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This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks concern ancient languages (Hittite Greek Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian German English Kiswahili) and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers applied to different forms and structures such as adverbs adjectives evaluative affixes discourse markers reduplication exclamative clauses coordination prosodic elements and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise self-contained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom's imposing theoretical apparatus the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom's work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism.

Translation practice and workflows have witnessed significant changes during the last decade. New market demands to handle digital content as well as technological advances are leading this transition. The development and integration of machine translation systems have given post-editing practices a reason to be in the context of professional translation services. Translators may still work from a source text but more often than not they are presented with already translated text involving different degrees of translation automation. This scenario radically changes the cognitive demands of translation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Technological development has inevitably influenced the translation research agenda as well. It has provided new means of penetrating deeper into the cognitive processes that make translation possible and has endorsed new concepts and theories to understand the translation process. Computational analysis of eye movements and keystroke behaviour provides us with new insights into translational reading processes of literality effects of directionality similarities between inter- and intralingual translation as well as the effects of post-editing on cognitive processes and on the quality of the final outcome. <br/>All of these themes are explored in-depth in the articles in this volume which presents new and valuable insights to anyone interested in what is currently happening in empirical process-oriented translation research.<br/>

This book offers an original treatment of the Italian clitic si. Sharply separating encoded grammar from inference in discourse it proposes a unitary meaning for si including impersonals passives and reflexives. Si signals third-person participancy but makes no distinctions of number gender or case role. The analysis advances the Columbia School framework by relying on just these straightforward oppositions attributing variety of interpretation largely to language use rather than to grammar. The analysis places si within a network of oppositions involving all the other clitics. Data come primarily from twentieth-century and more recent published and on-line literature. The book will be of interest to functional linguists students of reflexivity and scholars of the Italian language.

Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature is the first comprehensive study that investigates the representation of maps in children’s books as well as the impact of mapping on the depiction of landscapes seascapes and cityscapes in children’s literature. The chapters in this volume pursue a comparative approach as they represent a wide spectrum of diverse genres and national children’s literatures by examining a wealth of children’s books from Canada Denmark Germany Italy Norway Russia the United Kingdom and the USA. The theoretical and methodological approaches range from literary studies developmental psychology maps and geography literacy ecocriticism historical contextualization with both new historicist and political-historical leanings and intermediality to materialist cartographies cultural studies island studies and genre studies. By this this volume aims at embedding children’s literature in a broader field of literary and cultural studies thus situating children’s literature research within a general context of literary theory.

Published in 2005 Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming – A new theory of words and language introduced a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. In the ten years that have passed the theory has since gained traction in the field of corpus-linguistics. This volume brings together some of the most important contributions to the theory in areas such as language teaching and learning discourse analysis stylistics as well as the design of language learning software. Crucially this book introduces aspects of the language that have so far been given less focus in lexical priming such as spoken language figurative language forced primings priming as predictor of genre and historical primings. The volume also focuses on applying the lexical priming theory to languages other than English including Mandarin Chinese and Finnish.

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive metaphorical) motion and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation experimentation and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.

The aim of the present volume is to provide a present-day take on variation in terminology by looking forward and examining what leading scholars in the field are working on and where they are taking research in the field today.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This reader is built around three themes arranged according to complementary points of view to stimulate thought on the subject of variation as it is approached today. The first theme “The social dimension of variation” includes three contributions dealing with variation across different categories of speakers. This reflects not only the expert/layperson dichotomy but also other more original polarities as the emotional dimension and the issue of diastratic variation across LSPs. The second part of this reader puts forward different tools and methods to identify describe and manage term variation. The third theme of this reader questions semantics of term variation through the topics of concept saturation multidimensionality and metaphor.<br/>Variation through this picture of current studies proves to be the touchstone for the understanding of the major issues of terminology research today. The included papers draw on research in terminology carried out in different language communities - Spanish French Portuguese Italian and Dutch in particular - thereby opening up a window on much of the research carried out in these cultural areas. <br/>

This book focuses on important methodological and theoretical issues in Chinese and Japanese L1 and L2 acquisition. All contributions discuss experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) on three syntactic and semantic domains binding scope interaction and wh- and logical expressions. The issues in these grammatical domains are particularly well suited for TVJT studies as the task allows for the testing of particular interpretations among alternative representations and reveals children’s and adults’ understandings of these constructions. The book is a tribute to Stephen Crain’s contribution to the field of Chinese and Japanese language acquisition within the framework of Generative Grammar. It is a state-of-the-art collection that offers a picture of cutting-edge research on children’s and adult’s Chinese and Japanese acquisition. Readers will find the book a rich source of ideas and the starting point of new projects.

Space is a fundamental dimension of human life and is pervasive in human experience. Research on space has highlighted the possible asymmetrical nature of spatial relations. Differences in the encoding of goals and sources of motion are a case in point and cross-linguistic coding tendencies show that path is less frequently flagged by a dedicated case than goal source/origin and (static) location (locative). Interestingly such asymmetries may correlate with certain types of landmark as in the case of toponyms or of animate entities. Even though these issues have been focused upon both in typological and psycholinguistic research they remain largely open. The papers in this collection aim to show that a diachronic approach may shed light on the way in which asymmetries in the space domain come about over time thus contributing to the clarification of synchronically puzzling facts.