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

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.

This collection of critical essays, originally published in Pragmatics and Society 1:2 (2010), discusses how normative biases that shape our relation to the world are constructed through discursive practice in media discourse. The intertextual perspective it adopts is crucial for our understanding of how media representations of speakers and languages shape many of our preconceptions of others. Mediatization is inherently intertextual; the very nature of this process involves extracting the speech behavior of particular speakers or groups from a highly specific context and refracting and reshaping it to be inserted in another stream of representation. The notion of intertextuality becomes a useful concept for the linguistic anthropological study of media discourse in the context of modernity, as it provides us with a tool for exploring the semiotic processes that underlie the way in which the media negotiate and reinscribe the complex relationships of identity that characterize late modern subjecthood.

This volume, which was originally published in Terminology 15:1 (2009), presents and reflects on experiences dealing with terminology training, from a theoretical, practical and professional perspective. Terminology is part of the programmes of several (post)graduate courses, such as Translating and Interpreting, Applied Languages, Information Science and other disciplines. Especially terminology practice has changed drastically over the years and training in terminology must adapt to this new reality. Drawing on years of experience in teaching this subject at various academic levels and in diverse ways, we explore what to teach about terminology, how to teach it, how it is learned, what experiences are put into practice with what result, and how to connect the knowledge taught at universities and other institutions to the practical skills that are required from professionals in different areas, e.g. translators, information scientists, knowledge engineers, with respect to their knowledge of terminology.

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed, multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically, it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its socio-cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke (in brain and word), and solving insight problems. Theoretically, the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First, it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third, this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth, it is argued that language, far from being organism-centred, gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment. The contributions to this volume expand on those originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:3 (2009).

We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

China’s emergence has generated a wave of interest in interpreting and interpreter training. First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting (11:2, 2009) this collection of papers by six leading researchers from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, some based on recent PhDs, explores topics as diverse as historical conceptions of the interpreter’s role, interaction with linguistic minorities, methods for training and assessment, and negotiating hazards like speed, register or the cultural divide in conference, courtroom and community. The volume also includes an Editor’s foreword contextualising the Chinese interpreting scene for the international reader, an overview of the fast evolving landscape of interpreter training and research in China, and two critical reviews of textbooks used in home-grown training programmes.

Gestures are prevalent in communication and tightly linked to language and speech. As such they can shed important light on issues of language development across the lifespan. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture Volume 8:2 (2008), brings together studies from different disciplines that examine language development in children and adults from varying perspectives. It provides a review of common theoretical and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically and atypically developing children and in second language learners, what gestures reveal about discourse, and how all languages that adult second language speakers know can influence each other. The papers exemplify a vibrant new field of study with relevance for multiple disciplines.

Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets.

These articles were originally published in Studies in Language 32:3 (2008).

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.