2009 collection (133 titles)
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2009 collection (133 titles)
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Collection Contents
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From Interaction to Symbol
More LessAgainst the background of jargon-ridden and often obscure semiotic literature Sadowski’s book offers a reader-friendly yet rigorous account of human communication and its evolution from animal and primate behaviour. What is specifically human about the way we exchange information with other people, and to what extent are our facial expressions, body language, and even emotive elements of speech still indebted to our pre-human ancestors? Why can the chimpanzees, smart as they are, not interpret animal tracks in the ground; why did religions often ban representational art; why is photography perceptually more powerful than painting; how have human syntactic speech and combinatorial grammar enabled the “explosion” of culture; and why do otherwise rational humans often strongly believe in the objective existence of unempirical, virtual entities such as religious and philosophic concepts? These and many other fascinating questions are addressed in the book within the methodological framework of systems theory and evolutionary psychology.
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Focus and Background in Romance Languages
More LessFocus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
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Formulaic Language
More LessThis book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.
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Formulaic Language
More LessThis book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.
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