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Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics showcases recent trends in the co-development of theory and empiricism in Chinese linguistics. The volume tackles a wide range of theoretical and empirical problems in multiple subfields including sociolinguistics discourse analysis lexical semantics pragmatics phonetics and phonology corpus linguistics and Chinese second language acquisition. The contributions do not fall neatly into two sections traditionally labeled “theoretical” and “empirical”. Rather theoretical discussions are buttressed by empirical evidence and empirical analyses lead to theoretical generalizations. Furthermore the volume transcends the functional-formal division showing that empiricism not only empowers functional-typological and sociolinguistic research but can also have a place in formally oriented linguistic analysis.

Rapidly increasing migration flows contribute to the development of multiple forms of social and cultural differentiation in urban areas – or to ‘super-diversity’. Language diversity is an important part of the resulting new social and cultural constellations. Although linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon per se the response of individuals or education systems to it is still largely based on a monolingual habitus associating one nation (or a region within a nation) to one language. Building on the top-quality expertise of researchers from different academic fields the volume offers insights into the study of linguistic diversity from linguistic and education science perspectives. The studies derive from different countries different disciplines different research traditions and methodological approaches all aiming towards a better understanding of actual linguistic reality and its consequences for individual language development and for education.The book addresses an academic readership and experts who are interested in learning more about linguistic diversity as an inevitable effect of globalisation and on ways to deal with this reality in research as well as practise in urban areas.

It is generally assumed that Creole languages form a separate category from the rest of the world’s languages. The papers in this volume written by internationally renowned scholars in the field of Creole studies seek to explore more deeply this commonly held assumption by comparing the linguistic properties of specific Creole languages to each other and also to non-Creole languages. Using a variety of methodological and analytical approaches the contributions to this volume show that the linguistic classification of Creole languages continues to be a topic of intense debate that requires the re-examination of the premises of linguistic typology. What is the linguistic motivation for considering that languages are related or unrelated? How and why do common linguistic properties arise? Are Creoles indeed exceptional? This volume examines these questions and provides a strong foundation for continued research into the phonological morphological syntactic and semantic features found in Creole languages. Most of these articles were previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26:1 (2011). The article by Jeff Good was previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27:1 (2012).

Language and Power in Blogs systematically analyses the discursive practices of bloggers and their readers in eight English-language personal/diary blogs. The main focus is thereby placed on ties between these practices and power. The book demonstrates that the exercise of power in this mode can be studied via the analysis of conversational control (turn-taking speakership and topic control) coupled with research on agreements and disagreements. In this vein it reveals that control of the floor is strongly tied not solely to rates of participation but more strikingly to the types of contributions interlocutors make. With its detailed linguistic analyses and comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of language use and power the book is interesting for researchers and students working within the domains of pragmatics discourse analysis text linguistics and corpus linguistics in both offline and online settings.

The notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued however that "Old" and "New" used traditionally for characterising information refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects as attention-driven phrases are also related to aboutness the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English German French Polish Russian Greek Latin and Japanese the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns their permutations and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.

This volume complements earlier work on English as a lingua franca (ELF) by providing an in-depth study of the phenomenon from a decidedly European perspective. Distancing itself from more traditional approaches to the study of English in Europe (linguistic imperialism and “Euro-English”) the study is theoretically grounded in more recent approaches namely the ELF paradigm and the postmodernist conceptualisation of “English”. Methodologically speaking the study analyses language use in Eurovision Song Contest press conferences as a community of practice of European salience. The ethnographically based analyses focus on various linguistic levels thereby producing a comprehensive picture of European ELF as a discursive formation. Various qualitative and quantitative methods are used to shed light on the following aspects: code-choice practices in ELF talk participants’ metalinguistic comments on the use of ELF complimenting behaviour via ELF and relativisation patterns. On the basis of this data the concluding section advances discussions revolving around the conceptualisation of ELF in general the connection between ELF and Europeanness and implications for European language policies.

This volume presents some of the latest research in Frame Semantics including work in computational lexicography as developed within the FrameNet project. Using varied material from English Italian and Japanese the contributions collectively expand the theoretical conceptual and computational apparatus of Frame semantics by studying a range of issues concerning not only lexical structure associated with cognitive frames but also the less studied interactional frames and their relationship to grammatical organization. While addressing a number of linguistic phenomena such as verbs of visual perception metaphoric language subordinating connectives paraphrasing honorifics certain pragmatic particles basic speech acts and the semantic structuring of legal texts the analyses also highlight the broader question of integrating frames within rich lexical and grammatical descriptions whether in the context of lexicon-building resources models for knowledge representation experimental modeling of language acquisition and processing conceptual metaphor theory paraphrase research or the communicative grounding of linguistic structure.

Originally published in Constructions and Frames Vol. 3:1 (2011) and Vol. 2:2 (2010).

Les ressources lexicales (dictionnaires bases de données thesaurus etc.) rassemblent des connaissances sur les mots leurs sens et leurs usages. Si pendant des siècles elles ont été tributaires de l'imprimerie et du format textuel il existe de nos jours une grande variété d'outils et de ressources accessibles sous des formats électroniques divers. Ainsi la façon de considérer les ressources lexicales a changé considérablement ces dernières décennies. On a vu notamment apparaître des ressources non plus conçues en tant qu'entités statiques mais modélisées sous forme de bases de données ou de graphes dans lesquelles les informations sont liées et accessibles dynamiquement. Le domaine des ressources lexicales au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines dont la linguistique la lexicologie la lexicographie et le traitement automatique des langues est sans nul doute en pleine effervescence. Le but de ce volume est d'en dresser un panorama général qui rend compte de l’existant et des évolutions en cours.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Lexical resources store knowledge concerning words their meanings and uses. While dictionaries were confined to printed media there are now a variety of tools available in electronic form for different purposes. The way we look at these resources (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Indeed there is hardly any task in Natural Language Processing which can be conducted without them. While being built by hand in the past lexical resources are nowadays built with the help of machines more or less automatically. Also rather than being conceived as static entities (data-base view) lexical resources are often viewed as graphs whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly properties concerning topology clustering and evolution known from other disciplines also apply to lexical resources: everything is linked hence accessible and everything is evolving. While the field is still in evolution a snapshot may nevertheless be useful to reveal where we stand. This is precisely one of the goals of this volume.

What is the range of diversity in linguistic types what are the geographical distributions for the attested types and what explanations based on shared history or universals can account for these distributions? This collection of articles by prominent scholars in typology seeks to address these issues from a wide range of theoretical perspectives utilizing cutting-edge typological methodology. The phenomena considered range from the phonological to the morphosyntactic the areal coverage ranges in scale from micro-areal to worldwide and the types of historical contingency range from contact-based to genealogical in nature. Together the papers argue strongly for a view in which although they use distinct methodologies linguistic typology and historical linguistics are one and the same enterprise directed at discovering how languages came to be the way they are and how linguistic types came to be distributed geographically as they are.

There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world’s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles cover a variety of typologically different languages including German Irish Spanish French Japanese Yaqui Tepehua (Totonacan) Persian and English and they offer new data on the role of constructions within the RRG theory in these languages. Further this volume contributes towards providing a comprehensive overview of grammatical constructions which are central to our understanding of how human languages function in a functional linguistics perspective. This scholarly work is grounded in a functionally oriented model that makes strong claims of descriptive and typological adequacy. The book will represent a valuable step forward in linguistics research as it applies the RRG theoretical framework to the analyses of constructions.

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.

The contributions in this volume go beyond the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor complementing it in a number of relevant ways. Some of the papers argue for a more dynamic interdisciplinary approach to metaphor looking into it from semiotic psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Other contributions focus on the crucial role played by metaphor and metonymy in meaning construction at a discourse/textual level. Finally the volume also includes proposals which revolve around the alleged universal nature of metaphorical mappings and their suitability to account for grammatical phenomena.

The contributions in this volume display an ample gamut of theoretical approaches pointing to the viability of taking a functional-cognitive stance on the analysis of metaphor and metonymy in contrast to a purely cognitive one.

This book is structured into three major sections: i) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: revisions and recent developments; ii) metaphor and/or metonymy across different discourse/genre types; and iii) the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: current applications. Originally published in Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:1 (2011).

In this volume leading academics in Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis consider the notion of units for the study of language and interaction. Amongst the issues being explored are the role and relevance of traditionally accepted linguistic units for the analysis of naturally occurring talk and the identification of new units of conduct in interaction. While some chapters make suggestions on how existing linguistic units can be adapted to suit the study of conversation others present radically new perspectives on how language in interaction should be described conceptualised and researched. The chapters present empirical investigations into different languages (Danish English Japanese Mandarin Swedish) in a variety of settings (private and institutional) considering both linguistic and embodied resources for talk. In addressing the fundamental question of units the volume pushes at the boundaries of current debates and contributes original new insight into the nature of language in interaction.

In the wake of post-colonial and post-modernist thinking ‘Eurocentrism’ has been criticized in a number of academic disciplines including Translation Studies. First published as a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 6:2 (2011) this volume re-examines and problematizes some of the arguments used in such criticism. It is argued here that one should be wary in putting forward such arguments in order not to replace Eurocentrism by a confrontational geographical model characterized precisely by a continentalization of discourse thereby merely reinstituting under another guise. The work also questions the relevance of continent-based theories of translation as such along with their underlying beliefs and convictions. But since the volume prefers to keep the debate open its concluding interview article also provides the opportunity to those criticized to respond and provide well-balanced comments on such points of criticism.

Languages change and they keep changing as a result of communicative interactions and practices in the context of communities of language users. The articles in this volume showcase a range of such communities and their practices as loci of language change in the history of English. The notion of communities of practice takes its starting point in the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and refers to groups of people defined both through their membership in a community and through their shared practices. Three types of communities are particularly highlighted: networks of letter writers; groups of scribes and printers; and other groups of professionals in particular administrators and scientists. In these diverse contexts in England Scotland the United States and South Africa language change is not seen as an abstract process but as a response to the communicative needs and practices of groups of people engaged in interaction.

“Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” (Mitchell Kapor n.d.). Medical concepts and terminology can be very confusing for the uninitiated interpreter or translator. This book will allow interpreters and translators to quickly read up on healthcare settings familiarizing themselves with anatomy physiology medical terminology and frequently encountered conditions investigations and treatment options. Health translators working on medical reports will be able to find commonly used abbreviations. Those who have been asked to translate health information material into community languages will be able to gain a good basic overview of related background information and crosscultural issues. Those who teach health interpreters or translators will find this book helpful for structuring their curriculum. Information is presented in a consistent logical and informative manner intended to support rather than overwhelm.Crezee was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to interpreter and translator education in the 2020 New Year Honours list.