Browse Books

Since the advent of syntactic cartography left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997) much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax semantics and information structure and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

Trust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization the drive for efficiency and accountability and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists discourse analysts communication scholars and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral written and digital language use in society including interactional sociolinguistics Critical Discourse Analysis ethnography multimodality and organizational studies.

While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.

The differences among functionalist cognitivist and/or constructionist models are generally taken to be not absolute but rather a matter of emphasis and degree with an increasing permeability between paradigms arising from cross-fertilizing influences. This book further explores this burgeoning area of research through the notion of functional-cognitive space namely the topography of the space occupied by functional cognitivist and/or constructionist models against the background of formalist approaches in general and of Chomsky’s Minimalism in particular. Specifically the twelve contributions in the present volume update the reader on recent developments in functionalism (Systemic Functional Grammar Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar) and cognitivism (Word Grammar (Cognitive) Construction Grammar and the Lexical Contructional Model). Plotting cognitive-space proves particularly adequate for situating the six models represented in this volume not only in relation to each other but also potentially with respect to a wide spectrum of functionalist cognitivist and/or constructionist models.

This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject Rule was already a feature of Old English. By setting the Northumbrian developments within a broad framework of diachronic and diatopic variation in which manifestations of subject-type concord are explored in a wide range of varieties of English the author argues that a concord system based on subject type rather than person/number features is in fact a far less local and more universal tendency in English than previously believed.

Plurilingual communication is common practice in most urban areas. Societal domains such as business and science nowadays see themselves as international and plurilingual communication is the rule rather than the exception. But how do other players in critical domains of modern societies and more specifically in education react to this situation? This volume of the Hamburg Studies in Linguistic Diversity (HSLD) series explores this question along three major lines. One group of contributions sheds light on educational policies in Europe and beyond. A second group of contributions elucidates what interaction and communication practices develop in multilingual contexts. The focus is on school settings. Thirdly we present articles that discuss the effects of plurilingual settings and plurilingual practices on language development. As a whole this volume shows how linguistic diversity shapes a central domain of our societies namely education and how it also impacts upon the development of the individuals interacting in this domain.

Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic promotional and professional domains in English Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention impersonation attribution markers engagement markers attitude markers boosters hedges reporting verbs politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations taking into consideration language specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.

This book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds in German and English nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.

Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory in historical linguists and in language typology.

The major purpose of newspaper headlines is to trigger the reader’s interest. A popular way to achieve this goal is the use of phraseological modifications. Based on previous findings from various linguistic disciplines this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the reception of substitutions like More than Meats the Eye. It develops an empirical methodology for investigating the complex cognitive processes involved using a large sample of authentic examples for illustration. Along these lines this volume not only shows what associations readers make when they encounter a lexical substitution and what factors facilitate the recognition of the canonical form. It also addresses the question of how meaning is constructed in terms of Conceptual Integration Theory and establishes an experimentally supported model of interpretation. This multifaceted perspective renders Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines: "More than Meats the Eye" relevant to scholars and advanced students from a wide range of linguistic areas such as phraseology cognitive linguistics psycholinguistics and humour research but also to interested journalists.