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This study is devoted to the analysis of Italian idioms with either ordinary or support verbs (also called light verbs). The research focuses on the exhaustive description of idioms and is based on their systematic classification according to the principles of the Lexicon-Grammar methodology developed by Maurice Gross (1975 1979 and further). A thorough examination of the literature shows strong disagreement on the acceptability of some idiomatic constructions. For this reason the Web was used as a corpus to verify judgments on the supposed ungrammatical constructions. This approach showed that idiomatic constructions which have always been considered ungrammatical are instead perfectly acceptable if contextualized. The results obtained include the following: passive is not a "special case" when it concerns idioms and idiomatic constructions show the same complexity as non-idiomatic constructions.

This book presents an investigation of lexical bundles in native and non-native scientific writing in English whose aim is to produce a frequency-derived statistically- and qualitatively-refined list of the most pedagogically useful lexical bundles in scientific prose: one that can be sorted and filtered by frequency key word structure and function and includes contextual information such as variations authentic examples and usage notes. The first part of the volumediscusses the creation of this list based on a multimillion-word corpus of biomedical research writing and reveals the structure and functions of lexical bundles and their role in effective scientific communication. A comparative analysis of a non-native corpus highlights non-native scientists’ difficulties in employing lexical bundles. The second part of the volume explores pedagogical applications and provides a series of teaching activities that illustrate how EAP teachers or materials designers can use the list of lexical bundles in their practice.

This volume presents some of the latest research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines. Many are represented here including anthropology archaeology the fine arts linguistics onomastics philosophy psychology and vision science. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at the Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12) conference held at the University of Glasgow. Papers from the earlier PICS04 and PICS08 conferences were published by John Benjamins as Progress in Colour Studies 2 volumes 2006 and New Directions in Colour Studies 2011 respectively. The opening chapter of this new volume stems from the conference keynote talk on prehistoric colour semantics by Carole P. Biggam. The remaining chapters are grouped into three sections: colour and linguistics; colour categorization naming and preference; and colour and the world. Each section is preceded by a short preface drawing together the themes of the chapters within it. There are thirty-one colour illustrations.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres it notes how conventional tenses particularly in headlines are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics discourse analysis and stylistics.

The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields theoretical approaches and perspectives this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations methods and findings and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.

Educating in Dialog: Constructing meaning and building knowledge with dialogic technology contains a collection of new articles on the relationship of learning dialog and technology. The articles combine different views of dialogic learning stemming from a multiplicity of discipline backgrounds and research interests including educational design educational science epistemology cognitive linguistics cultural studies and mobile learning to name a few. The authors discuss and explore a variety of topics that range from knowledge building over learning communities to dialogic technologies for knowledge co‐construction. Discussing technology and learning against this broad background is indispensable as the gap between what learners actually need for successful learning and what current technology offers becomes increasingly wide. This book provides thought-provoking views of recent developments in the area of technology supported learning for everyone who is interested in educational technologies collaborative learning and dialog.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense aspect and modality) the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking) complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions verb-particle combinations the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of amongst others tag questions and it-clefts or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.

Two are the starting points of this book. On the one hand the use of Doña Marina/La Malinche as a symbol of the violation of the Americas by the Spanish conquerors as well as a metaphor of her treason to the Mexican people. On the other the role of the translations of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the creation and expansion of the Spanish Black Legend. The author aims to go beyond them by considering the role of translators and interpreters during the early colonial period in Spanish America and by looking at the translations of the Spanish chronicles as instrumental in the promotion of other European empires. The book discusses literary religious and administrative documents and engages in a dialogue with other disciplines that can provide a more nuanced view of the role of translation and of the mediators during the controversial encounter/clash between Europeans and Amerindians.

This volume systematically investigates the role of argumentation in takeover bids. The announcement of these financial proposals triggers an argumentative situation in which both the economic desirability and the social acceptability of the deal become argumentative issues for different classes of stakeholders (shareholders employees customers etc.). The study focuses on the strategic maneuvers that corporate directors deploy in order to persuade their audiences while complying with precise regulatory requirements designed to allow shareholders to make reasonable decisions.

A conceptual reframing of takeovers as an argumentative context brings to light the different argumentative situations of friendly and hostile bids. The argumentative strategies that corporate directors adopt in the two situations are identified and analyzed on the basis of a corpus of takeover documents referring to offers launched in the UK market between 2006 and 2010. The argumentative reconstruction focuses in particular on the inferential configuration of arguments which is accomplished by means of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT). This kind of analysis enables capturing the inherently argumentative processes through which information becomes a relevant starting point for investment decisions.

Audio description (AD) is a narrative technique which provides complementary information regarding the where who what and how of any audiovisual content. It translates the visuals into words. The principal function of this ad hoc narrative is to make audiovisual content available to all: be it a guided city tour of Barcelona a 3D film or a Picasso painting. Audio description is one of the younger siblings of Audiovisual Translation and it is epigonic to the audiovisual translation modality chosen. This book is the first volume on the topic written in English and it brings together an international team of leading audio description teachers scholars and practitioners to address the basic issues regarding audio description strategies. Using one stimulus Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009) the authors analysed what when where and how to audio describe. The book is written in a collaborative effort following a bottom up approach. The many issues that surfaced in the process of the analysis were grouped in broader categories represented in the ten chapters this book contains. A good example of a successful international collaboration the volume sets a robust practical and theoretical framework for the many studies on audio description to come in the future. Considering the structure of the individual contributions the book is not only oriented towards the identification of the challenges that await the describer but it also offers an insight into their possible solutions.