Browse Books

Pomeranian is the West Germanic language spoken by European emigrants who went from Farther Pomerania (present-day Poland) to Brazil in the period 1857–1887. This language is no longer spoken in cohesive societies in Europe but the language has survived and is in remarkably good shape on this language island in the tropical state of Espirito Santo. This monograph offers the first synchronic grammar of this language. After a historical introduction the book offers a systematic description of its phonology morphology and syntax. The language is contrasted with its European sisters more particularly High German Dutch and Frisian. It highlights various phenomena that will presumably contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate on the Germanic verbal system. It provides new data on cluster V2 do-support and the two infinitives. As to the infinitival syntax the language shows remarkable parallels to the system of Frisian. As to the rich Pomeranian system of subtractive morphology the phonological account that is offered will be important for the ongoing discussion of the abstractness of phonological representations. Finally Pomeranian is a welcome addition to the set of languages on which our etymological understanding of West Germanic is based.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts TV broadcasts online forums politicians’ speeches legal and administrative texts and oral narratives drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian English French German Greek Italian Lithuanian Polish Russian Serbian Slovenian Spanish and Ukrainian – and it employs different discourse-analytical methods such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis Gendered Language Studies Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources languages and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars students and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies media studies identity studies and social and public policy.

As of January 2023 this e-book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events but more importantly further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the cognitive functional approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events syntax-semantic interface and typology.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books.

This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory reader-response studies and pedagogical stylistics among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics stylistics narratology and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

What do people think of translation in the different historical cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not.

But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena whose formal manifestation and underlying licensing conditions represent the convergence of two or more areas of the grammar an area of investigation particularly invigorated in recent generative research by developments such as phase theory (cf. Chomsky 2001; 2008) and the cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999). In this respect the dialects of Italy are no exception in that they present comparative Romance linguists and theoretical linguists alike with many valuable opportunities to study the linguistic interfaces as highlighted by the many case studies presented in this volume which provide a series of original insights into how different components of the linguistic system – syntactic phonetic phonological morphological semantic and pragmatic – do not necessarily operate in isolation but rather interact to license phenomena whose nature and distribution can only be fully understood in terms of the formal mapping between the interfaces.

Corpus linguistics has become one of the most widely used methodologies across the different linguistic subdisciplines; especially the study of world-wide varieties of English uses corpus-based investigations as one of the chief methodologies. This volume comprises descriptions of the many new corpus initiatives both within and outside Africa that aim to compile various corpora of African Englishes. Moreover it contains cutting-edge corpus-based research on African Englishes and the use of corpora in pedagogic contexts within African institutions. This volume thus serves both as a practical introduction to corpus compilation (Part I of the book) corpus-based research (Part II) and the application of corpora in language teaching (Part III) and is intended both for those researchers not yet familiar with corpus linguistics and as a reference work for all international researchers investigating the linguistic properties of African Englishes.

In the context of constantly increasing linguistic diversity in many parts of the world opportunities and challenges arise for the acquisition of literacy skills. The successful development of literacy skills becomes a crucial prerequisite for educational attainment determining future career prospects of migrant students. Multilingual settings reveal the diversification of languages and scripts prompted in the context of migration. This monograph explores the phenomenon of biscriptuality and aims to provide an approach for investigating the development of biliteracy in the context of divergent scripts. This interdisciplinary mixed-methods study bridges intercultural education science education research and applied linguistics for gaining a complex view on the role of biscriptuality in students’ biliteracy. It considers the extent of students’ biscriptual skills specifies language dimensions in which the influence on biliteracy may occur and differentiates between the effects of biscriptuality on the development of writing skills in two different genres narrative and expository.

This volume explores a pivotal period in European history the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Politeness scholars have suggested that the nineteenth century heralds a significant transition in the meanings and realisations of politeness between the Ancien Régime and the contemporary period with the rise of the middle classes as economic political social and cultural actors.

The central innovation of this volume consists in its use of a wide range of politeness metasources — grammar books schoolbooks conduct books etiquette books and letter-writing manuals — to access social norms. This interdisciplinary approach which draws on historical linguistics argumentation theory appraisal theory and literary stylistics is applied to a wide range of languages: English including Scottish and business English Italian Spanish West and South Slavic languages.

As a highly coherent collection of innovative research papers the volume will be welcomed by researchers of (im)politeness pragmatics and sociolinguistics both from a historical and contemporary perspective.

The chapters in this collection authored by renowned scholars address a gap in the literature by focusing on the consequences that outsourcing among other globalized economic practices and remediation by new technologies have had on the service encounters genre (SE). From both a multilingual and a multidisciplinary perspective this collection explores the development of technological applications and professional best practices as well as call centre interaction e-commerce and e-word of mouth. More specifically the papers in this volume report on technology developed to support SEs and how this technology influences service providers and their allowable linguistic contributions. Further this collection provides valuable insights on the language and strategic behaviour deployed in less researched kinds of SEs gives special attention to how technology impacts the interface between the transactional and interactional goals of SEs and thus has real world applications.