Benjamins Current Topics (vols. 1–81, 2007–2015)

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009), this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. Historical sociopragmatics has a central focus on historical language use in its situational contexts, and how those situational contexts engender norms which speakers engage or exploit for pragmatic purposes. The chapters represent a range of ways in which historical sociopragmatics can be understood and investigated. The reader will find English texts from the 15th century through to the 18th, a variety of genres (including personal correspondence, trial proceedings and plays), and both qualitative and (corpus-based) quantitative analyses. Importantly, attention is given to how contexts can be (re)constructed from written records, a sine qua non of the field. It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in pragmatics, especially socially-oriented pragmatics, and/or historical linguistics, especially the history of English.

The use of technology in learning has increased dramatically. Training and education is now utilizing and almost integrated with the World Wide Web, podcasts, mobile and distant learning, interactive videos, serious games, and a whole range of e-learning. However, has such technology enhanced learning been effective? And how can it better serve training and education?E-learning must be 'brain friendly', so it optimizes learning to the cognitive architecture of the learners. If technology enhanced learning promotes the formation of effective mental representations and works with the human cognitive system, then the learners will not only be able to acquire information more efficiently, but they will also remember it better and use it. Technology should not be the driving force in shaping e-learning, but rather how that technology can better serve the cognitive system.

This volume, originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 16:2 (2008) and partly in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:1 (2009), explores the research frontiers in cognition and learning technology. It provides important theoretical insights into these issues, as well as very practical implications of how to make e-learning more brain friendly and effective.

First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting (10:1, 2008) and complemented with two articles published in Interpreting (12:1, 2010), this volume provides a panoramic view of the complex and uniquely constrained practice of court interpreting. In an array of empirical papers, the nine authors explore the potential of court interpreters to make or break the proceedings, from the perspectives of the minority language speaker and of the other participants. The volume offers thoughtful overviews of the tensions and conflicts typically associated with the practice of court interpreting. It looks at the attitudes of judicial authorities towards interpreting, and of interpreters towards the concept of a code of ethics. With further themes such as the interplay of different groups of "linguists" at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the language rights of indigenous communities, it opens novel perspectives on the study of interpreting at the interface between the letter of the law and its implementation.

Somewhere and somehow, in the 5 to 7 million years since the last common ancestors of humans and the great apes, our ancestors “got” language. The authors of this volume all agree that there was no single mutation or cultural innovation that took our ancestors directly from a limited system of a few vocalizations (primarily innate) and gestures (some learned) to language. They further agree to use the term “protolanguage” for the beginnings of an open system of symbolic communication that provided the bridge to the use of fully expressive languages, rich in both lexicon and grammar. But here consensus ends, and the theories presented here range from the compositional view that protolanguage was based primarily on words akin to the nouns and verbs, etc., we know today with only syntax lacking to the holophrastic view that protolanguage used protowords which had no meaningful subunits which might nonetheless refer to complex but significantly recurrent events.

The present volume does not decide the matter but it does advance our understanding. The lack of any direct archaeological record of protolanguage might seem to raise insuperable difficulties. However, this volume exhibits the diversity of methodologies that can be brought to bear in developing datasets that can be used to advance the debate.

These articles were originally published as Interaction Studies 9:1 (2008).

This collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks. The series of reflections and specialized meanings uncovered in these texts are closely tied to particular sequences of patterned chunks in language and offer exciting insights into the inseparability of lexis and grammar.

The contributions to this volume were previously published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13:3 (2008).

“Let the meta-discussion begin,” James Holmes urged in 1972. Coming almost forty years later – years filled with fascinating and often unexpected developments in the interdiscipline of Translation Studies – this volume offers the reader a multiplicity of meta-perspectives, while also moving the discussion forward. Indeed, the (re)production and (re)use of metalinguistic metaphors frame and partly determine our views on research, so such a discussion is vital ­as it is in any scholarly discipline. Among other questions, the eleven contributors draw the reader’s attention to the often puzzling variations of usage and conceptualization in both the theory and the practice of translation.

First published as a special issue of Target 19:2 (2007), the volume runs the gamut of metalinguistic topics, ranging from terminology, localization and epistemological questions, through the Chinese perspective, to the conceptual mapping of the online Translation Studies Bibliography.

Named Entities provides critical information for many NLP applications. Named Entity recognition and classification (NERC) in text is recognized as one of the important sub-tasks of Information Extraction (IE). The seven papers in this volume cover various interesting and informative aspects of NERC research. Nadeau & Sekine provide an extensive survey of past NERC technologies, which should be a very useful resource for new researchers in this field. Smith & Osborne describe a machine learning model which tries to solve the over-fitting problem. Mazur & Dale tackle a common problem of NE and conjunction; as conjunctions are often a part of NEs or appear close to NEs, this is an important practical problem. A further three papers describe analyses and implementations of NERC for different languages: Spanish (Galicia-Haro & Gelbukh), Bengali (Ekbal, Naskar & Bandyopadhyay), and Serbian (Vitas, Krstev & Maurel). Finally, Steinberger & Pouliquen report on a real WEB application where multilingual NERC technology is used to identify occurrences of people, locations and organizations in newspapers in different languages.

The contributions to this volume were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes 30:1 (2007).

Lexical cohesion is about meaning in text. It concerns the ways in which lexical items relate to each other and to other cohesive devices so that textual continuity is created. Traditionally, lexical cohesion (along with other types of cohesion) has been investigated in individual texts. With the advent of corpus techniques, however, there is potential to investigate lexical cohesion with reference to large corpora. This collection of papers illustrates a variety of corpus approaches to lexical cohesion. Contributions deal with lexical cohesion in relation to rhetorical structure, lexical bundles and discourse signalling, discourse intonation, semantic prosody, use of signalling nouns, and corpus linguistic theory. The volume also considers implications that innovative approaches to lexical cohesion can have for language teaching. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics volume 11:3 (2006).

Our species has been a maker and user of tools for over two million years, but "cognitive technology" began with language. Cognition is thinking, and thinking has been "distributed" for at least the two hundred millennia that we have been using speech to interact and collaborate, allowing us to do collectively far more than any of us could have done individually. The invention of writing six millennia ago and print six centuries ago has distributed cognition still more widely and quickly, among people as well as their texts. But in recent decades something radically new has been happening: Advanced cognitive technologies, especially computers and the Worldwide Web, are beginning to redistribute cognition in unprecedented ways, not only among people and static texts, but among people and dynamical machines. This not only makes possible new forms of human collaboration, but new forms of cognition. This book examines the nature and prospects of distributed cognition, providing a conceptual framework for understanding it, and showcasing case studies of its development. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (14:2, 2006).

Research into gestures represents a multifaceted field comprising a wide range of disciplines and research topics, varying methods and approaches, and even different species such as humans, apes and monkeys. The aim of this volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 5:1/2 (2005)) is to bring together the research in gestural communication in both nonhuman and human primates and to explore the potential of a comparative approach and its contribution to the question of an evolutionary scenario in which gestures play a significant role. The topics covered include the spontaneous natural gesture use in social groups of apes and monkeys, but also during interactions with humans, gestures of preverbal children and their interaction with language, speech-accompanying gestures in humans as well as the use of sign-language in human and nonhuman great apes. It addresses researchers with a background in Psychology, Primatology, Linguistics, and Anthropology, but it might also function as an introduction and a documentation state of the art for a wider less specialised audience which is fascinated by the role gestures might have played in the evolution of human language.

Technology has long been a helpful aid in human cognitive activities. With its growing sophistication and usage, technology is now taking a more intrinsic and active role in human cognition. The shift from an external aid to being an internal component of cognitive processing reflects a revolution in technology, cognition, and their interaction. The creation of such ‘cognitive technologies’ transforms the traditional instrumental function of technology to a constitutive role that shapes and defines cognition itself. This book, which was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition 13:3 (2005), explores the new horizon of these ‘cognitive technologies’ and their interactions with humans.

What counts as evidence in linguistics? This question is addressed by the contributions to the present volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Studies in Language 28:3 (2004). Focusing on the innateness debate, what is illustrated is how formal and functional approaches to linguistics have different perspectives on linguistic evidence. While special emphasis is paid to the status of typological evidence and universals for the construction of Universal Grammar (UG), this volume also highlights more general issues such as the roles of (non)-standard language and historical evidence. To address the overall topic, the following three guiding questions are raised: What type of evidence can be used for innateness claims (or UG)?; What is the content of such innate features (or UG)?; and, How can UG be used as a theory guiding empirical research? A combination of articles and peer commentaries yields a lively discussion between leading representatives of formal and functional approaches.

First published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Politics 5:1 (2006), this collection of papers focuses, from a number of different disciplinary perspectives, on aspects of language and communication in official processes of dealing with traumatic pasts. It is a text that belongs to the genre of talking about pain, about state violence, about uncovering suppressed truths. Linguists and a number of other social scientists investigate discourses, mostly ones generated during hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), scrutinizing them for how trauma is articulated and sometimes overcome, for how confrontational discourses are publicly managed, for how, after gross human rights violations, reconciliation can be mediated. Language is viewed as an instrument of confronting a traumatic past, of negotiating conflict, and of initiating processes of healing for individuals as well as in communities.

Social stimuli are important proximate determinants of human thought, action, and behaviour. But does the social environment also have deeper, profounder, and possibly more distal impact on more lasting psychological structures and forms, generalizing across time and domains, such as traits, self-consciousness, abilities, and talents? This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of if, how, and how far the mind is socially fabricated: Philosophical contributions address conceptual tools for analyses of how person perceivers shape the psychological structures of the person perceived. Social psychologists consider some of the more local mechanisms of “mind making”, including self fulfilling prophecies, attributions, and self-verification. Moreover, they address the dramatic consequences of being ostracised. From a clinical perspective it is investigated how patients’ immediate social environment (e.g., the family) impacts on schizophrenic relapse. In addition, developmental psychologists report on investigations of the role of social factors, e.g., imitative learning, for the development of the social self. Finally an ethological perspective demonstrates the susceptibility of animals to social stimuli. These papers were previously published as Interaction Studies 6:1 and 6:3 (2005).

The contributions in this book discuss letter-writing from 1400 to 1800, and the material studied ranges from the late medieval Paston Letters and the correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse to Early Modern English family letters and correspondence in natural history between England and North America in the eighteenth century. By bringing a set of corpus linguistic, discourse analytic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity, the articles both extend and complement the traditional letter-writing research in the history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical perspective.

The articles in this book were first published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5:2 (2004), share a contextualised view of letters: whether approached from the perspective of language contact, social and discursive practices, intertextuality, audience design or linguistic politeness, letters are analysed as part of their specific familial, business or scientific network. Writing letters thus emerges as highly context-sensitive social interaction.