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This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics broadly conceived as the cognitive social and cultural study of language and communication i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop

This volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 9th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9) which was held at the University of Malaga (Spain) from June 6 to 9 2017. The volume includes plenaries by Manuel Almeida (“Language hybridism: On the origin of interdialectal forms”) and Frans Hinskens (“Of clocks clouds and sound change”). In addition the editors have selected 13 papers encompassing different languages and language varieties — not only from large language families such as Romance and Germanic but also small language families like Greek or smaller languages like Croatian — and covering a large range of topics on sociolinguistics and linguistic variation. The book displays a contemporary picture of the research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages. Readers interested in every field related to language and language use will enjoy a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives on speech variation historical sociolinguistics and foreign language acquisition and learning.

Departing from the premise that ‘being ordinary’ is brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse and is thus an interactional achievement the contributions to this edited volume investigate its construction reconstruction and deconstruction in media discourse. Ordinariness is perceived as a scalar notion which is conceptualised against the background of both non-ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. The chapters address its strategic construction across media genres (public talk Prime Minister’s Questions interview radio call-in commenting) and discursive activities (tweets social media posts) as done in various languages (American English Austrian German British English Chinese French Finnish Hebrew and Japanese) by professional participants (e.g. politicians journalists scientists) and by ordinary people participating in media discourse (e.g. ordinary citizens viewers members of the audience). Discursive strategies used to bring about (non/extra) ordinariness include small stories quotations conversational style irony naming and addressing as well as references to the private-public interface.

A History of Catalan Folk Literature is the fruit of a collaborative effort between fifteen researchers from various universities and research centres who have joined forces to create a broader study of Catalan folk literature that addresses the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories in their entirety.

Since the thirteenth century Catalan culture has created a rich and abundant literary legacy and since the mid-nineteenth century this has been complemented by a tradition of folklore studies that remains very much alive today. Within this comparatively recent discipline folk literature has played a particularly important role.

The book presents the evolution of Catalan folk literature studies in each of the areas that make up the Catalan linguistic and cultural territories referred to above. The period considered stretches from the mid-nineteenth century when the beginnings of a scientific interest in folklore emerged across Europe to the present day.

This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages in both root and embedded clauses on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words there is no “bottleneck effect” but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.

This book systematically investigates intercultural experiences of Polish managers and specialists delegated by their multinational company (MNC) on an international assignment to China. The book employs narrative inquiry to explore language intercultural communication collaboration learning and expatriate adjustment in the MNC. This approach offers new insights into intercultural experiences communication and cultural challenges faced by an under-researched group of professionals exposed to intensive collaborations with the local managers and employees. The findings also illustrate how the expatriates learned to better navigate the multicultural and multilingual business context and what factors facilitated and inhibited their learning and adjustment. Encouraging the qualitative context-sensitive examination of expatriate-local personnel interactions the book will be an invaluable source for scholars and practitioners interested in among others novel approaches to investigating language and intercultural communication in international business cross-cultural management qualitative cross-cultural research as well as for lecturers and students interested in Central Europe and China.

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain who settled at these locations in the past few centuries with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech and hence their written form of language does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore the writers of the emigrant letters examined in the current volume were very unlikely to have known of still less have used manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA Canada South Africa Australia and New Zealand.

This volume explores linguistic metaphor identification in a wide variety of languages and language families. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in researching language and metaphor from students to experienced scholars. Its primary goals are to discuss the challenges involved in applying the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) to a range of languages across the globe and to offer theoretically grounded advice and guidelines enabling researchers to identify metaphors in multiple languages in a valid and replicable way. The volume is intended as a practical guidebook that identifies and discusses procedural challenges of metaphor identification across languages thus better enabling researchers to reliably identify metaphor in a multitude of languages. Although able to be read independently this volume – written by metaphor researchers from around the world – is the ideal companion volume for the 2010 Benjamins book A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification: From MIP to MIPVU.

This book explores relationships between Processability Theory approaches and other approaches to SLA. It is distinctive in two ways. It offers PT-insiders a way to see connections between their familiar traditions and theories with other ways of working. Parallel to this it offers readers who work in other traditions ways of connecting with a research tradition that makes specific testable claims about second language acquisition processes. These dual perspectives mean that both beginning and established SLA researchers as well as those seeking to connect their work with views of language learning will find something of interest. Studies of multiple languages and multiple aspects of language are included. Chapters cover areas as diverse as literacy language comprehension language attrition and language testing.

This commemorative volume comprises ten essays which celebrate the work of Walter (Bill) Nash. Bill Nash was an extraordinary scholar – a classicist parodist critic musician linguist poet polyglot humourist and novelist. He was as adroit in his reading of the Old Norse sagas as he was in his analyses of the rhetorical composition of everyday English usage and his published outputs embrace the stylistic rhetorical compositional and creative topographies of both language and literature. The contributions that comprise this volume are all by well-known scholars in the field and each essay celebrates Nash’s prodigious offering by covering the academic fields with which he was particularly associated. These fields include composition rhetoric discourse analysis English usage comic discourse creative writing and the stylistic exploration of literature from the Old English period to that of the present day.

This book provides a cutting-edge exploration of the social meaning of phonetic variation in the Spanish-speaking world. Its 11 chapters elucidate the ways in which listeners process perceive and propagate phonetically motivated social meaning across monolingual and contact varieties including the Spanish spoken in Spain (Asturias Catalonia and Andalusia) Ecuador Colombia Argentina Chile Mexico and the United States. The book presents a wide variety of new and innovative research by renowned scholars and the chapters examine issues like the influence of visual cues bilingualism contact geographic mobility and phonotactic predictability on social and linguistic perception. Additionally the volume engages in timely discussions of intersectionality replicability and the future of the field. As the first unified reference on Spanish sociophonetic perception this volume will be useful in graduate and undergraduate classrooms in libraries and on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in Spanish sociophonetics.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches variation and change address in digital and audiovisual media nominal address and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French Czech Dutch English (from the US UK Australia and Canada) Finnish Italian Mongolian Palenquero Creole Portuguese Slovak and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists sociolinguists typologists and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.

This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting ‘more than one’ entity from collective and aggregate nouns (with the first-ever typology) to count plurals partly substantivised adjectives and conjoined NPs. This semantic feature approach to plurality which cuts across number the count/non-count distinction and lexical/NP levels reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns and accommodates cases such as three elephant cattle or a chain of islands. The study also offers a refined understanding of aggregate nouns (a category nearly as large as that of collective nouns) and quantification in pseudo-partitives develops Guillaume’s notion of ‘internal plurality’ and proposes the innovative concept of ‘hyperonyms of plural classes’ (e.g. furniture). The Animacy Hierarchy is also found to be influential beyond hybrid agreement. The book aims to be accessible to scholars of any theoretical background interested in these topics.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies historical perspectives and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Literary writers through their handling of deixis evaluative and modal expressions tellability politeness norms and genre expectations activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account human beings are profoundly influenced by society but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals” who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.<br/>As well as explaining these theoretical positions the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns both from a historical and present-day perspective and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public such as letters newspapers parliamentary debates and online communication in the form of reader comments discussion pages and tweets. In addition to English the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.

If as we believe the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and as a consequence has made the ancient intrinsic diversity of all languages visible at least to the extent that this is still possible. <br/>Nowadays then the old linguistic diversity of dialects of parlances of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet) the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs the development of the Germanic word order and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages Proto-Germanic was in intensive contact with Punic a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.

In 2016 the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective others from a diachronic perspective or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French Italian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian Gallo and Sardinian.

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers representing a wide spectrum of frameworks approaches and methods from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects to corpus-based discussions of language and gender to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes to laboratory experiments and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics and Southeast Asian languages more generally.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis syntax semantics morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts such as year of publication sex of the author geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories as well as the above-mentioned metadata information can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) purpose-designed software by IrLab is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849

The emergence of Modern Hebrew as a spoken language constitutes a unique event in modern history: a language which for generations only existed in the written mode underwent a process popularly called “revival” acquiring native speakers and becoming a language spoken for everyday use. Despite the attention it has drawn this particular case of language-shift which differs from the better-documented cases of creoles and mixed languages has not been discussed within the framework of the literature on contact-induced change. The linguistic properties of the process have not been systematically studied and the status of the emergent language as a (dis)continuous stage of its historical sources has not been evaluated in the context of other known cases of language shift. The present collection presents detailed case studies of the syntactic evolution of Modern Hebrew alongside general theoretical discussion with the aim of bringing the case of Hebrew to the attention of language-contact scholars while bringing the insights of the literature on language contact to help shed light on the case of Hebrew.

The books we’ve read the films we’ve seen the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually rather than how it can be identified described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism neuroscience linguistics and sociology this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.

This book offers a broad-based account of bilingual processing drawing on research findings and current thinking from various domains across cognitive science. The theoretical approach adopted is the Modular Cognition Framework in which language processing is characterized as an interaction between dedicated linguistic systems and the other modules of the human mind. The latter provide the 'internal context' of bilingual processing. This internal context involves goals value emotion self and representations of the external context. The book combines all these elements into a coherent picture of the bilingual's internal context and the way it shapes processing. It then shows how some central concepts in cognitive science and bilingualism fit in with – and follow from – this view. These concepts include working memory consciousness attention effort codeswitching and the possible cognitive benefits of being bilingual. The book should be of interest to professionals in the field as well as postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Inspired by Marcelo Dascal’s theory of controversies this volume includes studies in the theory of controversies studies of the history of controversy forms and their evolution and case-studies of particular historical and current controversies.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The purpose of this volume is to identify a taxonomy of controversies and also to sense a line of development for the phenomenon of controversies itself. <br/>At the same time we want to ask ourselves about the impact and the spread of controversies in the contemporary world eminently intended as a heuristic element facilitating knowledge.<br/>For all these reasons the fundamental aim of the volume is to provide the reader with a selection of current theoretical and practical perspectives on controversies and to offer a broad picture of the complex range of definitions meanings and practices connected to them.

This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis experimentation or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages range from mechanisms through which information structure connection and discourse organization are realized to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.

This collection is one of the first in-depth studies of video calling in family and domestic life. It explores the reasons that people themselves provide to explain their video calling investigates how these reasons make that calling accountable and how in turn these reasons come to be things talked about in the calls themselves. The research shows how video calling is part of the currency of contemporary family affection: such calls are not just about keeping in touch they are a way of loving too; and they are sometimes a way of fighting as well. 'Skyping' or 'Facetiming' might be frequent and can seem mundane – just a question of routine – but what they entail is a measure of important things to families. This makes this collection of interest to anyone concerned with family life and the evolving ways in which technology has a role in it.

Originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics 27:3 (2017).

Recent scholarship has confirmed earlier observations that nominalization plays a crucial role in the formation of complex constructions in the world’s languages. Grammatical nominalizations are one of the most salient and widespread features of languages of the Americas yet they have not been approached as foundational grammatical structures for constructions such as relative clauses and complement clauses. This is due to an imbalance in past scholarship which has tended to focus on these constructions at the expense of the nominalization structures underlying them. The papers in this collection treat grammatical nominalizations in their own right and as a starting point for the investigation of their uses in complex grammatical structures. A representative sample of Amerindian languages with focus on South America examines properties of grammatical nominalizations such as their multiple functions their internal and external syntax and their diachronic development. Among the far-reaching theoretical conclusions reached by the studies in this volume is that the various types of relative clauses recognized in the typological literature are actually no more than epiphenomena arising from the different uses of grammatical nominalizations.

The objective of this book is to understand variation in political metaphor. Political metaphors are distinctive and important because they are used to achieve political goals: to persuade to shape expectations to realize specific objectives and actions. The analyses in the book go beyond the mere identification of conceptual metaphors in discourse to show how political metaphors function in the real world. It starts from the finding that the same conceptual domains are used to characterize politics political entities and political issues. Yet the specific metaphors used to describe these conceptual domains often change. This book explores some of the reasons for this variation including features of political leaders (e.g. their age and gender) countries and other sociopolitical circumstances. This perspective yields a better understanding of the role(s) of metaphors in political discourse.

This volume contains selected papers from the Thirtieth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics that was held at Stony Brook University in 2016 as well as two articles that are based on papers presented at the Thirty-First Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at the University of Oklahoma in 2017. The chapters are theoretical and experimental explorations of a variety of linguistic topics and engage ideas ranging over three broad areas of research: phonetics and phonology syntax and experimental and computational linguistics. They deal with Classical and Modern Standard Arabic as well as a variety of dialects including Iraqi Egyptian Moroccan and Syrian Arabic.

Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English such as long-distance dependencies coordination ellipsis valency etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG yet despite this simplicity it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.

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.

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.