Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

The Art of Commemoration focuses on a particular historical event that illustrates how nations define their own identities and establish mutual relations in their discourse: the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 and its Commemoration in 1994. This Commemoration was an innovative and unique form of transnational communication because it brought together representative speakers from all parties involved. They considered the commemorated event from different perspectives: the victim (Poland), the former enemy (Germany) and the former allies (England, USA, France and other countries, as well as Russia which liberated Poland but had not supported the Uprising). A letter from the Pope added a Catholic perspective.

The ‘art of commemoration’ consists in invoking the past events from one’s own perspective while simultaneously considering the other perspectives, as well as in making sense of the past and present at the same time. This volume analyses the artful way in which the speakers coped with these complexities in a full discourse analytic reconstruction of each address.

Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics provides readers with a much-needed insight into the development of pragmatic competence, an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics. The longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments. The analysis focuses on developments in these learners’ knowledge of discourse structure, pragmatic routines and internal modification. Findings present valuable information pertaining to the process of acquisition of pragmatic competence. They also point to the favourable but imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. A comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, an in-depth analysis and an extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, German as a foreign language and study abroad research.

Asymmetry in Grammar: Syntax and Semantics brings to fore the centrality of asymmetry in DP, VP and CP. A finer grained articulation of the DP is proposed, and further functional projections for restrictive relatives, as well as a refined analyses of case identification and presumptive pronouns. The papers on VP discuss further asymmetries among arguments, and between arguments and adjuncts. Double-object constructions, specificational copula sentences, secondary predicates, and the scope properties of adjuncts are discussed in this perspective. The papers on CP propose a further articulation of the phrasal projection, justifications for Remnant IP movement, and an analysis of variation in clause structure asymmetries. The papers in semantics support the hypothesis that interpretation is a function of configurational asymmetry. The type/token information difference is further argued to correspond to the partition between the upper and lower level of the phrase. It is also proposed that Point of View Roles are not primitives of the pragmatic component, but are head-dependent categories. Configurationality is further argued to be required to distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive Topic. Compositionality is proposed to explain cross-linguistic variations in the selectional behavior of typologically different languages.



The papers in syntax include contributions from Antonia Androutsopoulou and Manuel Español-Echevarría, Dana Isac, Edit Jakab, Cedric Boeckx, Julie Anne Legate, Maria Cristina Cuervo, Jacqueline Guéron, Niina Zhang, Thomas Ernst, Manuela Ambar, Jean-Yves Pollock, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Ilena Paul and Stanca Somesfalean.The papers on semantics include contributions of Greg Carlson,Peggy Speas and Carol Tenny, Chungmin Lee, and James Pustejovsky.

Diana Boxer’s Applying Sociolinguistics: Domains and Face-to-Face Interaction is an up-to-date overview of discourse studies in oral interaction. Its focus is on encounters in the various spheres of life: family, educational, social, religious, and work, with an additional chapter on cross-cultural face-to-face interaction in these domains. Each chapter reviews current research in that specific domain, with particular attention to methodological issues. For example, in-depth explanations are offered to the reader on how the various approaches to studying face-to-face discourse (e.g. ethnographic, conversational analytic, interactional sociolinguistic) lend themselves to answering different research questions. Each chapter also culminates with an original analysis by the author of face-to-face interaction in that particular domain. Topics include: nagging in family interaction; bragging and boasting in workplace interaction; sarcasm in educational interaction; joking and teasing in social interaction; rite-of-passage discourse in religious interaction; and gatekeeping discourse in cross-cultural interaction.

Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of first word meanings; memory and related processing capacities in early word learning and understanding; and lexical representation and lexical access in early language production.

The papers on syntactic development deal with the acquisition of grammatical prosodic features for learning language specific syntactic regularities.Volume 2 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on the interaction between the development of prosodic and morphosyntactic knowledge as evidenced in the early speech of Dutch, English, German, Portugese, Spanish, Danish, Islandic, and Swedish children shedding new light on the relation between universal and language specific aspects of language acquisition. Another section of this volume deals with new approaches to language acquisition using ERP- techniques. The papers discuss in detail the relation between the development of language skills and changes in neurophysiological aspects of the brain. The potentials of these techniques for the development of new tools for an early diagnosis of children who are at risque for developmental language disorders are also pointed out.

The closing section contains a synopsis of interactionist approaches to language acquisition, a discussion of the genetic and experiential origin of primitive linguistic elements in acquisition, and a discussion of structural and developmental aspects of bird song in comparison to human language.

The two volumes making up Approaches to Bootstrapping present a state-of-the art interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic overview of recent developments in first language acquisition research.

With the explosion in the quantity of on-line text and multimedia information in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in automatic summarization. This book provides a systematic introduction to the field, explaining basic definitions, the strategies used by human summarizers, and automatic methods that leverage linguistic and statistical knowledge to produce extracts and abstracts. Drawing from a wealth of research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information retrieval, the book also includes detailed assessments of evaluation methods and new topics such as multi-document and multimedia summarization. Previous automatic summarization books have been either collections of specialized papers, or else authored books with only a chapter or two devoted to the field as a whole. This is the first textbook on the subject, developed based on teaching materials used in two one-semester courses. To further help the student reader, the book includes detailed case studies, accompanied by end-of-chapter reviews and an extensive glossary.Audience: students and researchers, as well as information technology managers, librarians, and anyone else interested in the subject.

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the “real time acquisition” of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.

An understanding of genres in communication (written and spoken) is essential to professional success. This volume studies situationally appropriate responses in professional communication in face-to-face interaction and distance communication, from a socio-cognitive point of view. A traditional rhetorical approach does not give much insight in the ways in which genres are embedded in communicative activity or how actors draw upon genre knowledge to perform effectively. However, if genres are considered as embedded in social interaction “as typified forms of typified circumstances”, the rich dynamic aspects of genre knowledge can be disclosed.

The chapters deal with genre knowledge in various settings, illustrating the impact of time, place, medium, skills and purpose, and some chapters deal with genre analysis in a broader sense giving ideas for applied genre analysis.

The book is of interest to professionals and scholars in communication studies, discourse analysis, and social and cognitive science.

The concept of ‘animacy’ concerns the fundamental and cognitive question of the extent to which we recognize and express living things as saliently human-like or animal-like.

In Animacy and Reference Mutsumi Yamamoto pursues two main objectives: First, to establish a conceptual framework of animacy, and secondly, to explain how the concept of animacy can be reflected in the use of referential expressions. Unlike previous studies on the subject focussing on grammatical manifestations, Animacy and Reference sheds light upon the conceptual properties of animacy itself and its reflection in referential processes.

For the research of this study the author focussed on languages that show completely different tendencies. As a result, English and Japanese ‘parallel corpora’ are analysed yielding salient observations and opening intriguing discussions.

Approaching Dialogue has its primary focus on the theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of talk-in-interaction. It deals with conversation in general as well as talk within institutions against a backdrop of Conversation Analysis, context-based discourse analysis, social pragmatics, socio-cultural theory and interdisciplinary dialogue analysis.

People’s communicative projects, and the structures and functions of talk-in-interaction, are analyzed from the most local sequences to the comprehensive communicative activity types and genres. A second aim of the book is to explore the possibilities and limitations of dialogism as a general epistemology for cognition and communication. On this point, it portrays the dialogical approach as a major alternative to the mainstream theories of cognition as individually-based information processing, communication as information transfer, and language as a code. Stressing aspects of interaction, joint construction and cultural embeddedness, and drawing upon extensive theoretical and empirical research carried out in different traditions, this book aims at an integrating synthesis. It is largely interdisciplinary in nature, and has been written in such a way that it can be used at advanced undergraduate courses in linguistics, sociopragmatics of language, communication studies, sociology, social psychology and cognitive science.

About the author: Per Linell holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and has been professor within the interdisciplinary graduate program of Communication Studies at the University of Linköping, Sweden, since 1981. He has published widely in the fields of discourse studies and social pragmatics of language.

The advent of Franz Boas on the North American scene irrevocably redirected the course of Americanist anthropology. This volume documents the revolutionary character of the theoretical and methodological standpoint introduced by Boas and his first generation of students, among whom linguist Edward Sapir was among the most distinguished. Virtually all of the classic Boasians were at least part-time linguists alongside their ethnological work. During the crucial transitional period beginning with the founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, there were as many continuities as discontinuities between the work of Boas and that of John Wesley Powell and his Bureau. Boas shared with Powell a commitment to the study of aboriginal languages, to a symbolic definition of culture, to ethnography based on texts, to historical reconstruction on linguistic grounds, and to mapping the linguistic and cultural diversity of native North America. The obstacle to Boas’s vision of anthropology was not the Bureau but the archaeological and museum establishment centred in Washington, D.C. and in Boston. Moreover, the “scientific revolution” was concluded not when Boas began to teach at Columbia University in New York in 1897 but around 1920 when first generation Boasians cominated the discipline in institutional as well as theoretical terms. The impact of Boas is explored in terms of theoretical positions, interactional networks of scholars, and institutions within which anthropological work was carried out. The volume shows how collaboration of universities and museums gradually gave way to an academic centre for anthropology in North America, in line with the professionalization of American science along German lines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The author is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Adverbs of degree form an intriguing part of the lexicon: numerous, multiform and everchanging. They also show a great variety in distribution. In this study, the characteristics of adverbs of degree are investigated from a semantic point of view. The main focus is on Dutch, but previous studies about English and German adverbs of degree are used to compare with and to build on.

The book starts with an introduction on grading and gradability, and a classification of the adverbs according to the degree they express. Next, the different lexical sources from which the adverbs emerge and the process of grammaticalization are discussed. The main part of the book is devoted to semantic restrictions on the use of adverbs of degree, on the one hand restrictions concerning the modified elements, on the other hand those concerning the environment. Topics include absoluteness versus gradability, positive versus negative evaluation, the strengthening of negation, polarity sensitivity, the logical properties of the adverbs themselves, and restrictions to reduplication and stacking.

Besides the main text, three case studies are presented in which the pecularities of some of the adverbs are investigated in depth, to show more in detail to complexities of their distribution. The appendix gives an overview of Dutch adverbs of degree.

This monograph investigates a number of central issues in the Syntax of Adverbs with special reference to Greek in the light of Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetry Hypothesis. It examines the conditions on the placement of the various adverb types, their licensing requirements, and their relation to adjectives. The author advances an analysis according to which adverbs are licensed as Specifiers of functional projections in the clausal domain. As such, they enter a matching relation with the relevant features of the respective functional head. Adverbs are either directly merged at the relevant functional projection (for instance Aspectual and Speaker Oriented adverbs) or alternatively they are moved to this position from the complement domain of the verb (for instance manner adverbs). Furthermore, the volume examines the phenomenon of Adverb Incorporation. It is proposed that Incorporation is obligatory for those VP internal Adverbs which are 'structuraly non-complex' in Chomsky's 1995 terms. Finally, the similarities and differences between adverbs and adjectives, clausal and nominal structure are investigated and a number of asymmetries between the two are highlighted.

This book discusses the first language acquisition of three morphosyntactic mechanisms of transitivity alternation in arctic Quebec Inuktitut. Data derive from naturalistic longitudinal spontaneous speech samples collected over a nine-month period from four Inuit children. Both basic and advanced forms of passive structures are shown to be used productively by Inuktitut-speaking children at an early age relative to English-speaking children, but consistent in age with speakers of non-Indo-European languages reported on in the literature; potential explanations of this difference include frequency of caregiver input and details of language structure. Morphological causatives appear slightly later in the acquisition sequence, and their first instances reflect use of unanalyzed routines. Lexical causatives are present from the earliest ages studied. Evidence of a period of overgeneralization of lexical causatives in one subject at the same time as the morphological causative shows signs of being productively acquired suggests that the seeming overgeneralization may reflect nothing more than as yet unstable use of the morphological causative. Noun incorporation structures are shown to be used productively by Inuktitut-speaking children at an early age relative to Mohawk-speaking children; potential explanations of this difference include details of language structure and relative language use in the environments of the learners. Findings are considered in light of current debates in the literature concerning continuity versus maturation of grammatical structure, and concerning the functional categories available to the child at early stages of acquisition. Data presented argue against late maturation, and suggest that all functional categories may be accessed by the Inuktitut-speaking child early in the acquisition process.

This comprehensive study of Anglicisms in the context of accelerated neological activity in Contemporary Metropolitan French not only provides detailed documentation and description of a fascinating topic, but opens up new vistas on issues of general linguistic interest: the effects of technology on language, the analyticity-syntheticity controversy, the lexical contribution to language vitality, the study of compound word formation, the interplay between cultural and linguistic affectivity. By investigating the dynamics of borrowing within the larger framework of general neological productivity and by bringing to bear cognitive and pragmatic considerations, a much-needed fresh approach to the entire question of Anglicisms takes shape. All pertinent phenomena regarding Anglicisms in French — a topic which continues to command the attention of language commentators and defenders in France and elsewhere — are explored: integral borrowings, semantic calques, structural calques, the generation of pseudo-Anglicisms and hybrids, graphological and phonological phenomena. In each case, the phenomenon is investigated in the proper context of its interaction with other pertinent neological, phonological and sociocultural developments. These include general changes in French compound word formation, modified derivational dynamics, the microsystem of pseudo-Classical morphology, historic phonological instabilities, the pressure for more synthetic types of lexical production in relation to the needs of technology and society. Rather than adhering rigidly to any single theoretical model, there is an attempt to set up a dialog between differing models in order to arrive at a multidimensional view of the phenomena investigated.

The papers in this volume were presented at the Fifth Biennial Symposium of the Department of Linguistics, Rice University, March 1993. The participants were asked to concentrate in depth and in a self-reflective way upon some range of data. The intent was multifold. The first purpose was descriptive. It was expected that the participants would carry out their task in a retrospective way, exemplifying and building upon their previous work, but it was also expected that they would begin to demonstrate the configuration of some area in a more comprehensive picture of language. The point was to take (at least) one substantive step in the depiction of what we think language will ultimately be like. The contributions were both specific and generalizing, with focus as much upon methodology as upon hypotheses about language. In examining descriptive practice, we continued to concentrate upon issues which concerned us all, and at the same time we tried to advance the discourse by the results of such description. We hoped that problematic and recalcitrant data would make our own practice clearer to us and that it might also instruct us in the refinement of our conceptions of language.

The aim of the book is to collect and make available to the public recent studies on Roumanian in the framework of Generative Grammar. All the studies can be considered as highly advanced from both the empirical and the theoretical point of view. In fact, they deal with many of the phenomena that differentiate this language from other well-studied ones, adopting and further improving recent developments in linguistic theory. In this respect the book contributes both to Roumanian studies and to theoretical linguistics. These studies cover major areas of general syntactic investigation: the syntax of nominal expressions (Giusti on determiners, Grosu on free relative clauses), clausal structure (Motapanyane), clitic placement (Dobrovie-Sorin), and morpho-semantics (Farkaş and Zec). In so doing, they address the problems of the definition and refinement of the theory of functional projections, contributing new ideas and evidence for their formulation.

This study investigates the properties of several ancient syllabic and linear segmental scripts to make explicit the aspects of linguistic knowledge they attempt to represent. Some recent experimental work suggests that nonliterate speakers do not have segmental knowledge and that only syllabic knowledge is 'real' or accessible, whence the ubiquity of syllabaries. Miller disputes this by showing that such tests do not distinguish relevant types of knowledge, and that linguistic analysis of the ordering and writing conventions of early Western scripts corroborates the evidence from language acquisition, use, and change for segment awareness. By coding segments, the ancient syllabaries represented more phonological knowledge than the alphabet, which was a poor compromise between the vowelless West Semitic scripts and the vowel-redundant syllabic scripts.

A wide range of information about early scripts and their development is combined with a new theory of the syllable as 'Sonority Phrase'. The book's value is further enhanced by thorough discussion of the issues from a broad range of theoretical and applied viewpoints, including language play and change, cognition, literacy, and cultural history.

This work is based on an investigation of language acquisition process, particularly in regard to syntax, among Mauritian children learning to speak Mauritian Creole as their first language. As such, it is the first major study of the development of child grammar in a Creole context. Mauritian Creole, in common with many Creole languages, emerged under extreme conditions and, as an isolating language, Mauritian Creole is typologically different from languages where syntax is predominantly tied to morphology. There is thus an opportunity to broaden perspectives on language acquisition since until now most work has focused on languages such as English, French, German, Italian. The analysis proceeds within the GB framework of generative grammar, and discussion emanates from psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and theoretical linguistic viewpoints. The data also provide a means for evaluating Bickerton's theory, especially his conclusion that the acquisition of radical Creoles takes place with fewer errors than is the case for other languages, given that Creole languages are in harmony with the 'Bioprogram'.

This volume on nonverbal communication studies, the most multi- and interdisciplinary contribution to this field in almost twenty years, offers numerous suggestions for further research in many hitherto unexplored areas. The twenty contributions include the most recent theoretical and empirical crosscultural studies of gestures from historical, communicative and sociopsychological perspectives. In addition the volume presents novel psychological and clinical studies of nonverbal behaviors in connection with, for instance, aphasias and children's experience of artificial limbs. A whole section is devoted to nonverbal communication in literature and literary translation, and a discussion of art and literature, which opens new avenues for literary analysis and a better understanding of reading as a recreational experience. A unique feature is a discussion of Nonverbal Communication Studies as an academic area (including detailed outlines of three current courses), complemented by an extensive bibliography.

This volume presents research on major issues in syntactic theory within Role and Reference Grammar. This theory was first presented in detail in Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar [FSUG], and these papers represent both expansions and applications of the theory to a wide range of phenomena. The first section contains an introduction to the theory which is the most thorough statement of it since FSUG, summarizing the features of Role and Reference Grammar established there and developing new theoretical components and analyses of syntactic phenomena not discussed in the earlier work. Throughout the discussion features of RRG are compared and contrasted with comparable features of other syntactic theories. The remainder of the volume is devoted to detailed analyses of specific problems, e.g. control, case marking, in a wide variety of languages, e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Nootka, Mparntwe Arrernte and Turkish. Thus the works presented here illustrate well the strong cross-linguistic approach to syntactic theory and description in Role and Reference Grammar.

The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues.

The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.

La classification des signes de C.S. Peirce en icones, indices et symboles est universellement reconnue. Est-ce le resultat d'une heureuse rencontre ou la preuve de la pertinence du système de pensée qui l'a produite? Est-ce l'absence d'une présentation scientifique de la sémiotique de Peirce qui autorise cette interrogation? Cet essai montre précisément, au moyen d'une formalisation qui épouse au plus près le contenu des manuscrits de Peirce, la possibilité d'approcher scientifiquement les phénomènes sémiotiques. Partant d'une formalisation de la perception en termes de structures relationnelles, l'auteur réconstruit l'ensemble des conceptions phénoménologiques et sémiotiques de C.S. Peirce, retrouve et discute toutes ses taxinomies et va au-delà en montrant l'existence de structures d'ordre naturelles (treillis) sur les ensembles de classes de signes. Une méthodologie d'analyse des signes complexes en découle et est appliquée notamment a la théâtrologie, l'idéologie, l'épistémologie, l'ethnométhodologie...La semiosis est décrite comme un processus impliquant des communautés humaines par le biais des institutions et des habitus. Une annexe rassemble 76 textes de Peirce définissant le signe dont un grand nombre sont inedits.

Three features set this book apart from other recent publications on aspect. First, it looks closely at the language family, Slavic, that has been the main source of assumptions and data about aspect. Second, it looks upon the object of linguistic study, natural language, from an angle shared by thinkers on language whose prominence is still outside linguistics: Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida. Third, the exploratory and contrastive account of aspect in Indic, chiefly in Bengali, which will no doubt evoke reactions from experts in these languages.

Since the pioneering analyses of Renward Brandstetter (1860–1942) a quasi-morphological element called the ‘root’ has been recognized in Austronesian linguistics. This monograph confronts many of the methodological and substantive issues raised but never fully resolved by Brandstetter. In an effort to reassess the value of his work for contemporary linguistics the author examines Brandstetter’s methods and results, and applies a modified from of this approach to new material. The study establishes 230 roots based on more than 2,560 root tokens in some 117 languages. It is thus intended to serve as a rudimentary root dictionary and a basic handbook on the subject of the root for future scholars of Austronesian.