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Rapid changes in communication channels tools and conventions of interaction over the last two decades have paved the way for increasingly digital learning environments. In second language (L2) education shifts toward digital learning and teaching were intensified during the pandemic and many such formats are here to stay. At the same time a growing interest in socially oriented pedagogies in L2 learning and teaching is prompting many L2 researchers and practitioners to investigate new research areas and explore post-communicative language teaching pedagogies that engage learners more deeply with cultural texts using a range of semiotic and linguistic resources. Digital Social Reading (DSR) is a pedagogical approach that affords technology-mediated collaborative reading where texts are read through a digital platform that allows two or more readers to highlight the same virtual copy of a text and discuss it through a digital interface that affords synchronous or asynchronous margin dialogues anchored in specific passages. This book offers empirical studies demonstrating how DSR can foster–and illuminate–learner interactions that mediate learning and also work that focuses on language teaching perspectives in DSR environments including task design and assessment issues.

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity as well as on their differences and similarities both in synchrony and diachrony and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages including English French German Italian Medieval Latin and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines including pragmatics spoken discourse conversation analysis discourse genres (political commercial notarial discourse) corpus studies language change pragmaticalization and language typology.

At a time when we have all lived through profound and unexpected disruptions to our shared spaces routines economies societies and work-lives this book considers the nature and implications of rupture the commons and their conjoining. Addressing rupture and disruption through the lens of literary and cultural studies this volume traverses genres — film fiction theatre poetry and the graphic novel — and continents and addresses histories and identities as ecologies. The focus is resolutely contemporary with nearly all of the texts being analyzed produced within the last decade. Beginning with the history of and debates about Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons” Ruptured Commons engages with texts and cultures of disaster wherein artistic expression becomes a form of protest and a path to change. This collection both critically examines our arrival at and understanding of this moment and explores diverse and hopeful visions for the future embedded within contemporary culture.

Focusing on the growing trend of employing the present tense in storytelling this book explores present-tense narrative in contemporary fiction. Using a corpus approach speech writing and thought presentation in 21st-century present-tense narrative is compared with 20th-century past-tense narrative. An in-depth comparative analysis reveals previously undiscovered innovative features specific to how character discourse is presented in modern narratives. Notably narrative tenses have an impact on thought presentation; in present-tense narrative Free Direct Thought (FDT) emerges as frequently as Free Indirect Thought (FIT) a departure from the dominance of FIT in modern past-tense narrative. This book will be of interest to stylisticians narratologists corpus linguists and those who have found themselves absorbed in a 21st-century work of present-tense fiction.

Contemporary schools are enlivened by a multitude of children with rather disparate linguistic cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. These children spend most of their school hours in interaction with other children engaging in multifarious activities (conflict gossip play humor task-related activities) that gradually come to constitute the local culture and social organization of their peer group. The book illustrates the multimodal and sequential organization of these mundane peer choreographies describing the resources through which children co-ordinate their social actions in the complex linguistic and socio-material landscape of diverse classrooms. Moving beyond the focus on teacher-led socialization in previous literature the analyses shed light on the relevance of everyday peer practices to the negotiation of children’s social roles and identities and to their overall developmental trajectories in the community. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and addresses scholars from different academic fields including sociology linguistics anthropology social and developmental psychology and education.

Linguistic Literary and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language culture and identity across the globe.

An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi Ruth Karachi Benson Oji Liliane Hodieb Zheng Yang Zhifang Li and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein Wang Chutong and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh Muharrem Kaplan and Tomás Espino Barrera.

Appealing to scholars researchers and students this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic Literary and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field offering fresh perspectives on language culture and identity.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms from written to spoken to visual in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis to the macro-level structure of online interaction all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.

Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics discourse analysis media studies and digitally mediated communication.

This monograph aims to shed light on the linguistic endeavors and educational practices employed by 17th century Spanish Dominicans in their efforts to understand and disseminate knowledge of the Chinese language during this historical period. Ample attention is dedicated to the evolution of Chinese grammars and dictionaries by these authors. Central to the monograph is the manuscript “Marsh 696” which comprises a Chinese-Spanish dictionary and a fragmentary Spanish grammar of Mandarin Chinese a hitherto unknown and unpublished anonymous and undated text entitled Arte de lengua mandarina. This text is probably a fragment of the earliest grammar written by a Westerner of Mandarin Chinese (completed in Manila in c.1641) previously presumed lost. It is presented here as a facsimile a transcription of the Spanish text and an English translation alongside a detailed linguistic analysis. The historical framework outlined in this monograph spans from the predecessors of Francisco Díaz (1606–1646) around 1620 including the Jesuit linguistic production in mainland China and Early Manila Hokkien sources to the era wherein Antonio Díaz (1667–1715) finalized his revised version of Francisco Díaz’s dictionary. The monograph scrutinizes these texts in relation to the linguistic contributions of Francisco Varo (1627–1687). Additionally the monograph incorporates other unpublished texts that are significant for reconstructing the educational curriculum for teaching and learning Chinese by Dominican friars during this period.

This book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork premodern texts and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010 this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.

This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This book addresses the problems and challenges of studying the discourse of "danger" cross-linguistically and cross-culturally and proposes the cultural pragmatics of danger as a new field of inquiry. Detailed case studies of several linguacultures include Arabic Chinese Danish English German Japanese and Spanish. Focusing on global and local contexts surrounding “living in dangerous times” this book showcases how the new model of cultural pragmatics can be used to illuminate cultural meanings in discourse. Unlike the universalist approaches to pragmatics cultural pragmatics focuses on understanding the linguacultural logics of discourse and in the case of “danger” the multiple cultural logics around which the themes and domains of “danger” revolve. The approach makes use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) as its principal analytical tool and concepts such as “cultural keywords” and “cultural scripts” figure prominently as bearers of culture-specific meanings. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book will be of interest to students of pragmatics and discourse studies researchers in cultural and cognitive semantics anthropological linguistics global humanities political rhetoric and environmental studies as well as linguists working in applied areas such as risk and disaster studies crisis and emergency communication.