2011 collection (154 titles)

As a meaningful manifestation of how institutionalized the discipline has become, the new Handbook of Translation Studies is most welcome. It joins the other signs of maturation such as Summer Schools, the development of academic curricula, historical surveys, journals, book series, textbooks, terminologies, bibliographies and encyclopedias.

The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation and interpreting and providing easy access to a large range of topics, traditions, and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who often adamantly prefer such user-friendliness, researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies, Translation & Interpreting professionals; but also scholars and experts from other disciplines (among which linguistics, sociology, history, psychology). In addition the HTS addresses any of those with a professional or personal interest in the problems of translation, interpreting, localization, editing, etc., such as communication specialists, journalists, literary critics, editors, public servants, business managers, (intercultural) organization specialists, media specialists, marketing professionals.

The usability, accessibility and flexibility of the HTS depend on the commitment of people who agree that Translation Studies does matter. All users are therefore invited to share their feedback. Any questions, remarks and suggestions for improvement can be sent to the editorial team at [email protected].

Next to the book edition (in printed and electronic, PDF, format), HTS is also available as an online resource, connected with the Translation Studies Bibliography. For access to the Handbook of Translation Studies Online, please visit http://www.benjamins.com/online/hts/

Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural and emphatic consonants and their pharyngeal and laryngeal mechanisms, intonation, and language acquisition. In addition to presenting new data and new descriptions and interpretations, a key aim of the volume is to demonstrate the depth of objective analysis that instrumental methods can enable researchers to achieve. A special feature of many chapters is the use of more than one type of instrumentation to give different perspectives on phonetic properties of Arabic speech which have fascinated scholars since medieval times. The volume will be of interest to phoneticians, phonologists and Arabic dialectologists, and provides a link between traditional qualitative accounts of spoken Arabic and modern quantitative methods of instrumental phonetic analysis.

The present volume presents cutting-edge research on Arabic linguistics. It features a set of papers which continue a long tradition of seeking new explanations for familiar or previously undiscovered structural patterns. While the papers illustrate a range of approaches, from formalist to functionalist, each paper combines rigorous analysis of a set of Arabic data within the context of explicit models of some aspect of human language. The volume consists of three sections, the first section devoted to phonetics and phonology, the second to syntax, and the third to language acquisition and language contact.

The studies in Language Change in Contact Languages showcase the contributions that the study of contact language varieties make to the understanding of phenomena such as relexification, transfer, reanalysis, grammaticalization, prosodic variation and the development of prosodic systems. Four of the studies deal with morphosyntactic issues while the other three address questions of prosody. The studies include data from the Atlantic creoles (Saramaccan, Sranan, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Trinidadian Creole, Papiamentu), as well as Singapore English. This volume, originally published as special issue of Studies in Language 33:2 (2009), aims to make the work of several language contact experts available to a wider audience. The studies will be of use to any student or scholar interested in different approaches to contact-induced language processes, particularly as they relate to morphosyntax and prosody.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thereby attempting to divide up its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, discursive, variational, or interactional angles, this 9th volume focuses on what pragmatics is good for – beyond the very discipline of pragmatics as such. The chapters in the volume thus address the importance of taking a pragmatic perspective on traditional fields of applied linguistics (contrastive and error analysis, translation), and they address the core of pragmatics as the study of language use (with phenomena ranging from irony and emphasis to literacy and mass media, and with approaches to the function of language like rhetoric, stylistics, corpus analysis, and general semantics). The volume contains chapters not only on the spoken and written modes of communication, but also on signed language pragmatics and on computer-mediated communication. The impact and usefulness of taking a pragmatic perspective on language for a deeper understanding of clinical and rehabilitation practices has recently received ever more focus; in this volume, aspects of this direction of research are dealt with in the chapter on clinical pragmatics. In most of the chapters in the volume, ethics has a core role to play, not only in issues of authenticity in general in relation to research on language use, but also in issues that have a direct influence on the (linguistic) culture and society we live in, irrespective of whether we are part of a (linguistic) majority or a minority, or a minority within a minority: language policy and language planning, language ecology, and language in relation to legal matters. In all of these fields, we see the importance of research within pragmatics as a discipline dealing with how language influences our everyday lives. All in all, the volume presents different perspectives on how research in pragmatics not only can be put to practice, but how pragmatics is used as a tool to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.

This volume, which was originally published in Terminology 15:1 (2009), presents and reflects on experiences dealing with terminology training, from a theoretical, practical and professional perspective. Terminology is part of the programmes of several (post)graduate courses, such as Translating and Interpreting, Applied Languages, Information Science and other disciplines. Especially terminology practice has changed drastically over the years and training in terminology must adapt to this new reality. Drawing on years of experience in teaching this subject at various academic levels and in diverse ways, we explore what to teach about terminology, how to teach it, how it is learned, what experiences are put into practice with what result, and how to connect the knowledge taught at universities and other institutions to the practical skills that are required from professionals in different areas, e.g. translators, information scientists, knowledge engineers, with respect to their knowledge of terminology.

Construction Grammar is enthusiastically embraced by a growing group of linguists who find it a natural way to formulate their analyses. But so far there is no widespread formalization of construction grammar with a solid computational implementation. Fluid Construction Grammar attempts to fill this gap. It is a fully operational computational framework capturing many key concepts in construction grammar. The present book is the first extensive publication describing this framework. In addition to general introductions, it gives a number of concrete examples through a series of linguistically challenging case studies, including phrase structure, case grammar, and modality. The book is suited both for linguists who want to know what Fluid Construction Grammar looks like and for computational linguists who may want to use this computational framework for their own experiments or applications.

From the beginning of the Scientific Revolution around the late sixteenth century to its final crystallization in the early eighteenth century, hardly an observational result, an experimental technique, a theory, a mathematical proof, a methodological principle, or the award of recognition and reputation remained unquestioned for long. The essays collected in this book examine the rich texture of debates that comprised the Scientific Revolution from which the modern conception of science emerged. Were controversies marginal episodes, restricted to certain fields, or were they the rule in the majority of scientific domains? To what extent did scientific controversies share a typical pattern, which distinguished them from debates in other fields? Answers to these historical and philosophical questions are sought through a close attention to specific controversies within and across the changing scientific disciplines as well as across the borders of the natural and the human sciences, philosophy, theology, and technology.

The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. The twenty-third Going Romance conference was a very special one: for the first time it was not hosted by one of the Dutch universities, but was co-organized by the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and held in France at the Maison du Séminaire in Nice from 3–5 December 2009.

The present volume contains a broad range of peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages as well as selected papers from the special workshop dealing with linguistic change in relation to linguistic theory.