2014 collection (166 titles)

Discourses of Helping Professions brings together cutting-edge research on professional discourses from both traditional helping contexts such as doctor-patient interaction or psychotherapy and more recent helping contexts such as executive coaching. Unlike workplace, professional and institutional discourse – by now well established fields in linguistic research – discourses of helping professions represent an innovative concept in its orientation to a common communicative goal: solving patients’ and clients’ physical, psychological, emotional, professional or managerial problems via a particular helping discourse. The book sets out to uncover differences, similarities and interferences in how professionals and those seeking help interactively tackle this communicative goal. In its focus on professional helping contexts and its inter-professional perspective, the current book is a primer, intended to spark off more interdisciplinary and (applied) research on helping discourses, a socio-cultural phenomenon that is of growing importance in our post-modern society. As such, it is of great relevance for discourse researchers and discourse practitioners, caretakers and social scientists of all shades as well as for everybody interested in helping professions.

Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A sociological study is the first comprehensive study of literary translation in modern Iran, covering the period from the late 19th century up to the present day. By drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, this work investigates the people behind the selection, translation, and production of novels from English into Persian. The choice of novels such as Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World provides insights into who decides upon titles for translation, motivations of translators and publishers, and the context in which such decisions are made.The author suggests that literary translation in Iran is not a straightforward activity. As part of the field of cultural production, literary translation has remained a lively game not only to examine and observe, but also often a challenging one to play. By adopting hide-and-seek strategies and with attention to the dynamic of the field of publishing, Iranian translators and publishers have continued to play the game against all odds.

The book is not only a contribution to the growing scholarship informed by sociological approaches to translation, but an essential reading for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Iranian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.

The languages of Europe and North and Central Asia provide a rich variety of data. In this volume, some articles are summaries of large areal typological research projects, and some articles focus on structures or constructions in a single language. However, it is common to all the articles that they investigate phenomena that have not been examined previously, or they apply a new framework to a topic. The volume will be of interest to scholars with a focus on this broad geographic region, typologists, historical linguists and discourse analysts. The uniqueness of this volume is that it brings together work on a genetically diverse set of languages that have some shared areal traits.

This volume brings together articles by some major figures in various linguistics domains — phonology, morphology and syntax — aiming at explaining the form of linguistic items by exploring the structures that underlie them.

The book is divided in 5 parts: vowels, syllables, templates, syntax-morphology interface and Afro-Asiatic languages. Specific topics are the internal structure of vowels and its relation to harmony; the logic of recurrent vocalic patterns; syllabic prominence; the interaction of syllabic and templatic structure and segmental realization; the innateness of templates and paradigms; the limits of phonology; and various morpho-syntactic implications on phonological form.

The volume renders homage to Jean Lowenstamm’s work, by underlining the importance of seeking structural and intermodular insight in the study of linguistic form.

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind.

In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest.

The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics.

Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch, English, Greek, Danish, and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China, Russia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world.

This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.

The urge to understand all aspects of human experience more and better seems to be one of the motives underlying cognitive development in many domains of human existence. Understanding more and better is at the basis of knowledge creation and extension. One way of getting access to how understanding comes about and how knowledge is the result of a continuous dynamics of understanding and misunderstanding is by studying the cognitive potential and the development of natural language(s) and more particularly of terminology, in specialized domains. In this volume on dynamics and terminology, thirteen contributors illustrate that human cognition is a dynamic process in a variety of socio-cognitive and cultural settings. The case studies encompass a panoply of methodologies and deal with subjects ranging from the dynamics of legal understanding in multilingual Europe, over financial, economic and scientific terminology in several cultural and linguistic settings, to language policy issues in multilingual environments. All thirteen contributors link the dynamics of cognition to the creative potential of language as a repository of past and present experience in cultural settings and to the creation of neologisms in domain-specific languages. Attention is given to the functionality of indeterminacy, vagueness, polysemy, ambiguity, synonymy, metaphor and phraseology. In this volume terminology is researched and discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining insights developed over the last decades in communicative terminology, socio-terminology, socio-cognitive terminology, cultural terminology, with tools and methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, frame semantics, semiotics, knowledge engineering and statistics.

After several paradigm changes and even more turns, after fights about scholarly territories and methodological renewal, after intra- and interdisciplinary discussions, Translation Studies continues to produce a large number of publications dealing with the challenge of defining itself and its object, with the borderlines of both the discipline and the object, with ways of interacting with related (sub)disciplines. This publication gathers contributions from established TS scholars (all former CETRA Chair professors) about the topics that will very probably dominate the near future of the discipline.

This is an extended and updated version of a Target special issue with the same title that was published in 2012 (24:1).

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology.

Dialect syntax has proven to be an invaluable data source for theoretical syntax, and theoretical syntax has provided useful analytical tools for uncovering fascinating grammatical properties of dialects. In the 1980s, the assumption that there must be more than one structural position in the left periphery of the clause was confirmed (among others) by so-called "doubly filled COMPs" in Bavarian (e.g. the co-occurrence of a wh-phrase and a complementizer), and in the 1990s, Northern Italian dialects provided the main empirical evidence for Rizzi’s extended theory of the left clausal periphery (the so-called "Split-C-hypothesis"). Among German dialects, Bavarian played a prominent role from the beginning: in addition to doubly-filled COMPs we find phenomena such as complementizer agreement, partial pro-drop, pronominal clitics, extractions from finite clauses introduced by complementizers, negative concord, parasitic gaps, or double possessors, all of which are fascinating and highly relevant for theoretical syntax. The contributions in this volume investigate and analyze a wide range of topics from Bavarian syntax with the focus on implications for general theoretical questions. This volume is of interest for any linguist interested in syntactic theory and dialect syntax.

This volume is a collection of 18 papers on the communication of certainty and uncertainty. The first part introduces recent theoretical developments and general models on the topic and its relations with modality, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, epistemicity, evidentiality, hedging, mitigation and speech acts. In the second part, results from empirical studies in medical and supportive contexts are presented, all of which are based on a conversational analysis approach. These papers report on professional dialogues including advice giving in gynecological consultations, breaking diagnostic bad news to patients, emergency calls, addiction therapeutic community meetings and bureaucratic-institutional interactions. The final part concerns the qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora, addressing scientific writing (both research and popular articles) and academic communication in English, German, Spanish and Romanian. The collection is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective and to health professionals interested in the practical implications of communicating certainty or uncertainty.

This book presents an investigation of lexical bundles in native and non-native scientific writing in English, whose aim is to produce a frequency-derived, statistically- and qualitatively-refined list of the most pedagogically useful lexical bundles in scientific prose: one that can be sorted and filtered by frequency, key word, structure and function, and includes contextual information such as variations, authentic examples and usage notes. The first part of the volumediscusses the creation of this list based on a multimillion-word corpus of biomedical research writing and reveals the structure and functions of lexical bundles and their role in effective scientific communication. A comparative analysis of a non-native corpus highlights non-native scientists’ difficulties in employing lexical bundles. The second part of the volume explores pedagogical applications and provides a series of teaching activities that illustrate how EAP teachers or materials designers can use the list of lexical bundles in their practice.

Over the past four decades, discourse coherence has been studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic, computational, and applied perspectives. This volume identifies current issues and under-researched topics in the pragmatics of discourse coherence. Nine studies from various disciplines address the realization and signalling of coherence relations in various genres and languages, their acquisition and use by first- and second-language learners and university students, the relationship between coherence relations and genre-specific discourse structure, and extensions of the coherence paradigm to multimodal discourse and visual art. This collection will be of interest to researchers from linguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication, and multimodal semiotics.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.

Educating in Dialog: Constructing meaning and building knowledge with dialogic technology contains a collection of new articles on the relationship of learning, dialog and technology. The articles combine different views of dialogic learning stemming from a multiplicity of discipline backgrounds and research interests including educational design, educational science, epistemology, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and mobile learning, to name a few. The authors discuss and explore a variety of topics that range from knowledge building over learning communities to dialogic technologies for knowledge co‐construction. Discussing technology and learning against this broad background is indispensable, as the gap between what learners actually need for successful learning and what current technology offers becomes increasingly wide. This book provides thought-provoking views of recent developments in the area of technology supported learning for everyone who is interested in educational technologies, collaborative learning, and dialog.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.

The book seeks to enlarge the theoretical scope, research agenda, and practices associated with TBLT in a two-way dynamic, by exploring how insights from writing might reconfigure our understanding of tasks and, in turn, how work associated with TBLT might benefit the learning and teaching of writing. In order to enrich the domain of task and to advance the educational interests of TBLT, it adopts both a psycholinguistic and a textual meaning-making orientation. Following an issues-oriented introductory chapter, Part I of the volume explores tenets, methods, and findings in task-oriented theory and research in the context of writing; the chapters in Part II present empirical findings on task-based writing by investigating how writing tasks are implemented, how writers differentially respond to tasks, and how tasks can contribute to language development. A coda chapter summarizes the volume’s contribution and suggests directions for advancing TBLT constructs and research agendas.

This volume focuses on word formation processes in smaller and so far underrepresented indigenous languages of South America. The data for the analyses have been mainly collected in the field by the authors. The several language families described here, among them Arawakan, Takanan, and Guaycuruan, as well as language isolates, such as Yurakaré, Kalapalo and Cholón, reflect the linguistic diversity of South America. Equally diverse are the topics addressed, relating to word formation processes like reduplication, nominal and verbal compounding, clitic compounding, and incorporation. The traditional notions of the processes are discussed critically with respect to their implementation in minor indigenous languages. The book is therefore not only of interest to readers with an Amerindian background but also to typologists and historical linguists, and it is a supplement to more theory-driven approaches to language and linguistics.

This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.

Communication in Autism adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore one of the most common developmental disorders associated with communication impairment. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about communication in autism is that variation is as extreme as it could possibly be. While some individuals with autism have age-appropriate language, a number have exceptional language skills; others have little or no spoken language. In between these extremes are individuals who experience significant linguistic impairments. These impairments can affect peer relations and literacy skills. The chapters in this volume provide comprehensive coverage of both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical aspects of autistic communication. The result is a volume that showcases the wide range of methodologies being used in this field of research. It is invaluable for scientists, service providers, parents, individuals with autism, and students learning about communication and autism (e.g., in psychology, speech pathology, and education).

Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces captures the diversity of encounters that these languages have known and explores their relevance for current linguistic theories. The book focuses on dimensions along which Portuguese and Spanish can be fruitfully compared and highlights the theoretical value of exploring points of interaction between closely related varieties. It is unprecedented in its scope and unique in bringing together leading experts in a systematic study of similarities and differences between both languages. The authors explore the common boundaries of these languages within current theoretical frameworks, in an effort to combine scholarship that analyzes Portuguese and Spanish from multiple subfields of linguistics. The volume compares structures from both synchronic and diachronic points of view, addressing a range of issues pertaining to variability, acquisition, contact, and the formation of new languages. While it provides an up-to-date resource for scholars in the field, it can also be a useful companion for advanced students.

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

This volume brings together theoretical perspectives and empirical studies on the ongoing Englishization of Nordic universities. A core objective is to contrast and address the gap between ideological representations of this phenomenon and the ways in which it unfolds in the practices on the ground. The book provides perspectives from five Nordic countries: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, with one chapter from each country focusing on ideologies and another on practices. The book is intended to provide an up-to-date resource on the internationalization and Englishization of Nordic universities for scholars, policy makers and anyone wishing to gain an overview of current issues in the field.

Children acquiring two languages, either simultaneously or sequentially, have more variation in their linguistic input than their monolingual peers. Understanding the nature and consequences of this variability has been the focus of much recent research on childhood bilingualism. This volume constitutes the first collection of research solely dedicated to the topic of input in childhood bilingualism. Chapters represent a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of childhood bilingualism, covering a variety of language combinations and sociocultural contexts in Europe, Israel, North and South America. As a reflection of the field’s current understanding of the intricate relationship between experience and development in children growing up with two or more languages, this volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working with bi- and multilingual learners in various sociolinguistic and educational contexts.

Despite intensive research, negation remains elusive. Its expression across languages, its underlying cognitive mechanisms, its development across time, and related phenomena, such as negative polarity and negative concord, leave many unresolved issues of both a definitional and a substantive nature. Such issues are at the heart of the present volume, which presents a twofold contribution. The first part offers a mix of large-scale typological surveys and in-depth investigation of the evolution of negation in individual languages and language families that have not frequently been studied from this point of view, such as Chinese, Berber, Quechua, and Austronesian languages. The second part centers on French, a language whose early stages are comparatively richly documented and which therefore provides an important test case for hypotheses about the diachrony of negative marking. Representing, moreover, a variety of theoretical approaches, the volume will be of interest to researchers on negation, language change, and typology.

This book is concerned with comparing morphological paradigms between languages in order to establish areal and genealogical relationships. The languages in focus are the Transeurasian languages: Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages. World-eminent experts in diachronic morphology and typology interact with specialists on Transeurasian languages, presenting innovative theoretical analyses and new empirical facts. The stress on the importance of paradigmatic morphology in historical linguistics contrasts sharply with the paucity of existing literature on the topic. This volume partially fills this gap, by shifting focus from Indo-European to other language families. “Paradigm change” will appeal to scholars and advanced students concerned with linguistic reconstruction, language contact, morphology and typology, and to anyone interested in the Transeurasian languages.

This volume offers the reader a unique possibility to obtain a concise introduction to dependency linguistics and to learn about the current state of the art in the field. It unites the revised and extended versions of the linguistically-oriented papers to the First International Conference on Dependency Linguistics held in Barcelona. The contributions range from the discussion of definitional challenges of dependency at different levels of the linguistic model, its role beyond the classical grammatical description, and its annotation in dependency treebanks to concrete analyses of various cross-linguistic phenomena of syntax in its interplay with phonetics, morphology, and semantics, including phenomena for which classical simple phrase-structure based models have proven to be unsatisfactory. The volume will be thus of interest to both experts and newcomers to the field of dependency linguistics and its computational applications.

The Minimalist Program is just that, a “program”. It is a challenge for syntacticians to reexamine the constructs of their models and ask what is minimally needed in order to accomplish the essential task of syntax – interfacing between form and meaning. This volume pushes Minimalism to its empirical and theoretical limits, and brings together some of the most innovative and radical ideas to have emerged in the attempt to reduce Universal Grammar to the bare output conditions imposed by these conceptually necessary interfaces. The contributors include both leading theoreticians and well-known practitioners of minimalism; the papers thus both respond to broad questions about the nature of human language and the architecture of grammar, and provide careful analyses of specific linguistic problems. Overarching issues of syntactic computation are considered, such as the role of formal features, the mechanics of movement and the property of displacement, the construction of words and phrases, the nature of Spell-Out, and, more generally, the forces driving operations. The volume has the potential to reach a wide audience, favoring inter-theoretical debate with a concise state-of-the-art panorama on Minimalism and advances about its future developments.

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.

The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems, morphology, syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word class issues, and present original analyses and new data from a number of languages. The primary focus is on methods (including computational ones) and criteria for identifying and representing major word classes and subclasses in specific languages, with considerable attention also directed towards the characterization of the nature and role of minor — or neglected — word classes, including trans-categorization processes. The range of topics and perspectives covered makes this volume of considerable interest to both theoretical linguists and typologists.

This two-part volume provides a collection of 27 linguistic studies and contributions that shed light on the evolution of different Englishes world-wide (varieties, learner Englishes, dialects, creoles) from a broad spectrum of different perspectives, including both synchronic and diachronic approaches. What makes the volume unique is that it is the first-ever contribution to the field which includes a section exclusively commited towards testing, discussing and refining Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model against recent realities of English world-wide (Part 1). These realities include a wide variety of case studies ranging from regions (socio)linguistically as diverse as South Africa, the Phillipines, Cyprus or Germany. Part 2 goes beyond the Dynamic Model and offers both empirical and theoretical perspectives on the evolution of World Englishes. In doing so, it provides contributions with a theoretical focus on the topic as well as cross-varietal accounts; it sheds light on individual Englishes from different geographical regions and offers new perspectives on “old” varieties.

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language. In addition, the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English, Estonian, Finnish, and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.

This book focuses on binomials (word pairs such as heart and soul, rich and poor, or if and when), and in particular on the degree of reversibility that English binomials demonstrate. Detailed and innovative corpus linguistic analyses investigate the correlates of the degree of reversibility, linguistic constraints that influence the ordering and reversibility of binomials and the diachronic development of reversibility. In addition, judgment data are analyzed for their convergence and divergence with corpus data regarding degrees of reversibility. The book thus establishes reversibility as a complex characteristic of the binomial construction, at the same time throwing light on general questions in phraseology, lexicalization, language structure and language processing.

Greenberg’s (1954) concept of a ‘Khoisan’ language family, while heartily embraced by non-specialists, has been harshly criticized by linguists working on these languages. Evidence for Greenberg's hypothesis has proved to be seriously insufficient and little progress has been made in the intervening years in substantiating his claim by means of the standard comparative method. This volume goes beyond “Khoisan” in the linguistic sense by exploring a more complex history that includes multiple and widespread events of language contact in southern Africa epitomized in the areal concept ‘Kalahari Basin’. The papers contained herein present new data on languages from all three relevant lineages, Tuu, Kx’a and Khoe-Kwadi, complemented by non-linguistic research from molecular and cultural anthropology. A recurrent theme is to disentangle genealogical and areal historical relations — a major challenge for historical linguistics in general. The multi-disciplinary approach reflected in this volume strengthens the hypothesis that Greenberg’s “Southern African Khoisan” is better explained in terms of complex linguistic, cultural and genetic convergence.

Recent years saw a growing interest in the study of subjectivity, as the linguistic expression of speaker involvement. Intersubjectivity, defined by Traugott as "the linguistic expression of a speaker/writer's attention to the hearer/reader", on the other hand, has so far received little explicit attention in its own right, let alone systematic definition and operationalization. Intersubjectivity and seemingly related notions such as interpersonal meaning, appraisal, stance and metadiscourse, frequently appear in cognitive-functional accounts, as well as historical and more applied approaches. These domains offer (partly) conflicting uses of 'intersubjectivity', differ in the overall scope of the concept and the phenomena it may cover.This book brings together contributions from a variety of different approaches, with the aim of disentangling the current web of intertwined notions of intersubjectivity. Rather than focusing on the potentially conflicting views, the volume aspires to resolve some of the conceptual puzzle by cross-fertilization between the different views, and spark discussion on how to operationalize 'intersubjectivity' in linguistic research. Originally published in English Text Construction 5:1 (2012).

The construction of discourse is a challenging field where many discourse structures and interactional effects remain poorly understood. This analysis provides a systematic explanation for the way in which discourse participants (speaker and hearer) are construed in Spanish through a corpus-driven analysis of informal conversation, TV-debates and parliamentary debates. It deals not only with person deixis, but with the full range of possibilities speakers choose from when profiling their self or their relationship with the interlocutor. This analysis also offers new insights into the operationalization of the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity as tools for the analysis of person reference and genre comparison. The comparative and corpus-driven approach offers methodological tools for genre analysis that can be transposed to other languages and/or genres. The detailed description of three socially highly relevant discourse types from a cognitive-functional perspective makes this book a useful resource not only for pragmatists but also for researchers in political and media discourse.

Diasporic populations offer unique opportunities for the study of language variation and change. This volume is the first collection of sociolinguistic studies of English use across the historically complex and widely dispersed Indian diaspora. The contributions describe particular sociohistorical contexts (the UK, Fiji, South Africa, Singapore, and the Caribbean) and then use this rich empirical base to examine diverse questions in theory and method, such as the extent to which different settings see different or similar linguistic outcomes; the role of community structures, transnational ties, attitudes, and identity; reasons for differing rates of change, adaptation, and focussing; and the relevance of endonormative stabilization of Asian Englishes. These themes do not simply further our understandings of diaspora. They can ultimately feed into wider theoretical questions in language contact studies, including universals, selection and adaptation of traits, and interactions between social contact, identity, and language change.

The chapters in this book show how the different flavors of Construction Grammar provide illuminating insights into the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse-functional properties of specific phenomena in Romance languages such as (Castilian) Spanish, French, Romanian, and Latin from a synchronic as well as a diachronic viewpoint. The phenomena surveyed include the role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish, the relevance of lexicalization for a constructionist analysis of complex prepositions in French, the complementariness of fragments, patterns and constructions as theoretical and explanatory constructs in verb complementation in French, Latin, and Spanish, non-constituent coordination phenomena (e.g. Right Node Raising, Argument Cluster Coordination and Gapping) in Romanian, and variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion in the light of Leonard Talmy’s (2000) typological differences of lexicalization between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.

Semantic roles have continued to intrigue linguists for more than four decades now, starting with determining their kind and number, with their morphological expression, and with their interaction with argument structure and syntax. The focus in this volume is on typological and historical issues. The papers focus on the cross-linguistic identification of semantic-role equivalents, on the regularity of, and exceptions concerning change and grammaticalization in semantic roles, the variation of encoding the roles of direction and experiencer in specific languages, presenting evidence for identifying a new semantic role of speech addressee in Caucasian languages, on semantic roles in word formation, and finally a cross-linguistic comparison of the functions and the grammaticalization of the ethical dative in some Indo-European languages. The book will be of interest to anyone involved with case and semantic roles, with the syntax-semantics interface, and with semantic change and grammaticalization.

Language use is fundamentally multimodal. Speakers use their hands to point to locations, to represent content and to comment on ongoing talk; they position their bodies to show their orientation and stance in interaction; they use facial displays to comment on what is being said; and they engage in mutual gaze to establish intersubjectivity. This volume brings together studies by leading scholars from several fields on gaze and facial displays, on the relationship between gestures, sign, and language, on pointing and other conventionalized forms of manual expression, on gestures and language evolution, and on gestures in child development. The papers in this collection honor Adam Kendon whose pioneering work has laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for contemporary studies of multimodality, gestures, and utterance visible action.

Motivation is a key aspect of second language learning. There is no doubt that abstract models are basic to gain theoretical insights into motivation; however, teachers and researchers demand comprehensible explanations for motivation that can help them to improve their everyday teaching and research. The aim of this book is to provide both theoretical insights and practical suggestions to improve motivation in the classroom. With this in mind, the book is divided into two sections: the first part includes innovative ideas regarding language learning motivation, whereas the second is focused on the relationship between different approaches to foreign language learning – such as EFL (English as a foreign language), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) or immersion – and motivation. Both sections have an emphasis on pedagogical implications that are rooted in both theoretical and empirical work.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of argumentation in the health care domain. Argumentation and Health is a collection of essays by argumentation theorists reflecting on the way in which the institutional context of health care shapes the argumentative interaction. The volume provides for the first time an overview of the most important recent developments and achievements of the study of argumentation in medical and public oriented health communication. In Argumentation and Health , attention is paid to argumentation in different forms of health communication, such as the medical consultation, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, health brochures and health risk communication.

This book is of interest to argumentation theorists, (health) communication scholars, healthcare practitioners, students of medicine and health-related fields, and all other researchers and practitioners interested in the function and characteristics of argumentation in health communication. Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 1:1 (2012).

This volume contributes to the development and advancement of TBLT as a research domain by investigating the intersection between tasks and technology from a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., educational, cognitive, sociocultural) and by gathering empirical findings on the design and implementation of diverse tasks for writing, interaction, and assessment with the mediation of technological tools such as wikis, blogs, CMC, Fanfiction sites, and virtual and synthetic environments. The innovative blend of tasks and technology in technology-mediated communication is guided by task-based language teaching and learning principles, and the contexts of study span adult college-level education settings in the United States, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. The volume opens up a new framework that the authors call “technology-mediated TBLT,” in which tasks and technology are genuinely and productively integrated in the curriculum according to learning-by-doing philosophies of language pedagogy, new language education needs, and digital technology realities.

The differences among functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist models are generally taken to be not absolute, but rather a matter of emphasis and degree, with an increasing permeability between paradigms arising from cross-fertilizing influences. This book further explores this burgeoning area of research through the notion of functional-cognitive space, namely, the topography of the space occupied by functional, cognitivist and/or constructionist models against the background of formalist approaches in general and of Chomsky’s Minimalism in particular. Specifically, the twelve contributions in the present volume update the reader on recent developments in functionalism (Systemic Functional Grammar, Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar) and cognitivism (Word Grammar, (Cognitive) Construction Grammar and the Lexical Contructional Model). Plotting cognitive-space proves particularly adequate for situating the six models represented in this volume, not only in relation to each other, but also potentially with respect to a wide spectrum of functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist models.

One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in projecting possible turn completion. As one of the few systematic studies of multimodality in Mandarin interaction, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis.

Plurilingual communication is common practice in most urban areas. Societal domains such as business and science nowadays see themselves as international, and plurilingual communication is the rule rather than the exception. But how do other players in critical domains of modern societies, and more specifically, in education react to this situation? This volume of the Hamburg Studies in Linguistic Diversity (HSLD) series explores this question along three major lines. One group of contributions sheds light on educational policies in Europe and beyond. A second group of contributions elucidates what interaction and communication practices develop in multilingual contexts. The focus is on school settings. Thirdly, we present articles that discuss the effects of plurilingual settings and plurilingual practices on language development. As a whole this volume shows how linguistic diversity shapes a central domain of our societies, namely education, and how it also impacts upon the development of the individuals interacting in this domain.

The English language is changing every day and it is us – the individual speakers and writers – that drive those changes in small ways by choosing to use certain strings of words over others. This book discusses and describes some of the choices made by speakers from South Korea by examining the similarities and differences between two Korean communities: one in England and one in South Korea. The book has two overall aims. Firstly, it is intended to begin a discussion about phraseology and Lexical Priming and how these theoretical concepts relate and play out in the context of a New English. Secondly, it provides a model of how a language variety can be explored by detailed analysis of short strings. It delves into a range of areas from World Englishes to phraseology and formulaic language and would be suitable for students, teachers and researchers in all these areas.

Literary Conceptualizations of Growth explores those processes through which maturation is represented in adolescent literature by examining how concepts of growth manifest themselves in adolescent literature and by interrogating how the concept of growth structures scholars’ ability to think about adolescence. Cognitive literary theory provides the theoretical framework, as do the related fields of cognitive linguistics and experiential philosophy; historical constructions of the concept of growth are also examined within the context of the history of ideas. Cross-cultural literature from the traditional Bildungsroman to the contemporary Young Adult novel serve as examples. Literary Conceptualizations of Growth ultimately asserts that human cognitive structures are responsible for the pervasiveness of growth as both a metaphor and a narrative pattern in adolescent literature.

Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.

The major purpose of newspaper headlines is to trigger the reader’s interest. A popular way to achieve this goal is the use of phraseological modifications. Based on previous findings from various linguistic disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the reception of substitutions like More than Meats the Eye. It develops an empirical methodology for investigating the complex cognitive processes involved, using a large sample of authentic examples for illustration. Along these lines, this volume not only shows what associations readers make when they encounter a lexical substitution and what factors facilitate the recognition of the canonical form. It also addresses the question of how meaning is constructed in terms of Conceptual Integration Theory and establishes an experimentally supported model of interpretation. This multifaceted perspective renders Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines: "More than Meats the Eye" relevant to scholars and advanced students from a wide range of linguistic areas, such as phraseology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and humour research, but also to interested journalists.