2009 collection (133 titles)

The image of the tightrope walker illustrates the interpreter’s balancing act. Compelled to move forward at a pace set by someone else, interpreters compensate for pressures and surges that might push them into the void. The author starts from the observation that conference interpreters tend to see survival as being their primary objective. It is interpreters’ awareness of the essentially face-threatening nature of the profession that naturally induces them to seek what the author calls “dynamic equilibrium”, a constantly evolving state in which problems are resolved in the interests of maintaining the integrity of the system as a whole. By taking as a starting point the more visible interventions interpreters make (comments on speed of delivery, on exchanges between the chair and the floor), the author is able to explore the interpreter’s instinct for self-preservation in an inherently unstable environment.
This volume is an insightful and refreshing account of interpreters’ behavior from the other side of the glass-fronted booth.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 21st and 22nd Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Stuttgart. The contributions provide insightful discussions of several topics of current interest for syntactic theory on the basis of comparative data from a wide range of contemporary and historical Germanic languages. The theoretical issues explored include: the left periphery, with a number of contributions touching on the pros and contras of cartographic accounts; different aspects of word order and how it arises from movement and clause structure; the interplay of thematic relations and case theory with the realization of DPs; and the treatment of finiteness and modal structures. This book is of interest to syntacticians working in a comparative perspective and to advanced undergraduates.

Ioane Petritsi, a twelfth-century Georgian philosopher, translated from Greek into Georgian The Elements of Theology of the Neoplatonist Proclus (fifth century) and wrote a Commentary on the entire text, with a preface and a postface. Petritsi tried to prove the priority of the Proclean One over all other ontological hypostases, its transcendence and its omnipresence, together with the thesis that all things depend on the One, including even matter. In his Commentary, Petritsi also referred to other works of Proclus besides The Elements of Theology, as well as to many other ancient Greek philosophers. Although Petritsi’s Commentary is an important milestone in the history of the medieval Christian philosophical interpretations of ancient Platonism, to date, this text written in Old Georgian has remained almost unknown for western scholarship. This is the first time that the complete text of Petritsi’s Commentary is being published in a western language. The present book provides a German translation of the complete text, with an introduction, notes, indices and bibliography. Der mittelalterliche georgische Philosoph Ioane Petrizi übersetzte im 12. Jahrhundert die Stoicheiosis theologike des Neuplatonikers Proclus (5. Jh.) ins Alt-Georgische und verfasste zu dem gesamten Text der Stoicheiosis einen umfangreichen Kommentar, den er zusätzlich mit einem Prolog und einem Epilog versah. Petrizi versucht in seinem Kommentar, die ontologische Vorrangigkeit des Proklischen Einen über alle anderen Hypostasen ebenso zu beweisen wie dessen Transzendenz bei gleichzeitiger Allanwesenheit im Seinskontinuum. Zudem vertritt er die These, dass alle Dinge vom Einen abhängen, sogar die Materie. Dabei berücksichtigt Petrizi neben der Stoicheiosis auch andere Werke Proclus’ ebenso wie zahlreiche weitere Texte antiker griechischer Philosophen. Damit wird Petrizis Kommentar zu einer bedeutenden Schrift für die Erforschung und das Verständnis der mittelalterlichen christlichen Philosophie und ihrer Aneignung des (spät-)antiken Platonismus. Trotz seiner Bedeutung ist Petrizis Text von der westlichen Forschung bisher kaum zur Kenntnis genommen worden. Die vorliegende Übersetzung ins Deutsche ist die erste komplette Übersetzung dieses Textes in eine westliche Sprache überhaupt. Neben der Übersetzung bietet diese Ausgabe eine Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Indices und eine Bibliografie.

Despite its potential influence on the standard language, there is still relatively little written about the language of the young. This book gives new insight into some important areas of their language, such as identity construction reflected, for instance, in prosodic patterns and language choice, the use of discourse markers and slang in a contrastive perspective, the pragmatics of fixed expressions and the impact of English on the teenage vernacular. Most of the articles are corpus-based, and all represent naturally occurring spontaneous conversation. The book will be of interest to linguists, university students and anyone interested in today’s adolescent language and language change.

The craft of gesture is part of the practical equipment with which we inhabit and understand the world together. Drawing on micro-ethnographic research in diverse interaction settings, this book explores the communicative ecologies in which hand-gestures appear: illuminating the world around us, depicting it, making sense of it, and symbolizing the interaction process itself. Gesture is analyzed as embodied communicative action grounded in the hands' practical and cognitive engagments with material worlds. The book responds to the quest for the role of the human body in cognition and interaction with an analytic perspective informed by phenomenology, conversation analysis, context analysis, praxeology, and cognitive science. Many of the cross-linguistic video-data of everyday interaction investigated in its chapters are available on-line.

Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language faculty – evolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of paratactic into syntactic structures.

Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change offers the first comprehensive description of Indian English and its emerging regional standard in a corpus-linguistic framework. Drawing on a wealth of authentic spoken and written data from India (including the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English), this book explores the dynamics of variation and change in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary Indian English. The aims are to document the extent of lexical and grammatical nativization at the beginning of the twenty-first century and compare contemporary Indian English to other varieties around the world (for example British and American English). The results are relevant to sociolinguists, variationists and lexicologists seeking to investigate ongoing language change in emerging standard varieties of English. With its strong empirical foundation and its comparative outlook, the book is also of interest to anyone looking for an introduction to the corpus-based description of varieties of English.

This collection of papers discusses some of the major syntactic properties of Brazilian Portuguese from a minimalist perspective. The volume focuses on movement and empty category issues and brings new empirical material on a variety of topics (null subjects and finite control, possessive and existential constructions, factive constructions, relative clauses, null objects and stress shift, preposition duplication, VP topicalization, and ellipsis). The book is of interest to a wide spectrum of linguists working on theoretical and comparative syntax.

Indigenous minority languages have played crucial roles in many areas of linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, typology, and the ethnography of communication. Such languages have, however, received comparatively little attention from quantitative or variationist sociolinguistics. Without the diverse perspectives that underrepresented language communities can provide, our understanding of language variation and change will be incomplete. To help fill this gap and develop broader viewpoints, this anthology presents 21 original, fieldwork-based studies of a wide range of indigenous languages in the framework of quantitative sociolinguistics. The studies illustrate how such understudied communities can provide new insights into language variation and change with respect to socioeconomic status, gender, age, clan, lack of a standard, exogamy, contact with dominant majority languages, internal linguistic factors, and many other topics.

This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners’ use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an underexplored field in SLA research to date.The book also provides a critical re-assessment of the study of pragmatics within SLA. It has largely been neglected to date that L2 pragmatic knowledge includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. Thus, the book argues for an extension of the scope of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts. It also discusses pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching and will be of interest to applied linguists and SLA researchers, language teachers and curriculum designers.