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

The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics, and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches, focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics), including insights into new, nonstandard and little studied constructions.

The study of media, texts and culture(s) and especially the analysis of interdependent relationships between them has become a major concern in various academic fields, such as intercultural communication, contrastive textology, comparative cultural studies, historical and intercultural pragmatics. Starting from the observation that in contrastive studies of mass media communication not only the theoretical status of “culture” often remains unclear but also the interdependent relation between the theoretical conceptualization of “culture” and the methodological approach of text analysis, this volume brings together linguistic mass media studies with intercultural, diachronic, intermedia and interlingual perspectives. Apart from offering new empirical insights into the field, this volume’s aim is to advance and to broaden the methodological and theoretical discussions involved. Comparing such diverse formats and genres like newspapers, TV news shows, TV commercials, radio phone-ins, obituaries, fanzines and film subtitles, the contributions of this volume illustrate the complexity of the growing field of contrastive media analysis.

How do readers make sense of a picture, a photograph, or a map in literary narratives in which visual signs play a critical role? How do authors accomplish their various objectives in constructing such complex texts? What strategies and techniques do they use to project fictional worlds and to provide their readers with the means for orienting themselves there? This book investigates the dynamics of the imaginary diagrams created by cartographers, photographers, and writers of narratives, giving ample evidence of how mapping practices have inspired the imagination of a vast number of authors from Thomas More up to contemporary writers. A special focus is on the effects created by the projection of photographs into the narrative space, and how our seemingly effortless interpretation of photographs and even maps masks complex cognitive processes. The theoretical horizon of this study encompasses the fields of cartography, mental maps, iconicity research, and the spatial turn in cultural studies.

Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. The volume Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics illustrates this current trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies. These cover a range of linguistic phenomena (syntax, modality and discourse) and pursue different types of research questions (grammaticalization, pragmatic function, stylistic function, typological profile). Accordingly, they use different types of corpora: contemporary and historical texts, written and spoken discourse, and various text types, such as academic discourse and political discourse. Five different languages are represented (English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Lithuanian) with English as a language of comparison in each contribution. The studies all show that quantitative analyses are not at odds with insightful qualitative interpretations or functional approaches to language, but rather complement each other. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15:2 (2010).

This book is the first volume that focuses on the specific challenges of machine translation with Arabic either as source or target language. It nicely fills a gap in the literature by covering approaches that belong to the three major paradigms of machine translation: Example-based, statistical and knowledge-based. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of the methods for incorporating linguistic knowledge into empirical MT. The book brings together original and extended contributions from a group of distinguished researchers from both academia and industry. It is a welcome and much-needed repository of important aspects in Arabic Machine Translation such as morphological analysis and syntactic reordering, both central to reducing the distance between Arabic and other languages. Most of the proposed techniques are also applicable to machine translation of Semitic languages other than Arabic, as well as translation of other languages with a complex morphology.

The present volume contains selected papers from the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Budapest, 13–16 May 2010, organized under the auspices of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The selection of papers presented here addresses problems of language use in one or another sense, covering issues of regularity, irregularity and analogy, as well as the role of frequency in morphological complexity, morphological change and language acquisition. The languages discussed include Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lovari (Romani) and Russian. The contributors are Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Mario Andreou, Márton András Baló, Dunstan Brown, Gabriela Caballero, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Roger Evans, Alice C. Harris, László Kálmán, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Laaha, Laura E. Lettner, Maria Mitsiaki, Péter Rácz, Angela Ralli, Péter Rebrus, Alan K. Scott, and Miklós Törkenczy.

Cohesive Profiling provides one of the first linguistic descriptions of blog discourse, focusing on the cohesive relations which enable users to construe blogs as compatible meaningful wholes. With a corpus-based analysis of cohesive relations in personal blogs, the study surprisingly reveals that there is only limited cohesive rapport between the textual contributions of blog authors and readers. The book retraces blogs’ technological, linguistic and generic evolution and describes how today’s blog genres are structured and composed. Additionally, it is shown how cohesive interaction, shared knowledge and technological expertise converge in blog readers trying to keep track of blog topics, purposes and identities over time. The book is of interest to researchers in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and pragmatics as well as to scholars working in the field of computer-mediated communication.

The book explores finely-grained distinctions in causal meaning, mostly from a relevance-theoretic perspective. To increase the challenge of this double task, i.e. a thorough as well as satisfactory account of cause and a detailed assessment of the theoretical model employed to this end, the current study involves an investigation carried out by way of contrasting the prototypical causal exponents of Modern Greek subordination, i.e. epeiδi and γiati. In addition, this objective is achieved in the methodological framework of contrasting a range of contextual applications of the two connectives against their translated versions in English, realizable by means of because. Despite first impressions, a closer observation of the wide range of applications of these markers in the discourse of coherence relations illustrates divergences in their distribution, which, in turn, are taken to highlight differing aspects of causal interpretation. The proposal for the relevance-theoretic model emanates from a reaction to an array of problems undermining traditional tenets of pragmatic theory originating with Grice’s stance, but is also made in response to the common practice in pragmatic research (since its origin) to pay low regard for the contribution of typical causal markers to debates aiming at the determination of the distinction that has been instrumental to issues of cognition and pragmatic interpretation, i.e. propositional vs. non-propositional meaning.

Among 15th-century literature in the Romance languages, Curial and Guelfa is one of the most successful romances of chivalry. It is a veritable jewel of late medieval European literature and of narrative in the Crown of Aragon in particular. Curial shares a range of features — realism, humanity, believable deeds of chivalry, historical background, allusions to everyday life, elements of humour and parody, variation between literary and popular language — with contemporary French chivalric narratives, and with the Valencian Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc. In this company, however, Curial stands out for the predominance in it of the sentimental component, for a significant incidence of learned elements from Greek and Latin classical culture and from the early fathers of the Christian church, and for its striking stylistic elegance. These learned elements are an indication of fresh humanistic breezes blowing from Italy. In this way the novel unites several cultural currents that converge in western Romance narrative at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.

This translation into English, by Max W. Wheeler, is based upon the 2008 edition by Antoni Ferrando.