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

Significant socio-political changes in China have had great impact on Chinese discourse. Changes to the discourse have become an increasing focus of scholarship. This book examines contemporary Chinese discourse and social practice in China with a focus on the role that language plays in the on-going transformation of Chinese society. With a view to producing new insights into the interdependence between discourse and social practice, this volume explores how discourse has been changing in a context-dependent way; how social practice can lead to shifts in the use of discourse; and how identities and attitudes are constructed through language use. Largely based on empirical studies, this book indicates that Chinese discourse has not only been an integral part of social change, but also Chinese discourse itself is changing, reflecting ideologies, values, attitudes, identities and social practice. The book is a great resource for scholars in diverse disciplinary studies including linguistics, communication, education, media and political studies concerning contemporary China.

This volume explores the dynamics of genre conventions in historical English news discourse. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of news writing and publication formats: from corantos to modern tabloids, from prototypical hard news stories and crime reports to more specialised genres such as medical and scientific news, advertisements, death notices and spoof news. Investigating linguistic, pragmatic and social factors, the authors trace the triggers, mechanisms and agents of change that have shaped genre conventions in historical news discourse from the 17th century to the present day.

This monograph develops a new socio-cognitive theory of sense-making for analyzing the creative management of situated social meaning. Drawing on cognitive-linguistic and social-interactional heuristics in an innovative way, the book both theorizes and demonstrates how embodied cognizers create complex situated conceptualizations of self and other, which guide and support their interactions. It shows how these sense-making processes are managed through the coordinated social interaction of two (or more) communicative partners.

To illustrate the theory, the book draws on two distinct data sets: front-desk tourist-information transactions and online-workgroup discussions. It scrutinizes how the communicative partners use verbal humour as a powerful strategy to creatively establish a situated social image for themselves.

This book addresses specialists and advanced students in the areas of cognitive linguistics as well as interactional approaches to language. Moreover, it will be of great value to readers interested in verbal humour, business communication, and computer-mediated communication.

Reports on crime in newspapers do not provide a neutral representation of criminals and their offences but instead construct them in accordance with societal discourse surrounding this issue. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of Linguistics, Criminology, and Media Studies and demonstrates how Linguistics can contribute to the study of crime in the media. By combining the tools offered by Corpus Linguistics and Critical Stylistics (a text-based framework for Critical Discourse Analysis), evidence is provided for predominant perceptions of crime and their underlying ideologies in both British and German society. This study names and illustrates the most significant linguistic devices used to construct offenders, victims, and crimes in two newspaper corpora compiled from the German and British press. These devices are then linked to criminological frameworks.

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisation of the concepts of causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE, GET, TAKE, PUT, and LET verbs. This volume stands as the first systematic exploration of these verbs and concepts as they occur in complex events and clauses. This book brings together scholars and researchers from a variety of functionally inspired theoretical backgrounds that have worked on these verbs within one language or from a cross-linguistic perspective. The objective is to understand the linguistic behaviour of the verbs and their inter-relationships within a contemporary cognitive-functional linguistic perspective. The languages represented include Irish, German, Slavic (West Slavic: Polish, Czech, Slovak and Sorbian and Western South Slavic: Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian), Germanic, Romance, Gan Chinese Yichun dialect, Māori, Bohairic Coptic, Shaowu Chinese, Hebrew, English, Lithuanian, Estonian, the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, Italian, and Persian. Topics discussed include argument structure and the encoding of arguments under causation, permission and transferverbs, their lexical semantics and event structure.

This volume presents some of the latest research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines. Many are represented here, including anthropology, archaeology, the fine arts, linguistics, onomastics, philosophy, psychology and vision science. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at the Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12) conference held at the University of Glasgow. Papers from the earlier PICS04 and PICS08 conferences were published by John Benjamins as Progress in Colour Studies, 2 volumes, 2006 and New Directions in Colour Studies, 2011, respectively. The opening chapter of this new volume stems from the conference keynote talk on prehistoric colour semantics by Carole P. Biggam. The remaining chapters are grouped into three sections: colour and linguistics; colour categorization, naming and preference; and colour and the world. Each section is preceded by a short preface drawing together the themes of the chapters within it. There are thirty-one colour illustrations.

The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely ‘Certainty: The conceptual differential’; ‘(Un)Certainty as attitudinality’; ‘Dialogical exchange and speech acts’; ‘Onomasiology’; and ‘Applications in exegesis and religious discourse’. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.

This volume systematically investigates the role of argumentation in takeover bids. The announcement of these financial proposals triggers an argumentative situation, in which both the economic desirability and the social acceptability of the deal become argumentative issues for different classes of stakeholders (shareholders, employees, customers, etc.). The study focuses on the strategic maneuvers that corporate directors deploy in order to persuade their audiences while complying with precise regulatory requirements, designed to allow shareholders to make reasonable decisions.

A conceptual reframing of takeovers as an argumentative context brings to light the different argumentative situations of friendly and hostile bids. The argumentative strategies that corporate directors adopt in the two situations are identified and analyzed on the basis of a corpus of takeover documents referring to offers launched in the UK market between 2006 and 2010. The argumentative reconstruction focuses in particular on the inferential configuration of arguments, which is accomplished by means of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT). This kind of analysis enables capturing the inherently argumentative processes through which information becomes a relevant starting point for investment decisions.

Communication in Autism adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore one of the most common developmental disorders associated with communication impairment. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about communication in autism is that variation is as extreme as it could possibly be. While some individuals with autism have age-appropriate language, a number have exceptional language skills; others have little or no spoken language. In between these extremes are individuals who experience significant linguistic impairments. These impairments can affect peer relations and literacy skills. The chapters in this volume provide comprehensive coverage of both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical aspects of autistic communication. The result is a volume that showcases the wide range of methodologies being used in this field of research. It is invaluable for scientists, service providers, parents, individuals with autism, and students learning about communication and autism (e.g., in psychology, speech pathology, and education).

Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives is a collection of articles that approaches linguistic subordination as a semantico-grammatical and pragmatic phenomenon. The volume brings together cognitive, interactional and typological perspectives, and is characterised by extensive use of multi-genre data. The collection aims at a more precise understanding of subordination by emphasizing its pragmatic and contextual nature. Subordination and its linguistic realizations are studied from the perspective of language in its actual contexts of use, as an interactional resource available to language users, in both written and spoken language. In addition, the authors produce typologically relevant information about subordination in the different varieties and genres of the studied languages (English, Estonian, Finnish, and French). These qualities make the book unique in the field of subordination studies.