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.