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This peer-reviewed collection brings together the latest research on language endangerment and language rights. It creates a vibrant interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the most pertinent and urgent topics central to vitality and equality of languages in today’s globalised world. The novelty of the volume lies in the multifaceted view on the variety of dangers that languages face today such as extinction through dwindling speaker populations and lack of adequate preservation policies or inequality in different social contexts (e.g. access to justice education and research resources). There are examples of both loss and survival and discussion of multiple factors that condition these two different outcomes. We pose and answer difficult questions such as whether forced interventions in preventing loss are always warranted or indeed viable. The emerging shared perspective is that of hope to inspire action towards improving the position of different languages and their speakers through research of this kind.

Intonation units have been notoriously difficult to identify in natural talk. Problems include fuzzy boundaries lack of exhaustivity and the potential circularity involved when studying their interface with other language-organizational dimensions. This volume advocates a way to resolve such problems: the ‘cesura’ approach. Cesuras or breaks in the flow of talk are created by discontinuities in the prosodic-phonetic parameters of speech that cluster to various extents at certain points in time. Using conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology the volume identifies the parameters creating cesuras in talk-in-interaction and proposes ways to notate them depending on the researcher’s goal. It also offers a way to study the role of cesuras at the prosody-syntax interface non-circularly which leads to new insights concerning language variation and change. The volume will thus be of major import to anyone working with natural spoken language its chunks its various dimensions and its variation and change.

This book deals with how to ask questions in the languages of China. The syntactic morphological and lexical forms for distinguishing interrogatives take centre stage; intonation is also dealt with but more peripherally than question particles disjunctive and negative constructions and word order. 140 languages spoken in China are covered coming from four major families: Sino-Tibetan Altaic Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic accompanied by a few mixed languages. The approach is areal-typological i.e. these focal languages are compared to the languages of the world as represented in typological samples and within China areal patterns of the structural variables are examined.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book will be an indispensable reference for future work on interrogatives in a typological context and for areal studies of the language situation in China and more generally East Asia.<br/> <br/>

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The contributions draw on the well established converging traditions of conversation analysis discursive psychology and membership categorization analysis together with recent work on interactional storytelling stylization and multimodal analysis. By adopting a discursive approach to emotion in multilingual talk the volume breaks with the dominant view of emotions as cognitive and intra-psychological phenomena and their study through self-report. Through detailed analyses of original recorded data the chapters examine how participants produce emotion-implicative actions identities stances and morality through their interactional work in ordinary face-to-face conversation computer-mediated interaction institutional talk in medical educational and broadcast media settings and in research interviews. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion multilingual speakers and settings pragmatics and discourse analysis.

This study offers a novel view of Conference Interpreting by looking at EU interpreters as a professional community of practice. In particular Duflou’s work focuses on the nature of the competence conference interpreters working for the European Parliament and the European Commission need to acquire in order to cope with their professional tasks. Making use of observation as a member of the community in-depth interviews and institutional documents she explores the link between the specificity of the EU setting and the knowledge and skills required. Her analysis of the learning experiences of newcomers in the professional community shows that EU interpreters’ competence is to a large extent context-dependent and acquired through situated learning. In addition it highlights the various factors which have an impact on this learning process.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Using the way Dutch booth EU interpreters share the workload in the booth as a case Duflou demonstrates the importance of mastering collaborative and embodied skills for EU interpreters. She thereby challenges the idea of interpreting competence from an individual cognitive accomplishment and redefines it as the ability to apply the practical and setting-determined know-how required to function as a full member of the professional community.

For decades Translation Studies has been perceived not merely as a discipline but rather as an interdiscipline a trans-disciplinary field operating across a number of boundaries. This has implied and still implies a considerable amount of interaction with other disciplines. There is often much more awareness of and attention to translation and Translation Studies than many translation scholars are aware of. This volume crosses the boundaries to other disciplines and explicitly sets up dialogic formats: every chapter is co-authored both by a specialist from Translation Studies and a scholar from another discipline with a special interest in translation. Sixteen disciplinary dialogues about and around translation are the result sometimes with expected partners such as scholars from Computational Linguistics History and Comparative Literature but sometimes also with less expected interlocutors such as scholars from Biosemiotics Game Localization Research and Gender Studies. The volume not only challenges the boundaries of Translation Studies but also raises issues such as the institutional division of disciplines the cross-fertilization of a given field the trends and turns within an interdiscipline.

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories but also to usage-based methodologies. Accordingly the chapters in this volume comprise a range of studies not based on synchronic contemporary English but include Dutch old English Italian and Spanish. This volume also features studies from a wider range of statistical sophistication: some chapters use more traditional frequency- and attestation-based approaches some chapters use inferential statistical techniques to explore lexically specific preferences and patterns in constructional slots and some chapters use multifactorial hypothesis-testing techniques or multivariate exploratory tools to discover patterns in corpus data that a mere eye-balling or simple statistical tools would not uncover.

Bridging the gap between the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition this volume offers an in-depth comparative analysis of two postcolonial varieties of English (Singapore and Malaysian English) and neighbouring Indonesian learner English in order to examine the Outer/Expanding Circle distinction and shed light on the genesis of postcolonial varieties of English. The study identifies and analyses more than thirty linguistic features in the categories phonology morphology syntax and discourse concluding that in spite of clear syntactic differences the distinction between the Outer and Expanding Circles is gradual rather than strictly categorical and should rely on current sociolinguistic realities rather than on historical criteria. The volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in the dynamics of Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of English in Southeast Asia or the integration of the paradigms of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition.

As language historians we believe that the subject of our study is neither natural languages nor idiolects which speakers have always been able to develop individually (loosely what Chomsky calls L-i) but rather the social constructions of reference shared by all speakers (basically what Chomsky terms as L-e ). In this context the language historian essentially studies how a public L-e is built such that it can be understood as the language of all (i.e. hiding L-i variations) and also how L-e succeed in replacing the primary reality of idiolects even if only in the imagination.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> Writing represents a crucial turning point in language construction because it made it possible to materialize the abstraction that until then related speakers could only guess and besides it comes into competition with individual languages.<br/>In modern centuries the provision of grammars dictionaries and other such learning tools and systematizing instruments strengthens the idea that because of their normative character languages can be learned through study. Mythical stories encourage the achievement of prescriptive rules and lead speakers to link emotions to their language. Therefore the topics of reflection that we want to discuss in this volume are: Norms Myths and Emotions related to language construction.

This book is based on the very popular international publication (Crezee 2013) and has been supplemented with Chinese glossaries. Just like the 2013 textbook this practical resource will allow interpreters and translators to quickly read up on healthcare settings familiarizing themselves with anatomy physiology medical terminology and frequently encountered conditions diagnostic tests and treatment options.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/> It is an exceptionally useful and easily accessible handbook in particular for English-speaking patients Chinese-speaking doctors and first language Chinese-speaking students in healthcare related programs. <br/>This book includes special comments on the medical system in some English- and Chinese-speaking countries and gives concrete examples of patient expectations for hospital stays or physician visits. Also included is information regarding the establishment of some health interpreting services the nature of Chinese medical terminology and specific culture-related concepts to be aware of. <br/>