2014 collection (166 titles)

Language is intimately related to interaction. The question arises: Is the structure of interaction somehow mirrored in language structure and use? This book suggests a positive answer to this question by examining the ubiquitous phenomenon of fictive interaction, in which non-genuine conversational turns appear in discourse, even within clauses, phrases, and lexical items (e.g. “Not happy? Money back! guarantee”). The book is based on a collection of hundreds of examples of fictive interaction at all grammatical levels from a wide variety of spoken, written, and signed languages, and from many different discourse genres. Special attention is devoted to the strategic use of fictive interaction in legal argumentation, with a focus on high-profile criminal trials. Both trial lawyers and lay jurors often present material evidence or murder victims as speaking, and express emotions and intentions in conversational terms. The book thus establishes the role of the conversational turn—rather than the sentence—as the basic unit of language, and the role of conversation as a frame that structures cognition, discourse, and grammar.

Since the 1980s theories and studies of grammaticalization have provided a major source of inspiration for the description and explanation of language change, giving rise to many publications and conferences. This collection presents original, empirical studies that explore various facets of grammaticalization research of both formal and functional orientation. The papers of this selection deal with general issues and specific empirical domains, such as personal pronouns; indefinite pronouns; final particles; tense and aspect markers; comitative markers and coordinating conjunctions. The languages covered include English, German, dialects of Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Walman (Papuan). The book will be of great interest to linguists working on language change in a wide variety of languages.

In the United States, political argumentation occurs in institutionalized settings and the broader public forum, in efforts to resolve conflict and efforts to foster it, in settings with time limits and controversies that extend over centuries. From the ratification of the U.S. Constitution to the presidency of Barack Obama, this book contains twenty studies of U.S. political argumentation, grouped under four themes: early American political discourse, Abraham Lincoln’s political argumentation, argumentation about foreign policy, and public policy argumentation since the 1960s.

Deploying methods of rhetorical criticism, argument analysis and evaluation, the studies are rich in contextual grounding and critical perspective. They integrate the European emphasis on politics as an argumentative context with the U.S. tradition of public address studies.

Two essays have never before been published. The others are retrieved from journals and books published between 1979 and 2014. The introductory essay is new for this volume.

Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There has also been an increase in several kinds of experimental work. However, not all linguistic data is simply naturally occurring or derived from experiments with statistically robust samples of speakers. Other traditions, especially the generative tradition, have fruitfully used introspection and questions about the grammaticality of different strings to uncover patterns which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The divide between generative and cognitive approaches to language is intimately connected to the kinds of data drawn on, and the way in which generalisations are derived from these data. The papers in this volume explore these issues through the lens of synchronic linguistic analysis, the study of language change, typological investigation and experimental study. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 36:3 (2012).

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.

Doing more than one thing at the same time – a phenomenon that is often called ‘multitasking’ – is characteristic to many situations in everyday and professional life. Although we all experience it, its real time features remain understudied. Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking offers a fresh view to the phenomenon by presenting studies that explore how two or more activities can be related and made co-relevant as people interact with one another. The studies build on the basis that multiactivity is a social, verbal and embodied phenomenon. They investigate multiactivity by using video recordings of real-life interactions from a range of different contexts, such as medical settings, office workplaces and car driving. With the companion collection Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. A close appreciation of how people use language and interact for and during multiactivity will not only interest researchers in language and social interaction, communication studies and discourse analysis, but will be very valuable for scholars in cognitive sciences, psychology and sociology.

Increasing attention has been paid to the agency of translators and interpreters, as well as to the social factors that permeate acts of translation and interpreting. In addition, agency and social factors are discussed in more interdisciplinary terms. Currently the focus is not only on translators or interpreters – i.e., the exploration of their inter/intra-social agency and identity construction (or on their activities and the consequences thereof), but also on other phenomena, such as the displacement of texts and people and issues of access and linguicism. The displacement of texts (whether written or oral) across time and space, as well as the geographic displacement of people, has encouraged researchers in Translation and Interpreting Studies to consider issues related to translation and interpreting through the lens of the Sociology of Language, Sociolinguistics, and Historiography. Researchers have employed a myriad of theoretical and methodological lenses borrowed from other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Therefore, the interdisciplinarity of Translation and Interpreting Studies is more evident now than ever before. This volume, originally published as a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies (issue 7:2, 2012), is a perfect example of such interdisciplinarity, reflecting the shift that has occurred in Translation and Interpreting Studies around the world over the last 30 years.

This volume brings together a selection of papers presented at the 12th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XII) held in St. Petersburg, Russia, 28 August – 2 September 2011. It begins with contributions on 17th-century rationalist ideas and practical grammar writing, and then covers a great variety of 18th and 19th century topics from Western grammars of Chinese to Saussure’s remarks on semiology of the years 1881–1891. The most noteworthy feature, however, is an entire section devoted to linguistics in Russia from the early Soviet period until the 1950s, including attempts to establish a Marxist view of language as well as phases to critically adapt Western ideas and at times efforts to participate successfully in international linguistic scholarship, both in phonetics and semantics.

This volume provides important contributions to Arabic linguistics and Linguistic research in general by presenting new empirical facts and innovative theoretical analyses. It consists of two major parts: the first contains four papers on phonology and morphology, most of which deal with phonology/morphology interface, while the second part includes five papers on syntax. The papers featured represent some of the current trends in Arabic Linguistics especially in the areas of Phonology and Syntax. Some of the articles are contributions to ongoing debates on the nature and properties of specific aspects of Arabic, such as: gemination and stress assignment in Phonology, and negation in Syntax. Other papers introduce new topics such as: analyzing intonational patterns in Arabic Phonology, investigating the source of the morpheme /-in/ in the less studied varieties of Central Asian Arabic in Morphology, and analyzing “sluicing” in Syntax.

Building on existing analytical frameworks, this book provides a new methodology allowing different language policies in international multilingual organisations (or “language regimes”) to be compared and evaluated on the basis of criteria such as efficiency and fairness. It explains step-by-step how to organise the evaluation of language regimes and how to design and interpret indicators for such evaluation. The second part of this book applies the theoretical framework to the evaluation of the language policy of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) division of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). Results show that an increase in linguistic diversity of the language regimes of patent organisations can both improve the efficiency of the patent system and lead to a more balanced distribution of costs among countries. This book is a resource for scholars in language policy and planning and for policy-makers in the international and European patent system.

This book, intended primarily for researchers and advanced students, expands greatly on previous work by the authors exploring the topography of the multidimensional “functional-cognitive space” within which functional, cognitive and/or constructionist approaches to language can be located. The analysis covers a broad range of 16 such approaches, with some additional references to Chomskyan minimalism, and is based on 58 questionnaire items, each rated by 29 experts on particular models for their importance in the model concerned. These ratings are analysed statistically to reveal overall patterns of (dis)similarity across models. The questionnaire ratings and experts’ comments are then used, together with the authors’ close reading of the literature, in detailed discussion leading to a final dichotomous rating for each feature in each model, the results again being analysed statistically. The final chapter presents the overall conclusions and suggests how existing collaborations between approaches could be strengthened, and new ones created, in future research.

Exploring Functional-Cognitive Space has been awarded the 2016 prize of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics (Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, AESLA) for work by experienced researchers.

True Emotions discusses several key problems in emotion research. The question about the true nature of emotions focuses on the role of cognition in human emotions at different levels of analysis: functional role, types of processes and representations, and neural implementation. Truth to the self, or authenticity, has two meanings, psychological and normative, where the latter is analyzed as coherence between the evaluative content of an emotion and the subject’s internally justified beliefs and values. Truth to the world is argued to be a matter of correct evaluative representation of the emotional object on the one hand, and the existence of the object, or the actuality or accurate probability of the represented situation on the other hand. Finally, authenticity and truth are applied to analyses of the authenticity of occupational emotions and the constitution of sentimental values, respectively. Recommended reading for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and gender researchers.

How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange.

Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.

Since the advent of syntactic cartography, left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997), much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian, whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations, while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover, the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and information structure, and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

Approximately a quarter of a century ago, the Multi-Dimensional (MD) approach—one of the most powerful (and controversial) methods in Corpus Linguistics—saw its first book-length treatment. In its eleven chapters, this volume presents all new contributions covering a wide range of written and spoken registers, such as movies, music, magazine texts, student writing, social media, letters to the editor, and reports, in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) and contexts (engineering, journalism, the classroom, the entertainment industry, the Internet, etc.). The book also includes a personal account of the development of the method by its creator, Doug Biber, an introduction to MD statistics, as well as an application of MD analysis to corpus design. The book should be essential reading to anyone with an interest in how texts, genres, and registers are used in society, what their lexis and grammar look like, and how they are interrelated.

While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.

Trust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization, the drive for efficiency and accountability, and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate, it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility, authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists, discourse analysts, communication scholars, and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in society, including interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, ethnography, multimodality and organizational studies.

Understanding how communicative goals impact and drive the learning process has been a long-standing issue in the field of language acquisition. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the social and pragmatic aspects of language learning: the way interaction shapes what and how children learn. In this volume, we bring together researchers working on interaction in different domains to present a cohesive overview of ongoing interactional research. The studies address the diversity of the environments children learn in; the role of para-linguistic information; the pragmatic forces driving language learning; and the way communicative pressures impact language use and change. Using observational, empirical and computational findings, this volume highlights the effect of interpersonal communication on what children hear and what they learn. This anthology is inspired by and dedicated to Prof. Eve V. Clark – a pioneer in all matters related to language acquisition – and a major force in establishing interaction and communication as crucial aspects of language learning.

This volume provides both a quantitative statistical and qualitative analysis of Late Northumbrian verbal morphosyntax as recorded in the Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It focuses in particular on the attestation of the subject type and adjacency constraints that characterise the so-called Northern Subject Rule concord system. The study presents new evidence which challenges the traditional Early Middle English dating attributed to the emergence of subject-type concord in the North of England and demonstrates that the syntactic configuration of the Northern Subject Rule was already a feature of Old English. By setting the Northumbrian developments within a broad framework of diachronic and diatopic variation, in which manifestations of subject-type concord are explored in a wide range of varieties of English, the author argues that a concord system based on subject type rather than person/number features is in fact a far less local and more universal tendency in English than previously believed.

Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.

This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.

This book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds in German and English, nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts, and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works, this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations, such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds, head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds, and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.

This publication constitutes essential reading for academics, teachers and language policy makers wanting to understand, plan, and implement an educational language program involving learner mobility.

The book provides data and analyses from a long-term program of research on study abroad (the SALA Project), which looked into the short and long-term effects of instructional and mobility contexts on language and cultural development from two perspectives: the participants’ language acquisition development over 2,5 years, and the practitioners’ perspective in relation to the design and implementation of a mobility program. The book is innovative in the longitudinal data it offers, the light it sheds on (i) an array of language skills, both productive and receptive, oral and written, tapping into phonology, lexis, grammar and discourse, (ii) the role of individual differences (including attitudes, motivation, beliefs, and intercultural awareness), and (iii) the insights on the effects of length of stay. In sum, this book represents a welcome addition to previous research on the outcomes of mobility policies to promote L2 learners’ linguistic development and the individual and educational conditions that appear to facilitate success in study abroad programs.