2014 collection (166 titles)

Exploring Second Language Creative Writing continues the work of stabilizing the emerging Creative Writing (SL) discipline. In unique ways, each essay in this book seeks to redefine a tripartite relationship between language acquisition, literatures, and identity. All essays extend B.B. Kachru’s notion of “bilingual creativity” as an enculturated, shaped discourse (a mutation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Creative Writing (SL), a new subfield to emerge from Stylistics, extends David Hanauer’s Poetry as Research (2010); situating a suite of methodologies and interdisciplinary pedagogies, researchers in this book mobilize theories from Creativity Studies, TESOL, TETL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies. Changing the relationship between L2 writers and canonized literary artefacts (from auratic to dialogic), each essay in this text is essentially Freirean; each chapter explores dynamic processes through which creative writing in a non-native language engages material and phenomenological modes toward linguistic pluricentricity and, indeed, emancipation.

Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.

Conference interpreting is a relatively young profession. Born at the dawn of the 20th century, it hastened the end of the era when diplomatic relations were dominated by a single language, and it played a critical role in the birth of a new multilingual model of diplomacy that continues to this day. In this seminal work on the genesis of conference interpreting, Jesús Baigorri-Jalón provides the profession with a pedigree based on painstaking research and supported by first-hand accounts as well as copious references to original documentation. The author traces the profession’s roots back to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, through its development at the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization, its use by the Allied and Axis powers as they decided the fate of nations in the years prior to and during World War II, and finally its debut on the world stage in 1945, at the Nuremberg Trials. Available for the first time in English, this account will be of interest not only to scholars and students of interpreting but also to any reader interested in the linguistic, social, diplomatic, and political history of the 20th century.

Despite a recent spate of publications, the valency of nouns is a topic that still remains in the shadow of the valency of verbs. This volume aims to contribute to the discussion of noun valency not only from a theoretical point of view, as is often the case, but also from an empirical one by presenting a series of studies focusing on particular questions and based on data-driven research. It explores properties of valency nouns in a variety of languages, including Bulgarian, Czech, German, Latin, Romanian, and Spanish. The specificity of this book consists in the diversity of the methodological approaches used. It includes empirical studies and it explores different theoretical frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), the Minimalist Program within Generative Grammar, Functional Generative Description (FGD), and Construction Grammar. Special attention is paid to deverbal nouns, but nouns expressing quantity and “compound-like” constructions involving relationship and interactivity are also dealt with.

This book focusses on computer methodologies as a way of investigating language and character in literary texts. Both theoretical and practical, it surveys investigations into characterization in literary linguistics and personality in social psychology, before carrying out a computational analysis of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves. Frequencies of grammatical and semantic categories in the language of the six speaking characters are analyzed using Wmatrix software developed by UCREL at Lancaster University. The quantitative analysis is supplemented by a qualitative analysis into recurring patterns of metaphor. The author concludes that these analyses successfully differentiate all six characters, both synchronically and diachronically, and claims that this methodology is also applicable to the study of personality in non-literary language. The book, written in a clear and accessible style, will be of interest to post-graduate students and academics in linguistics, stylistics, literary studies, psychology and also computational approaches.

Language, Literacy, and Learning in STEM Education brings together a range of applied linguistic researchers and projects that address the interface among language studies, science, engineering, and education. The book is premised on the concept that science is of central importance in the twenty-first century and that linguistic knowledge can contribute to the description, understanding, education, and practice of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The book introduces various linguistic methodologies and discusses ways in which these have been used to promote STEM education. It offers a first collection of such studies and a wide-ranging introduction to ways in which applied linguistics can serve as a resource for questions, projects, and issues situated within the fields of STEM. The book should be of interest to applied linguists working in STEM, as well as STEM professionals working in education and administrative or funding bodies interested in supporting and enhancing educational practices in the sciences.

In keeping with the profile of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, this volume presents and discusses issues that are central to aspects of social inequality, power, dominance and status as expressed in discourse in its broadest sense. The volume aggregates research efforts of the past years, and it constitutes a point of departure for future studies. The contributions challenge the widespread assumption that concepts such as inequality, power, dominance and status are predetermined in discourse; the volume, including contributions by international scholars from various disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and social psychology rather emphasizes the co-constructedness of these concepts in ordinary discourse and thus advances the potential for insights into how aspects of inequality, power, dominance and status are both made and understood.

This volume has been designed to promote recent research on a classic topic, relating discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of inequality in most of the social sciences and the humanities.

The volume aims at an international readership, making this book of interest to both researchers and advanced students in linguistic pragmatics, usage-based linguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology and social psychology.

This volume provides a multifaceted view of certain key themes in multilingualism research today and offers future directions for this research area in the context of the multilingual development of individuals and societies. The selection of studied languages is eclectic (e.g. Amondawa, Cantonese, Bulgarian, Dene, Dutch, Eipo, Frisian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Māori, Russian, Spanish, and Yukatek, among others), they are typologically diverse, and they are contrasted from a variety of perspectives, such as cognitive development, aging, acquisition, grammatical and lexical processing, and memory. This collection also illustrates novel insights into the linguistic relativity debate that multilingual studies can offer, such as new and revealing perspectives on some well-known topics (e.g. colour categorisation or language transfer). The critical and comprehensive discussions of theoretical and methodological considerations presented in this volume are fundamental for numerous current, future, empirical and interdisciplinary studies of linguistic diversity, linguistic typology, and multilingual processing.

This volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language, with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies, with topics ranging from phonology, modality, and grammatical morphemes, to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking, speech register, and language change. As a whole, they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical, methodological, and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years, the papers contained in this volume, both individually and collectively, have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular, as we as Japanese language teaching.

Within the field of second language acquisition, interest in the acquisition of French as a second language has a long-standing tradition, especially in the European context. The aim of this book is to offer a synthesis of current research within this area. It contains contributions from different researchers in the field, including studies on the acquisition of grammar, formulaic language, lexis and pragmatic devices, and covering interlanguage development from beginner level up to very advanced, presumably near-native levels of proficiency. The learners in the studies reported in the volume represent different L1 backgrounds and age groups. The chapters shed light on current issues in research on second language acquisition from different theoretical perspectives, and contribute to a better understanding of L2 French and SLA in general. The volume should be of interest for students, teachers and researchers of L2 French and SLA.

Originally published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition 3:1 (2012).

For many years, studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages, as with the field of child language development in general. This volume, originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012), brings together a team of researchers from China, the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It explores the development of pragmatic and discourse skills among Chinese-speaking children by investigating the development of pragmatic features specific to the Chinese language and culture (i.e. the use of null forms and overt forms in self/other reference and time expressions), socio-cultural factors in child-directed speech and comprehension of semiotic resources in children’s early childhood. The studies reported in the volume draw upon data of different kinds including recorded spontaneous speech, corpus, questionnaires and experimental data. The findings not only highlight a number of developmental patterns which may be attributed to the Chinese language(s) and culture, but also contribute to the understanding of some key issues in the development of pragmatic and discourse skills irrespective of linguistic backgrounds.

Over the last forty years, the functionalist approach to linguistic description and explanation has given rise to several major schools of thought that share two crucial assumptions: (i) form is not independent of meaning/function or language use; and (ii) linguistic description and explanation need to take into account the communicative function of language. This volume offers readers interested in functional linguistics a selected sample of studies that jointly prove the efficacy of the analytical tools and procedures broadly accepted within the functionalist tradition in order to investigate language and discourse, with special focus on key pragmatic/discourse notions such as contextualization, grammaticalisation, reference, politeness, (in-)directness, discourse markers, speech acts, subjective evaluation and sentiment analysis in texts, among others. In addition, this volume offers specific corpus-based techniques for the objective contextualisation of linguistic data, which is crucial given the central role allotted to context in both functional linguistics and pragmatics/discourse analysis.

Computational linguistics can be used to uncover mysteries in text which are not always obvious to visual inspection. For example, the computer analysis of writing style can show who might be the true author of a text in cases of disputed authorship or suspected plagiarism. The theoretical background to authorship attribution is presented in a step by step manner, and comprehensive reviews of the field are given in two specialist areas, the writings of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the various writing styles seen in religious texts. The final chapter looks at the progress computers have made in the decipherment of lost languages. This book is written for students and researchers of general linguistics, computational and corpus linguistics, and computer forensics. It will inspire future researchers to study these topics for themselves, and gives sufficient details of the methods and resources to get them started.

The contributions of this volume offer new perspectives on the relation between syntax and information structure in the history of Germanic and Romance languages, focusing on English, German, Norwegian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. In addition to discussing changes in individual languages along the syntax–information structure axis, the volume also makes a point of comparing and contrasting different languages with respect to the interplay between syntax and information structure. Since the creation of increasingly sophisticated annotated corpora of historical texts is on the agenda in many research environments, methods and schemes for information structure annotation and analysis of historical texts from a theoretical and applied perspective are discussed.

Few works in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) can endure multiple reads, but Selinker's (1972) "Interlanguage" is a clear exception. Written at the inception of the field, this paper delineates a disciplinary scope; asks penetrating questions; advances daring hypotheses; and proposes a first-ever conceptual and empirical framework that continues to stimulate SLA research. Sparked by a heightened interest in this founding text on its 40th anniversary, 10 leaders in their respective fields of SLA research collectively examine extrapolations of the seminal text for the past, the present, and the future of SLA research. This book offers a rare resource for novices and experts alike in and beyond the field of SLA.

Understanding how second language task-based performance can be raised is vital for progress with task-based approaches to instruction. The chapters in this volume all attempt to advance this understanding, and do so within a viewpoint which assumes limited attentional capacities and accounts for second language speaking based on Levelt's model of first language speaking. Six empirical chapters present original studies. They explore the topics of task planning, familiarity of information in a task, task repetition, task characteristics, and the effects of using post-task transcription. The studies interweave with and build upon each other, reflecting their conjoint focus on how second language learning memory and attention limitations shape their performance in using the target language. In the concluding chapter the accumulated findings across these studies are discussed in terms of the nature of preparation for a task, the role of task structure, the respective claims of the Tradeoff and Cognition Hypotheses, the role of selective attention, and the implications of the studies for pedagogy. The book is a central reference for students in psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and task-based language teaching.

This volume should be of great interest to phoneticians, phonologists, and both historical and cognitive linguists. Using data from the Romance languages for the most part, the book explores the phonetic motivation of several sound changes, e.g., glide insertions and elisions, vowel and consonant insertions, elisions, assimilations and dissimilations. Within the framework of the DAC (degree of articulatory constraint) model of coarticulation, it clearly demonstrates that the typology and direction of these sound changes may very largely be accounted for by the coarticulatory effects occurring between adjacent or neighbouring phonetic segments, and by the degrees of articulatory constraint imposed by speakers on the production of vowels and consonants. The phonetically-based explanations presented here are formulated on the basis of coarticulation data from speech production and perception research carried out during the last fifty years and are complemented with data on the co-occurrence of phonetic segments in lexical forms of the languages being considered. Attention is also paid to the role that positional and prosodic factors play in sound change implementation, as well as to the cognitive and peripheral strategies involved in segmental replacements, elisions and insertions.

After three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and doing things, has become an indispensable instrument for the authority to manage a fluid, increasingly fragmented, but highly dynamic and yet fragile society. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences. In particular, the volume focuses on the interplay of politics and media. The book’s intended readership is academics and students of Chinese studies, language and discourse, and media and communication studies.

Currently, one of the methodological debates in linguistics focuses on the question of what kinds of data are allowed in different linguistic theories and what subtypes of data can work as evidence for or against particular hypotheses. The first part of the volume puts forward a methodological framework called the ‘p-model’ that is expected to account for the data/evidence problem in linguistics. The aim of the case studies in the second part is to show how this framework can be applied to the everyday research practice of the working linguist, and how it can increase the effectiveness of linguistic theorising. Accordingly, the case studies exemplify that the p-model can come to grips with diverse object-scientific quandaries in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The third part includes case studies that illustrate how it copes with metascientific issues such as inconsistency in linguistic theories and the relationship between thought experiments and real experiments.

The object of this volume is the study of missionary translation practices which occur within a colonial context of political domination and spiritual conquest. Missionary translation becomes especially manifest in bilingual ethnographic descriptions, in (bilingual) catechisms and in the missionaries’ lexicographic condensation of bilingual dictionaries. The study of these instances permits the analysis and interpretation of their guiding principles, their translation practice and underlying reasoning. It also permits the modern linguist to discern semantic changes that can be revealed in these missionary translations over certain periods.

Up to now there has hardly been any study available that focuses on translation in missionary sources, of the different traditions in the Americas or Asia. This book will fill this gap, addressing the legacy of missionary translation practices and theories, the role of translation in evangelization and its particular form in the context of colonialism, the creation of loans from Spanish or Latin or equivalents or paraphrases in the indigenous languages in texts and dictionaries as translation strategies followed in bilingual editions. The process of acculturation and transculturation imposed by European religious systems is noted. This volume presents research on languages such as Nahuatl, Tarascan (Pur’épecha), Zapotec, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Pangasinán, and other Austronesian languages from the Philippines.

There is a growing awareness of the significance and value that modelling using information technology can bring to the functionally oriented linguistic enterprise. This encompasses a spectrum of areas as diverse as concept modelling, language processing and grammar modelling, conversational agents, and the visualisation of complex linguistic information in a functional linguistic perspective. This edited volume offers a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of computational modelling of language and grammars, within a functional perspective at both the theoretical and application levels. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of contemporary functionally oriented computational treatments of a variety of important language and linguistic issues. This book presents current research on functionally oriented computational models of grammar, language processing and linguistics, concerned with a broadly functional computational linguistics that also contributes to our understanding of languages within a functional and cognitive linguistic, computational research agenda.

The present collection offers fresh perspectives on the lexicon-syntax interface, drawing on novel data from South Asian languages like Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Punjabi, and Telugu. It covers different phenomena like adjectives, nominal phrases, ditransitives, light verbs, middles, passives, causatives, agreement, and pronominal clitics, while trying to settle the theoretical tensions underlying the interaction of the lexicon with the narrow syntactic component. All the chapters critically survey previous analyses in detail, suggesting how these may or may not be extended to South Asian languages. Novel explanations are proposed, which handle not only the novel data presented here, but also pave alternative ways to look at issues of minimalist architecture.

This book presents new issues in the study of the interface of emotions and language, and their use in social context. Two fundamental questions are tackled: the way different languages encode emotional information and the core role emotions play in languages' structure, use and learning. Seldom treated means of expressing emotions (such as interjections, conditionals, scalarity, allocentric constructions), the social and professional impact of emotions and the latest developments in the interface of speech recognition / emotions are some of the key contributions to this volume. The cross-cultural perspective contrasts new couples of languages (among which Australian aboriginal languages, Cypriot Greek, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) and addresses sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discursive issues. Most of the papers attempt interesting theoretical articulations that aim at a better understanding of the linguistic and sociolinguistic nature of emotions. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers interested in emotions, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as prosody and philosophy of language.

Diachronic corpus pragmatics extends the pragmatic perspective to developments in the history of various languages and uses corpus-linguistic methods to trace them. The chapters in this volume focus on linguistic elements at several levels, from individual words to phrases, clauses and entire genres and discourse forms. Using the most recent corpus tools, the authors investigate correlations between forms, functions and contexts in diachronic case studies that combine quantitative precision with close qualitative interpretation. The articles deal with different languages including English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, bringing their research traditions in pragmatics and corpus linguistics in dialogue with each other. This is the first time that such a wide range of languages has been brought together to showcase an exciting new field at the intersection of pragmatics, historical linguistics and corpus methodology.

In this tribute to Knud Lambrecht, a pioneer of Information Structure, a diverse group of scholars examines the intersection of syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and semantics. The six chapters in the first section of the volume consider issues of grammar with new theoretical and applied insights, pertaining to grammatical constructions such as left dislocation, unaccusatives, null complements, and passives. While the first half of the book presents studies involving a range of languages from Russian to Irish to Italian, the second section is dedicated to papers focused on French. These five chapters feature the application of Construction Grammar and/or Information Structure frameworks to prosody and second language processing, as well as to several distinctive spoken French constructions: clefts, left dislocations, and interrogatives. Collectively, this book offers substantial reading for those interested in the juncture of structure and context, notably a critical take on the important legacy of a preeminent linguist.