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This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology sociolinguistics and pragmatics and language acquisition. Including data from North African Levantine and Gulf varieties of Arabic as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia dialect contact and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986 1991) work on static prepositions. However interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space whose syntactic properties were related to specific semantic distinctions such as the opposition between “movement” and “displacement”. This volume provides an overview of recent studies on the semantics of dynamic space in French and addresses important questions about motion expression among which “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion the status of locative PPs the expression of manner fictive or non-actual motion. Descriptive experimental and formal or computational analyses are presented providing complementary perspectives on the main issue. The volume is intended for researchers and advanced students wishing to learn about both spatial semantics in French and recent debates on the representation of motion events in language and cognition.

Storytelling in the Digital World explores new emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon Facebook Twitter and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narratives; the effects of digital anonymity and pseudonymity on narrative practices; the strategies through which virtual communities discursively work together to solidify and negotiate their sociocultural identities; the tensions between the affordances that characterize different online media and the communicative needs of users; the structures and modes in which virtual users construct and enact participatory practices in these environments; and the significance of different spatiotemporal dimensions in the encoding sharing and appreciation of stories. More generally the volume engages with some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that the growing presence of digital technologies and media poses to narrative analysis.



Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017)

Teachability and Learnability across Languages addresses key issues in second foreign and heritage language acquisition as well as in language teaching. Focusing on a Processability Theory perspective it brings together empirical studies of language acquisition language teaching and language assessment. For the first time a research timeline for the role of instruction in language learning is presented showing how the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research has developed over the last four decades since Pienemann’s work on learnability and syllabus construction over the 1980s. The book includes studies of child and adult second as well as foreign language acquisition research covering a wide range of target languages including English German Hungarian Japanese Norwegian Polish Spanish Swedish and Turkish. In addition future extensions of PT are discussed. This volume is designed for advanced students in international programs of SLA and Applied Linguistics as well as for SLA researchers and second and foreign language teachers.

Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal verbal and adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss rise and restructuring of morphonological marking periphrastic verbal constructions auxiliary variation and evolution as well as changing word order options. Favouring corpus-linguistic frequency-based and statistical approaches the studies are firmly empirically grounded. The book is aimed at scholars interested in the history of the English language and in language variation and change.

This volume centers on three important theoretical concepts for the study of language change and the ways in which language structure emerges and turns into new structure: reanalysis actualization and indexicality. Reanalysis is a part of ongoing everyday language use a process through which language is reproduced and changed. Actualization refers to the processes through which a reanalyzed structure spreads throughout single communities and society. Indexicality covers the way in which parts of a linguistic system can point to other parts of the system both syntagmatically and paradigmatically. The inclusion of indexicality leads to fine-grained analysis in morphology word order and constructional syntax.

Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical functional account uses rigorous innovative methodology interdisciplinary evidence and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation change and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics morpho-syntax language variation and change or language contact to name but a few.

As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history structure meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous descriptions which were framed in terms of pre-existing grammatical notions such as ‘topicalization’ ‘passivization’ and ‘ergativization’ this book offers a fresh look at the PSC in which its syntactic and semantic as well as its discourse functions are examined within the system of major construction-types of the language as a whole. The PSC being low in transitivity serves primarily the function of backgrounding in discourse. Typologically the PSC bears a resemblance to middle constructions in Indo-European and other languages raising interesting questions about ways to understand congruent and divergent syntactic structures across the world’s languages. This book will be of interest to students of Chinese Linguistics as well as Language Typology.

This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie a 33000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.

Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). The two books slipped into the Jewish--and eventually Christian--Canon by a series of misrepresentations. The first Song of Songs is linguistically the latest book along the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum perhaps as late as 300-100 BC to judge by its language which closely resembles Mishnaic Hebrew (2nd Cent. AD). The book is a lush carnal poetic account of an illicit love affair where lusty exchanges between the female beloved and her male lover are interspersed with rustic love songs. The ultimate provenance of the text may be older than the time it was recruited into the Canon or the time suggested by its late dialect.The second book Qohelet is linguistically earlier on the Biblical Hebrew dialect continuum though still following the return from the Babylonian exile (ca. 550 BC). Unlike Song of Songs which is linguistically coherent and bears all the marks of having been produced by a native speaker (or speakers) Qohelet is replete with non-native lexical and grammatical usage and was most likely produced by a speaker (or speakers) of Aramaic the lingua franca of the Persian empire and the returning exiles. Multiple English translations of the two books exist. Nonetheless in one way or another all previous translations suffer from two main drawbacks: First their interpretation of the grammar – and on occasion also the vocabulary – of Biblical Hebrew is sometimes questionable. And second the poetic quality of their English leaves much to be desired paling in comparison with the stark beauty of the Hebrew original.This book attempts to do justice to both the contents and form of these two magnificent deliciously subversive poetic works.