Browse Books

This volume brings together studies that combine both traditional and contemporary tools in the study of syntactic geolectal variation with a special focus on a subset of Iberian varieties. There is an increasing body of research on syntactic micro-variation but the interaction between dialectology (which makes use of atlases corpora databases questionnaires interviews etc.) and formal syntactic studies has traditionally been weak (or even nonexistent) which is precisely the gap the contributions in this book aim at filling in. From a broader perspective this collection is meant as a contribution to the subfield of linguistic variation and to the more general field of Romance linguistics with special interest in Spanish and in other Iberian languages. The volume is meant for both researchers and students interested in linguistic variation or dialectology and specifically in syntactic variation in Iberian languages.

This book brings together new research on the practices of newsmaking. Participation engagement and collaboration have long been heralded as a vision goal or emerging practice in the news. The claim in this volume is that they have now become sedimented as the common-sense baseline for everyday newsmaking routines. The issue for newsmakers is not ‘whether’ to engage with readers and users but ‘how’ to engage with them. The contributions span a wide range of newsmaking contexts including analytics-based online headline testing the communication efforts of a Brussels-based free marketeer thinktank collaborative science journalism and rapidly changing journalistic sourcing and writing routines from legacy to social media. Together they argue for a postfoundational perspective which observes how participation engagement and collaboration have emerged as a ‘foundation’ which is no longer questioned but which can lead to new tensions in newsmaking. As such the book provides inspirational reading for anyone in the social sciences and humanities who is interested in understanding how the ubiquity of participation engagement and collaboration in the making of the news impacts on issues of power transparency and control in the twenty-first century.

This is the sixth volume to be dedicated to the pioneering linguistic work produced by missionaries in Asia. This volume presents research into the documentation study and description of Chinese Japanese Vietnamese and Tamil. It provides a selection of papers which primarily concentrate on the Society of Jesus and their linguistic production but also covers linguistic works written by Franciscans the Order of Discalced Carmelites and works of other religious institutions such as the Propaganda Fide and the Missions Étrangères de Paris. New insights are provided regarding these works and their reception among European scholars interested in these ‘exotic’ languages and cultures. Each text is placed in its historical context and various approaches to some of the most important descriptive problems faced by these linguists avant la lettre are analyzed such as the establishment of an adequate romanization system the description of typological features of these Asian languages such as tonality and aspiration in Chinese and Vietnamese agglutination and derivational morphology in Japanese and Tamil and pragmatics in particular politeness in Japanese. This volume not only looks at methodology and descriptive techniques but also comments on missionary linguistic policies in Asia and offers articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics historians typologists descriptive linguists and those interested in translation studies.

Aphasia is the most common acquired language disorder in adults resulting from brain damage usually stroke. This book firstly explains how aphasia research and clinical practice remain heavily influenced by rule-based generative theory and summarizes key shortcomings with this approach. Crucially it demonstrates how an alternative — the constructivist usage-based approach — can provide a more plausible theoretical perspective for characterizing language in aphasia. After detailing rigorous transcription and segmentation methods it presents constructivist usage-based analyses of spontaneous speech from people with various aphasia ‘types’ challenging a clear-cut distinction between lexis and grammar emphasizing the need to consider whole-form storage and frequency effects beyond single words and indicating that individuals fall along a continuum of spoken language capability rather than differing categorically by aphasia ‘type’. It provides original insight into aphasia — with wide-reaching implications for clinical practice — while equally highlighting how the study of aphasia is important for the development of Cognitive Linguistics.

Up to now the Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) consisted of four volumes all published between 2010 and 2013. Since research in TS continues to grow and expand this fifth volume was added in 2021. The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation interpreting localization adaptation etc. and providing easy access to a large range of topics traditions and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who prefer such user-friendliness but also researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies Translation & Interpreting professionals as well as scholars and experts from other adjacent disciplines. All articles in HTS are written by specialists in the different subfields and are peer-reviewed.

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA) this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics. It offers an alternative way of reading the transformation in such politics via the pattern of deconstruction reconstruction and policymaking. It systematically delineates how President R. Tayyip Erdoğan’s political discourse evokes dialog that embodies the grand legacy of history deconstructs the mentality of the opposition reconstructs an alternative dialog and converts discourse into policy. The book breaks a new ground by introducing a theoretical framework on the relationship between political discourse and policy. It traces how political stories sourced largely by appropriated historical themes and figures enable rhetoricians to weave simple yet good and influential stories to legitimize potential political action by beguiling people’s hearts and minds.

Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices and the role of variation in determining particular evolutionary trajectories in specific linguistic ecologies. The book therefore focuses on variation within and across languages within and across speakers and how this fundamental aspect of human behavior can affect language structure in time and space. Mufwene has been instrumental in putting creole languages on the map of General Linguistics and connecting their analysis to issues of language acquisition multilingualism language contact language evolution and language typology. Thanks to the diversity of topics and the wide-ranging theoretical persuasions of the contributors this volume aims at a large readership including both scholars and advanced students interested in cutting-edge research in the aforementioned domains.

This is the first edited collection focusing exclusively on how second language users interpret and engage with the processes of email writing. With chapters written by an international array of scholars the present volume is dedicated to furthering the study of the growing field of L2 email pragmatics and addresses a range of interesting topics that have so far received comparatively scant attention. Utilising both elicited and naturally-occurring data the research in this volume takes the reader from a consideration of learners’ pragmatic development as reflected in email writing and their perceptions of the email medium to relational practices in various email functions and in a variety of academic contexts. As a whole the contributions incorporate research with learners from a range of proficiency levels language and cultural backgrounds and employ varied research designs in order to examine different email speech acts. The book provides valuable new insights into the dynamic and complex interplay between cultural interlanguage pedagogical and medium-specific factors shaping L2 email discourse and it is undoubtedly an important reference and resource for researchers graduate students and experienced language teachers.

As Ragnar Rommetveit put it forty years ago dialogue is “the architecture of intersubjectivity”: a tool not only for maintaining yet also constantly transforming our life-worlds. The volume advances and empirically illustrates the role of talk-in-interaction in displaying ratifying creating yet also defying the crucial dimensions of the world we live in. This process is particularly noticeable in children’s primary social worlds i.e. home and school where they are socialized to becoming competent members of the communities they (will) live in. Drawing on fifty years of research on children's socialization through language and social interaction the volume provides new multidisciplinary insights and updated empirical data on the process through which cultures identities and knowledge are brought into being through the everyday dialogues that animate children’s life at home and school. The volume addresses a specialized readership and its interdisciplinary framework ensures that it will be of great interest to scholars from different academic fields such as social and developmental psychology anthropology education developmental linguistics sociolinguistics and developmental pragmatics.

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions large irregular inflectional paradigms and bipartite stem verbs which all pose interesting challenges to the learner as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity which broadly includes factors such as transparency predictability/regularity richness type/token frequency and productivity must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.