland Romania and the United States.

Contemporary linguistic forms are partially the product of their historical antecedents and the same is true for cognitive conceptualization. The book presents the results of several diachronic corpus studies of conceptual metaphor in a longitudinal and empirical “mixed methods” design employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis measures; the study design was informed by usage-based theory. The goal was to investigate the interaction over time between conceptualization and cultural models in historical English-speaking society. The main study of two linguistic metaphors of anger spans five centuries (A.D. 1500 to 1990). The results show that conceptualization and cultural models—understood as non-autonomous encyclopedic knowledge—work together to determine both the meaning and use of a linguistic metaphor. In addition historically a wide variety of emotion concepts formed a complex cognitive array called the Domain Matrix of emotion. The implications for conceptual metaphor theory research methodology and future study are discussed in detail.

Located at the intersection of historical pragmatics letters and manuscript studies this book offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575-1611. It investigates multiple ways in which socio-culturally and socio-familially contextualized reading of particular collections may increase our understanding of early modern letters as a particular type of handwritten communicative activity. The book also adds to our understanding of these women as individual users of English in their historical moment especially in terms of literacy and their engagement with cultural scripts. Throughout the book analysis is based on the manuscript letters themselves and in this way several chapters address the importance of viewing original sources to understand the letters' full pragmatic significance. Within these broader frameworks individual chapters address the women's use of scribes prose structure and punctuation performative speech act verbs and (im)politeness sincerity and mock (im)politeness.

The Linguistics of Newswriting focuses on text production in journalistic media as both a socially relevant field of language use and as a strategic field of applied linguistics. The book discusses and paves the way for scientific projects in the emerg­ing field of linguistics of newswriting. From empirical micro and theoretical macro perspectives strategies and practices of research development and knowledge transformation are discussed. Thus the book is addressed to researchers teachers and coaches interested in the linguistics of professional writing in general and news­writing in particular. Together with the training materials provided on the internet www.news-writing.net the book will also be useful to anyone who wants to become a more “discerning consumer" (Perry 2005) or a more reflective producer of language in the media.