2009 collection (133 titles)

In recent years, there has been a new interest in evaluating ‘complex’ structures in languages. The implications of such studies are varied, e.g., the distinction between supposedly more complex and less complex languages, how complexity relates to human knowledge of language, and the role of the reduction or increase of complexity in language change and creolization. This book focuses on the latter issue, but the conclusions presented here hold of typological ‘complexity’ in general. The chapters in this book show that the notion of complexity as conceived of in linguistics mainly centres on the outer manifestations of language (e.g., numbers of affixes). This exercise is useful in establishing the patterning of languages in terms of their degrees of analyticity or synthesis, but it fails to address the properties of the inner rules of these grammars, and how these relate to the computational system that governs the human language capacity. Put simply, issues of complexity should not be equated with the complexity observed in surface patterns of grammars alone.

With her theory of ‘Language as Dialogue’, Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of ‘competence-in-performance’ solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today.

This book traces Weigand’s linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing. The initial stage when a model of communicative competence was developed is followed by a gradual transition period which finally resulted in the theory of the dialogic action game as a mixed game or the Mixed Game Model. The articles cover a wide range of linguistic topics including, among others, speech act theory, lexical semantics, utterance grammar, emotions, the media, rhetoric and institutional communication. Editorial introductions give further information on the origin and theoretical background of the articles included.

This book provides a microanalysis of the interactions between four children and their parents starting when the children were aged 9 to 13 months and ending when they were 18 months old. It tracks development as an issue for and of interaction. In so doing, it uncovers the details of the organisation of the sequence structure of the interactions, and exposes the workings of language and social development as they unfold in everyday activities. The study begins with a description of pre-verbal children’s sequences of action and then tracks those sequences as linguistic ability increases. The analysis reveals a developing richness and complexity of the sequence structure and exposes a gap in Child Language studies that focus on the children’s and their carers’ actions in isolation from their sequential environment. By focusing on the initiating actions of both child and parent, and the response to those actions, and by capturing the details of how both verbal and nonverbal actions are organised in the larger sequences of talk, a more complete picture emerges of how adept the young child is at co-creating meaning in highly organised ways well before words start to surface. The study also uncovers pursuit of a response, and orientation to insufficiency and adequacy of response, as defining characteristics of these early interactions.

Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language, is the official language of Maharashtra, including Mumbai. Father Thomas Stephens, the first English traveler to Goa, a pioneer linguist, wrote Christa Puran in Marathi (1616) and Arte da Lingoa Canarim in Portuguese, printed in (1640). The latter is a grammar of Konkani, a language closely related to Marathi. It is the first grammar of its kind marking a new grammatical tradition for modern Indo-Aryan languages. The present volume contains an extensive account of Marathi phonology, morphology, word formation and syntax. It succinctly describes the accentual system, special compound verb forms, unique pronominal anaphors, complex agreement due to split ergative system, and special pronominal marking. The book also contains a case study of a child’s acquisition of Marathi and an essay on Women’s Language, the two topics that are increasingly becoming relevant to the grammar.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the interface between language and cognition. Language use is impossible without the mobilization of a large variety of cognitive processes, each serving a different purpose. During the last half century cognitive approaches to language have been particularly successful, and the broad spectrum of contributions to this volume testify to this success. As cognitive approaches to language are by definition a subset of the larger enterprise of cognitive science, a contribution on this general topic sets the stage. This is joined by a chapter on cognitive grammar, a theoretical study of the architecture of human language that is deeply inspired by general cognitive principles. A chapter on experimentation offers a crash-course on basic issues of experimental design and on the rationale behind statistical testing in general and the most important statistical tests in particular, offering a methodological toolkit for understanding many of the other contributions. Different chapters cover a broad range of topics: language acquisition, psycholinguistics, specialized topics within the latter field (e.g. the bilingual mental lexicon, categorization), and aspects of language awareness. Some chapters home in on what have become indispensible perspectives on the cognitive underpinnings of language: the way language is represented and processed in the human brain and simulation studies. The ever-growing success of the latter type of studies is exemplified, for instance, by the highly flourishing connectionist tradition and the more general paradigm of artificial intelligence, each of which is dealt with in a separate contribution.

The relationship of emotions, ethics, and authenticity constitutes a nexus of philosophical and psychological problems with wide interdisciplinary relevance. What is the proper role of emotions in moral behavior and theory; are emotions reliable guides to our authentic personal values; and finally; what does it mean to be authentic in one's emotions, assuming that there is such thing as emotional authenticity in the first place? The various contributions of this book seek to answer these vexing but rarely discussed questions, offering a broad intellectual tour that ranges from philosophy to psychology, sociology, and gender studies.

For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language’s sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena.

As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training is a systematically corrected, enhanced and updated avatar of a book (1995) which is widely used in T&I training programmes worldwide and widely quoted in the international Translation Studies community. It provides readers with the conceptual bases required to understand both the principles and recurrent issues and difficulties in professional translation and interpreting, guiding them along from an introduction to fundamental communication issues in translation to a discussion of the usefulness of research about Translation, through discussions of loyalty and fidelity issues, translation and interpreting strategies and tactics and underlying norms, ad hoc knowledge acquisition, sources of errors in translation, T&I cognition and language availability. It takes on board recent developments as reflected in the literature and spells out and discusses links between practices and concepts in T&I and concepts and theories from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

In this work, the Spanish copulae ser and estar are argued to be aspectual morphemes. Their binary opposition reflects the universal aspectual values [±Perfective], which are the same ones overtly expressed by the preterite and imperfect past tense forms in Spanish. It can therefore be shown that different types of states, just like different types of events, can be categorized based on their aspectual composition. Additionally, the inherent semantic differences between events and states can be accounted for by analyzing aspect as applying to events internally and to states externally. A useful resource for the beginning linguist as well as the most seasoned analyst, this work is written in language that is easy to understand while remaining faithful to all of the appropriate relevant technical terminology. Anyone who is seriously interested in exploring why the Spanish verbs ser and estar are used the way they are should read this book.