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This book provides a comprehensive description of the situational and linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing considering both assignment type and discipline. Drawing on a corpus of more than 900 undergraduate student assignments from four disciplinary groups (Arts and Humanities Social Sciences Physical Sciences and Life Sciences) the book combines corpus-based analyses of linguistic features with analyses of communicative purposes and text characteristics. Variation in University Writing takes a new approach to register variation by grouping assignments by their communicative purpose (to argue to explain to compare to describe to narrate a personal event to give a procedural recount to give personal advice and to propose) rather than register categories. A multidimensional analysis provides a detailed description of the linguistic patterns of undergraduate writing. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to teachers of writing instructors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and researchers of university writing.

Although there is a large literature on referentiality going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or as categories and what distinguishes ‘referential’ from ‘nonreferential’ ‘specific’ from ‘nonspecific’ and ‘generic’ from ‘nongeneric’. Crucially we ask whether these distinctions even matter to participants in conversation and if they do what the evidence for that would be. Contributors investigate these issues using data from conversational interaction in a variety of social contexts – including between close friends and family to more casual acquaintances in service encounters and between adults and children – and in a range of languages: English Finnish French Indonesian Japanese and Mandarin. Collectively the chapters develop insights showing that reference is often fluid dynamic and indeterminate that referential indeterminacy is typically unproblematic for participants that shifts in referentiality tend to be tied to specific social goals and that reference and referentiality emerge dialogically and interactionally.

The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern Central and Northern Europe Africa the Middle East Asia and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation adaptation and exchange and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality as evidenced in manuscripts maps scientific treatises and iconotexts and its performativity in narrations theatre sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture both early modern and modern such as the legends about King Arthur Faust and Hamlet.

This book provides a systematic empirical account of the language typically presented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks based on a large corpus of EFL textbooks used in secondary schools. A modified version of the Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) framework serves to examine linguistic variation both within textbooks and compared to corpora representing ‘real-life’ English as used outside the EFL classroom. The results highlight the characteristics of Textbook English that define it as a distinct variety of English. In light of the study's pedagogical implications this book proposes a range of corpus-based approaches to improve the naturalness of textbook texts. It also contributes to advancing quantitative corpus linguistics methodology: its detailed online supplements aim for methodological transparency and reproducibility in line with the principles of Open Science. This book will be of interest to linguistics and language education students and researchers as well as EFL teachers textbook authors and editors and those involved in curriculum development and teacher training.

This monograph explores the diverse sociopragmatic functions and meanings of humorous discourse in various online contexts affecting its use. To this end an analytical model is proposed which takes into consideration the aspects of context which are relevant to the production and reception of humor and hence to its sociopragmatic analysis. The model is employed for addressing research questions such as the following: Why may an utterance/text be intended and perceived as humorous by some speakers and fail for others? How and why may speakers attempt to regulate language use through humor? Why and how may the same humorous utterance/text engender diverse and contradictory interpretations? How do speakers create social groups and project social identities through humor? How could the sociopragmatic analysis of humor form the basis for teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework?

The volume espouses an ecosystemic standpoint on multilingual acquisition and learning viewing language development and use as both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Multilingualism is inclusively used to refer to sociolinguistic diversity and pluralism. Whether speech writing gesture or body movement language is a conduit that carries meaning within a complex fluid and context-dependent framework that engages different aspects of the individual the communicative interaction communicative acts and social parameters. Continually modified over the years to better represent its multidisciplinary scope the sociobiological notion of language has found steady and productive ground within major theoretical frameworks which individually or holistically contribute to a rounded understanding of language acquisition learning and use by exploring both system-internal and system-external factors and their interaction. Summoning the work of leading academics the volume outlines the changing dynamics of multilingualism in children and adults internationally with the latest advances and under-represented coverage that highlight the ecosystemic nature of multilingual acquisition learning and use.

Legal translation is hallmarked by peculiarities revolving around language intricacies particular formulae and system-specificity issues. At present there is a spectrum of legal corpora dedicated to court-related topics and legislation but there is no corpus composed of private legal documents such as contracts and agreements. This book wishes to bridge this gap by providing English-Italian comparable corpora related to the domain of (general) terms and conditions of service together with a model for their use in the translation classroom. It offers a novel contribution to the scientific community as it makes corpora of private legal documents available for consultation. In addition it shows that legal corpora built by following rigorous methods can become reliable tools in translator training and most likely in translation practice. This book is for students in Translation Studies professional translators researchers and scholars in legal language and legal translation as well as legal practitioners and lawyers.

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters contribute from a Cognitive Linguistics interdisciplinary perspective to the existing body of literature on the proverb. The book begins with a first part containing three chapters concerned with theoretical discussions of proverbs in cognition and culture. The three chapters in the second part ponder proverbs within a cognitive-cross-cultural perspective. The third part of the volume includes three chapters that deal with the proverbs of individual languages and cultures. The three chapters in the fourth part study proverbs and/or related phenomena from a cognitive and cultural perspective: snowclones idioms and proverbial phrases. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>This book will be of interest to academics interested in proverbs within a cognitive linguistic framework and to scholars in the areas of language studies applied linguistics language teaching and learning and Cognitive Linguistics in general and to those researchers who wish to refine their knowledge about the cognitive activities featuring proverb use and their interaction with sociocultural contextual variables.<br/>

This volume focuses on a number of interrelated issues in the theorizing and interpretation of morphological rivalry including the differences between a semasiological and an onomasiological approach to competition phenomena in word-formation the scope of such phenomena (micro-level rivalry between individual affixes as well as macro-level competition between different processes) the different sources of competition and the possible resolutions of competitive situations. An overview of existing research in the field is provided as well as new cutting-edge findings and proposals for analytical innovation. Linguistic data are drawn from European and Asian languages and morphologists semanticists and anyone interested in the dynamics of language will be stimulated by the analytical models and explanations offered in the 11 chapters.

This volume celebrates Robert B. Howell's wide-ranging contribution as a scholar mentor collaborator and colleague in the field of Germanic linguistics. In addition to investigating present-day or past varieties of Afrikaans Dutch English Flemish German and Pennsylvania Dutch each of the thirteen contributions in this volume explores one or more of the topics found in Howell’s work: (1) Linguistic structure and change (Page Sundquist Fagan De Vaan); (2) Migration contact and change (Fertig Louden Roberge); (3) Vernacular sources and change (Auer & Gordon Hendriks Van der Wal); (4) Historical sociolinguistics: past present and future (Van Bree Crombez Vandenbussche & Vosters Lauersdorf & Salmons).