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

This is the first-ever book-length collection of articles on the subject of prosody and humor. The chapters are written by the recognized leaders in the field and present the cutting edge of the research in this new interdisciplinary field of study. The book covers a broad range of languages, using several theoretical approaches, ranging from cognitive semantic theories, to discourse analysis, and anthropology. All the contributions are anchored in instrumental empirical data analysis. The topics covered range from humor in conversation, to sitcom scripts, from riddles to intonation jokes, from irony in a laboratory setting to irony occurring in conversation, from friends’ conversations in France, to business meetings in rural Brazil. The unifying theme is the search for markers of the humorous or ironical intentions of the speakers or of the genre of interaction. Originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 19:2 (2011) and 19:3 (2011).

This book shifts the focus of Pidgin and Creole Studies from the better-known Atlantic/Caribbean contexts to the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and Mongolia. By looking at Asian contexts before and after Western colonial expansion, we offer readers insights into language contact in historical settings and with empirical features substantially different from those that have shaped the theory of the field. Two pidgin varieties of the Far East are described in detail, namely Chinese-Pidgin Russian and China Coast Pidgin. The former offers a unique opportunity to observe the typological dynamics of contact between Slavic, Tungusic and Sinitic, while the latter presents one of the better-documented studies of any pidgin so far. The third contribution is an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese India slave trade in relation to contact phenomena. The remaining two chapters look at Southeast Asia and discuss Malayo-Portuguese Creoles and the ubiquitous Malay-Sinitic lingua franca respectively. From a linguistic perspective the diversity of language families, the historical time depth, the complex patterns of population movements, and the wealth of contact phenomena that define Asia are so many and at times still so little understood that no single volume could ever pretend to shed sufficient light on all these aspects of the region. Despite providing what can be seen as a sample platter of the field of contact linguistics in this part of the world, the in-depth analysis of exotic socio-historical settings, the typologically diverse and rich data sets, and the notions of pidgins and Creoles as applied here will nonetheless stretch the limits and limitations of current theories in the field, and are a must read for anyone interested in arriving at solid theoretical generalizations.

Published earlier as Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 25:1, 2010.

Semantic relations are at the core of any representational system, and are keys to enable the next generation of information processing systems with semantic and reasoning capabilities. Acquisition, description, and formalization of semantic relations are fundamentals in computer-based systems where natural language processing is required. Probing Semantic Relations provides a state of the art of current research trends in the area of knowledge extraction from text using linguistic patterns. First published as a Special Issue of Terminology 14:1 (2008), the current book emphasizes how definitional knowledge is conveyed by conceptual and semantic relations such as synonymy, causality, hypernymy (generic–specific), and meronymy (part–whole). Showing the difficulties and successes of pattern-based approaches, the book illustrates current and future challenges in knowledge acquisition from text. This book provides new perspectives to researchers and practitioners in terminology, knowledge engineering, natural language processing, and semantics.

Robert Bran­dom’s Making it Explicit (1994) marks a Copernican turn in the philosophy of mind and language, as this collection of critical essays together with Brandom’s enlightening answers convincingly shows. Though faithful to Witt­genstein’s prag­ma­tic turn in spirit, Brandom gives a systematic account of human sapience as a whole – by grounding our relation to the world by words on our discursive practice, assessing its nor­mative basis, which is instituted by scorekeeping activities and sanctioning attitudes, and thus trying to avoid mystifying mentalism as well as dogmatic naturalism in our account of the human spirit. The topics emphasized in this volume concern the place of Brandom’s inferentialist and normative semantics in 20^th century philosophy of language (Frege, Carnap, Quine), also in comparison to cognitive linguistics (Chomsky), instrumentalist pragmatism and functionalist understanding of the use of signs (Sellars), deflation of intentionality (Brentano), the logical analysis of predicative structures (Kant), the role of constructions for understanding, the constitution of objectivity by de-re-ascriptions and the problem of anti-representationalism, or how to treat malapropisms (Davidson).This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (13:1, 2005)