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This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies symbols cultural models stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical monomodal and multimodal discourses including politicians’ discourse presidential speeches newspapers TV series Catholic homilies colonialist discourse and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science international relations cultural studies and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor with clear sociocultural grounding and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis metaphor studies media studies nationalism studies and political science.

This volume explores new frontiers in the linguistic study of iconic lexemes known as ideophones mimetics and expressives. A large part of the literature on this long-neglected word class has been dedicated to the description of its sound symbolism marked morphophonology and grammatical status in individual languages. Drawing on data from Asian (especially Japanese) African American and European languages the twelve chapters in this volume aim to establish common grounds for theoretical and crosslinguistic discussions of the phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics acquisition and variation of iconic lexemes. Not only researchers who are interested in linguistic iconicity but also theoretical linguists and typologists will benefit from the updated insights presented in each study.

How has convergence affected news and translation? Convergence is a chameleon taking a new colour in each new context from the integrated bilingual newsroom of a legacy broadcaster to a newsroom in an outlet that has embraced multimodality from the very start. And yet translation scholars studying the news have ignored convergence while media scholars studying convergence have ignored translation. They have missed the fact that convergence is intrinsically linked to language and culture. This volume brings together translation and media scholars to investigate different modes of convergence across platforms as they shape how journalists frame stories and understand their role in a multilingual convergent world. It opens a dialogue with scholars and students in applied linguistics communication journalism languages and translation as well as translators interpreters and ultimately journalists.

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio Beja Maa). In conclusion the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages prepositions verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting their argument structure in the complement of the verbal root and that their meaning is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions enriched with the CAUSE operator. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs based on the operation of predicate transfer. It also offers a uniform analysis of cases. Prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the agreement operation whereat the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore it examines prepositions from a diachronic perspective and argues that they can be grammaticalised as future markers under certain circumstances.

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan Henk van Riemsdijk Alain Rouveret and scholars in Chinese Linguistics this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages computational and semantic aspects of resumption the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials system repairing strategies at interfaces the v-copy construction in Chinese the scope of disjunction interactions between focus negation and event quantification null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis child language acquisition of nominal structure word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax semantics theoretical linguistics and language acquisition as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

The Pragmatics of Executive Coaching is the first linguistic monograph on executive coaching a recent not fully professionalized yet booming helping professional format in the organizational realm. The book is positioned at the interface between applied linguistic analysis and the activity of coaching coupled with its structuring professional theory. It presents the Basic Activity Model of coaching a model for the qualitative analysis and description of the discursive co-construction of coaching by coach and client within and across individual coaching sessions and whole processes. The analysis is based on 150 hours of authentic data from the coaching approach Emotionally Intelligent Coaching and presents coaching as hybrid and interdiscursive helping professional format. The gained insights into the discursive layout of coaching interactions advance our linguistic understanding of helping professions as such contribute to the theoretical and methodological underpinning of coaching and help promote the coaching practice.

While much of the literature has focused on explaining diachronic variation and change the fact that sometimes change does not seem to happen has received much less attention. The current volume unites ten contributions that look for the determinants of diachronic stability mainly in the areas of morphology and (morpho)syntax. The relevant question is approached from different angles both empirical and theoretical. Empirically the contributions deal with the absence of change where one may expect it uncover underlying stability where traditionally diachronic change was postulated and inversely superficial stability that disguises underlying change. Determining factors ranging from internal causes to language contact are explored. Theoretically the questions of whether stable variation is possible and how it can be modeled are addressed. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on the causes of language change and to scholars working on the history of Germanic Romance and Sinitic languages.

Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties argument selector as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates referential properties of arguments as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.