2014 collection (166 titles)

Audio description (AD) is a narrative technique which provides complementary information regarding the where, who, what and how of any audiovisual content. It translates the visuals into words. The principal function of this ad hoc narrative is to make audiovisual content available to all: be it a guided city tour of Barcelona, a 3D film, or a Picasso painting. Audio description is one of the younger siblings of Audiovisual Translation, and it is epigonic to the audiovisual translation modality chosen. This book is the first volume on the topic written in English and it brings together an international team of leading audio description teachers, scholars, and practitioners to address the basic issues regarding audio description strategies. Using one stimulus, Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009), the authors analysed what, when, where and how to audio describe. The book is written in a collaborative effort, following a bottom up approach. The many issues that surfaced in the process of the analysis were grouped in broader categories represented in the ten chapters this book contains. A good example of a successful international collaboration, the volume sets a robust practical and theoretical framework for the many studies on audio description to come in the future. Considering the structure of the individual contributions, the book is not only oriented towards the identification of the challenges that await the describer, but it also offers an insight into their possible solutions.

The contributions in this volume are devoted to various aspects of the internal and external syntax of DPs in a wide variety of languages belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Semitic and Germanic language families. In particular, the papers address questions related to the internal and external cartography of various types of simplex and complex DPs: the position of DPs within larger structures, agreement in phi-features and/or case between DPs and their predicates, as well as between sub-elements of DPs, and/or the assignment of case to DPs in specific configurations. The first four chapters of the book focus primarily on the external syntax of DPs, and the remaining chapters deal with their internal syntax.

Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis – both phonetic and statistical – it is possible to extrapolate the role of individual factors (socio-cultural, physiological, communicative-interactional, etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation.

This book investigates the fundamental relationship between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory, acoustic, dialectological, and conversational perspectives, thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to language variation. Although presuming some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics, the book is addressed to all readers with an interest in speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction.

Although usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary selection between Old and Early Modern Spanish that led to the gradual replacement of the auxiliary ser ‘be’ with the auxiliary haber ‘have’. It analyses this process in terms of the interaction between gradience, gradualness, and the conserving effects of frequency and persistence in language change. The study contributes to the theory and methodology of diachronic linguistics, additionally offering insights on how to explain synchronic grammatical variation both within a language and between languages. The book is of interest to the fields of Spanish and Romance linguistics, syntax, as well as historical and variationist linguistics.