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Can children’s media be a source of education and empowerment? Or is the commercial media market a threat to their sense of social and democratic values? Such questions about the appropriateness children’s media consumption have recurred in public debates throughout the twentieth century. From Superman to Social Realism provides an exciting new approach to the study of children’s media and childhood history drawing on the theories of cross-media consumption and transnational history. Based on extensive Scandinavian source material it explores public debates about children’s media between 1945 and 1985. Readers are taken on a fascinating journey through debates about superheroes in the 1950s politicization of children’s media in the 1960s and about television and social realism in the 1980s. Arguments are firmly contextualized in Scandinavian childhood and welfare history an approach that demonstrates why professional and political groups have perceived children’s media as the key to the enculturation of future generations.

Situated within the long-established domain of temporality research in Second Language Acquisition this book aims to provide an update on recent research directions in the field through a range of papers which explore relatively new territory. Those areas include the expression of modality and counterfactuality the effect of first language transfer aspectuo-temporal comprehension aspectuo-temporal marking at a wider discursive level and methodological issues in the study of the acquisition of aspect. The studies presented explore English and French as second languages involving both child and adult learners from a range of first language backgrounds in both instructed and naturalistic learning contexts. The studies draw on both spoken and written data which explore various facets of the learners’ second language comprehension and production. The volume offers new but complementary insights to previous research as well as pointing to directions for future research in this burgeoning field of study.

Evidentiality Revisited focuses on semantic-pragmatic based frameworks for the study of evidentials and evidential strategies in European languages (Dutch English French German Italian Lithuanian Portuguese Russian and Spanish). The book also presents discourse-pragmatic studies with special emphasis on the use of evidential and epistemic expressions as resources for stancetaking in discourse. The volume addresses issues such as the relationship between the conceptual domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality the role of evidential and epistemic resources in modelling stancetaking the expression of speaker commitment to the validity status of the information and the discourse-pragmatic variation of evidentiality and epistemic modality in discourse domains and genres. The volume offers a collection of contributions in which cross-linguistic studies and corpus-based studies contribute to provide further insights into a usage-based account of linguistic reality.

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of argument realisation in complex predicates and complex events at the syntax-semantic interface across a wide variety of the world’s languages ranging over languages such as German Irish Sicilian and Italian Lithuanian Estonian and other Finno-Ugric languages Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra from Australia’s Western Desert region Japanese Tepehua (Totonacan Mexico) Cheyenne Mexican Spanish Boharic Coptic and Persian. This volume examines the syntactic variation of complex events complex predicates and multi-verb constructions within a single clause where the clause is view as representing a single event studying their semantics and syntax within functional cognitive and constructional frameworks to arrive at a better understanding of their cross linguistic behaviour and how they resonate in syntax. These constructions manifest considerable variability in cross-linguistic comparisons of complex predicate formation. In European languages for example typically one of the verbs in a verb-verb construction highlights a phase of an underspecified event while the matrix verb specifies the actual event. In contrast serial verbs require each verb to provide a sub-event dimension within a complex event that is viewed holistically as unitary in syntax. This book contributes to an understanding of complex events complex predicates and multi-verb constructions across languages their syntactic constructional patterns and argument realisation.

The zero coding of referents or other clausal constituents is one of the most natural communicatively and cognitively-transparent grammatical devices in human language. Together with its functional equivalent obligatory pronominal agreement zero is both extremely widespread cross-linguistically and highly frequent in natural text. In the domain of reference zero represents somewhat paradoxically either anaphorically-governed high continuity or cataphorically-governed low topicality. And whether in conjoined/chained or syntactically-subordinate clauses zero is extremely well-governed at a level approaching 100% in natural text. The naturalness cross-language ubiquity and well-governedness of zero have been largely obscured by an approach that for 30-odd years has considered it a typological exotica the so-called "pro-drop" associated with a dubious "non-configurational" language type. The main aim of this book is to reaffirm the naturalness universality and well-governedness of zero by studying it from four closely related perspectives: (i) cognitive and communicative function; (ii) natural-text distribution; (iii) cross-language typological distribution; and (iv) the diachronic rise of referent coding devices. The latter is particularly central to our understanding the functional interplay between zero anaphora pronominal agreement and related referent-coding devices.

This book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne na yo sa wa zo and ze. By adopting three key notions ‘involvement’ ‘formality’ and ‘gender’ the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics pragmatics sociolinguistics discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.