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This monograph studies stative predicates from a neo-constructionist perspective and integrates them in a comprehensive theory of event and argument structure. It focuses on two sets of stative verbs: govern-type verbs and object experiencer psychological verbs. For govern-verbs it shows how notions such as causativity and resultativity can also be ingredients of stative predicates and be derived syntactically. The consequences of this proposal are further pursued in a crosslinguistic investigation of adjectival passives which are stative predicates of sorts. For object-experiencer psychological verbs it is shown that their Experiencer theta-role can and should be derived as an aspectual entailment mediated by prepositional structure. In defending this view this monograph reveals a syntactic parallelism between location verbs and object-experiencer psychological verbs in many languages that has hitherto gone unnoticed. This book will primarily appeal to researchers interested in lexical aspect and its connection to morphosyntax.

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness the emergence of fixed expressions their connection to social action the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data mostly everyday conversation in English Estonian Finnish Japanese and Mandarin with some crosslinguistic comparison.

Heritage language bilingualism refers to contexts where a minority language spoken at home is (one of) the first native language(s) of an individual who grows up and typically becomes dominant in the societal majority language. Heritage language bilinguals often wind up with grammatical systems that differ in interesting ways from dominant-native speakers growing up where their heritage language is the majority one. Understanding the trajectories and outcomes of heritage language bilingual grammatical competence performance language usage patterns identities and more related topics sits at the core of many research programs across a wide array of theoretical paradigms. The study of heritage language bilingualism has grown exponentially over the past two decades. This expansion in interest has seen in parallel extensions in methodologies applied bridges built between closely related fields such as the study of language contact and linguistic attrition. As is typical in linguistics not all languages are studied to the same degree. The present volume showcases what Turkish as a heritage language brings to bear for key questions in the study of heritage language bilingualism and beyond. In many ways Turkish is an ideal language to be studied because of its large diaspora across the world in particular Europe. The papers in this volume are diverse: from psycholinguistic to ethnographic to classroom-based studies featuring Turkish as a heritage language. Together they equal more than their subparts leading to the conclusion that understudied heritage languages like Turkish provide missing pieces to the puzzle of understanding the variables that give rise to the continuum of outcomes characteristic of heritage language speakers.

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. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.<br/>Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/<br/>

This volume explores the intersection between Translation Studies and History and Philosophy of Science to shed light on the workings of scientific communities the dissemination of knowledge across languages and cultures and the transformation in the process of that knowledge and of the scientific communities involved among other issues. Through a diachronic approach from some chapters focussing on early modernity to others that explore the final decades of the twentieth century and by considering myriad languages from Latin to Hindi the twelve chapters of this volume reflect specifically on: (A) processes of the construction and dissemination of knowledge through the work of specific agents (whether individuals or collectives); (B) the implementation of particular linguistic strategies and visual tools in the translation of knowledge and in the diffusion of translated knowledge; and (C) the role of institutions and governments in the devising and implementation of translation policies as well as the impact of these.

The present volume presents research on language processing and language disorders. Topics range across typical language processing child developmental language disorders adult neurodegenerative disorders and neurological bases of typical or impaired brains. The chapters cover a number of linguistic phenomena including relative clauses empty categories determiner phrases and inflectional morphology. Work in this collection uses a variety of experimental methods both online and offline such as eye tracking reaction times Event Related Potentials picture selection sentence elicitation and picture matching tasks. This book will be useful for linguists speech therapists and psycholinguists working on the processing of morphosyntax.

Indirectness has been a key concept in pragmatic research for over four decades however the notion as a technical term does not have an agreed-upon definition and remains vague and ambiguous. In this collection indirectness is examined as a way of communicating meaning that is inferred from textual contextual and intertextual meaning units. Emphasis is placed on the way in which indirectness serves the representation of diverse voices in the text and this is examined through three main prisms: (1) the inferential view focuses on textual and contextual cues from which pragmatic indirect meanings might be inferred; (2) the dialogic-intertextual view focuses on dialogic and intertextual cues according to which different voices (social ideological literary etc.) are identified in the text; and (3) the functional view focuses on the pragmatic-rhetorical functions fulfilled by indirectness of both kinds.

Nowadays the forms assumed by knowledge indicate an unhinging of traditional structures conceived on the model of discipline.

Consequently what was once strictly disciplinary becomes interdisciplinary what was homogeneous becomes heterogeneous and what was hierarchical becomes heterarchical.

When we look for a matrix of interdisciplinarity that is to say a primary basis or an essential dimension of all the complex phenomena we are surrounded by we see the need to break with the disciplinary self-restraint in which often completely inadvertently many of us lock ourselves up remaining anchored to our own competences ignoring what goes beyond our own sphere of reference.

However interdisciplinarity is still a vague concept and a much demanding practice. It presupposes the continuous search for convergent theoretical perspectives and methodologies and the definition of common spaces and languages as well as a true dialogical and open mind of several scholars.

From ethics to science from communication to medicine from climate change to human evolution the volume Controversies and Interdisciplinarity offers a series of original insights beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model.

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven to whom this collection is dedicated.

This study focuses on the language around sexuality and discourses about sex labeled by the authors as metasex from a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike many existing studies on sexting that predominantly take into account the linguistic practices of teenagers often located in the Global North this book offers a more holistic approach by discussing Southern concepts of body parts their conceptualization and mediatization (“dick pics”) the interconnectedness of food and sex and its sensualization (“foodporn”) as well as processes of social cohesion around sex sociability and conviviality (“bonding”). Based on an anthropological linguistic perspective the authors analyze metasex practices from Nigeria DR Congo Uganda the Mediterranean and numerous other contexts. Africanist Agnes Brühwiler’s afterword on sex (talk) in Tanzania rounds off the various fresh insights this study offers.