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

The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions: Contrasting the communicative styles of U.S. and international nurses is the first book to quantitatively examine a wide range of linguistic features in a corpus of interactions between nurses and standardized patients. The main goal of this book is to compare the discourse of U.S. (L1 English speaking) and international (L2 English speaking) nurses. The research design relies on a mixed method approach, including both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of lexico-grammatical, interactional, prosodic, fluency, and non-verbal features; assessments of interactional effectiveness; and qualitative interviews with nurses. The book offers a detailed description of the situational characteristics of the interactions and compares the discourse of nurses and patients in order to contextualize differences in the communicative styles of the two nurse groups. The results provide new insight into the way that sociocultural and linguistic aspects of nurse discourse contribute to the delivery of patient-centered care.

This volume brings together contemporary position statements and research reviews which were originally presented as Plenary Addresses to the Biennial International Conference on Task-Based Language Teaching, between 2005 and 2013. It thus assembles up-to-date reflections, critiques, and recommendations from influential researchers working within the TBLT paradigm over the last 30 years, thereby also highlighting most of the major theoretical perspectives so far developed. While the plenarists structured their chapters around their original presentations, they have been invited to update their thinking as they feel appropriate and in response to recent developments in the field. The collection thus offers representative and accessible coverage of a range of approaches to the overall philosophy of TBLT, to the relationship between TBLT and the study of second language acquisition, and to the development and implementation of TBLT as a comprehensive approach to language education, curriculum, and pedagogy.

This volume addresses translation as an act and an event, having as its main focus the cognitive and mental processes of the translating or interpreting individual in the act of translating, while opening up wider perspectives by including the social situation in explorations of the translation process. First published as a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies (issue 8:2, 2013), the chapters in this volume deal with various aspects of translators’ and interpreters’ observable and non-observable processes, thus encouraging further research at the interface of cognitive and sociological approaches in this area. In terms of those distinctions, the chapters can be characterized as studies of the actual cognitive translation acts, of other processes related to the translation acts, or of processes that are related to the sociological translation event.

This book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.

Construction Grammar as a framework offers a new perspective on traditional historical questions in diachronic linguistics and language change: how do new constructions arise, how should competition in diachronic variation be accounted for, how do constructions fall into disuse, and how do constructions change in general, formally and/or semantically, and with what implications for the language system as a whole? This volume offers a broad introduction to the confluence of Construction Grammar and historical syntax, and also detailed case studies of various instances of syntactic change modeled within Construction Grammar. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar as a theory is particularly well suited for modeling historical changes in morphosyntax, and it also documents challenging new phenomena that require a theoretical account within any competing framework of syntactic change.

Linking grammatical analyses with ideas about a shareable reality, this book investigates some fascinating ways in which nominal reference is exploited to meet interpersonal and rhetorical goals. It focuses on the use of demonstrative and possessive determiners in Polish discourse and proposes that the phenomenon of deixis be reexamined in the light of linguistic variation. The book illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to the study of situated language use and its social outcomes. What emerges is a new understanding of the role of deictic elements as tools for establishing intersubjective coordination and expressing attitudes.

This book is for anyone actively seeking to understand how linguistic systems reflect human socio-cognitive abilities and in what ways reality is mediated through language.

The urge to understand all aspects of human experience more and better seems to be one of the motives underlying cognitive development in many domains of human existence. Understanding more and better is at the basis of knowledge creation and extension. One way of getting access to how understanding comes about and how knowledge is the result of a continuous dynamics of understanding and misunderstanding is by studying the cognitive potential and the development of natural language(s) and more particularly of terminology, in specialized domains. In this volume on dynamics and terminology, thirteen contributors illustrate that human cognition is a dynamic process in a variety of socio-cognitive and cultural settings. The case studies encompass a panoply of methodologies and deal with subjects ranging from the dynamics of legal understanding in multilingual Europe, over financial, economic and scientific terminology in several cultural and linguistic settings, to language policy issues in multilingual environments. All thirteen contributors link the dynamics of cognition to the creative potential of language as a repository of past and present experience in cultural settings and to the creation of neologisms in domain-specific languages. Attention is given to the functionality of indeterminacy, vagueness, polysemy, ambiguity, synonymy, metaphor and phraseology. In this volume terminology is researched and discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining insights developed over the last decades in communicative terminology, socio-terminology, socio-cognitive terminology, cultural terminology, with tools and methods from cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, frame semantics, semiotics, knowledge engineering and statistics.

Despite intensive research, negation remains elusive. Its expression across languages, its underlying cognitive mechanisms, its development across time, and related phenomena, such as negative polarity and negative concord, leave many unresolved issues of both a definitional and a substantive nature. Such issues are at the heart of the present volume, which presents a twofold contribution. The first part offers a mix of large-scale typological surveys and in-depth investigation of the evolution of negation in individual languages and language families that have not frequently been studied from this point of view, such as Chinese, Berber, Quechua, and Austronesian languages. The second part centers on French, a language whose early stages are comparatively richly documented and which therefore provides an important test case for hypotheses about the diachrony of negative marking. Representing, moreover, a variety of theoretical approaches, the volume will be of interest to researchers on negation, language change, and typology.

Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.

For many years, studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages, as with the field of child language development in general. This volume, originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012), brings together a team of researchers from China, the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It explores the development of pragmatic and discourse skills among Chinese-speaking children by investigating the development of pragmatic features specific to the Chinese language and culture (i.e. the use of null forms and overt forms in self/other reference and time expressions), socio-cultural factors in child-directed speech and comprehension of semiotic resources in children’s early childhood. The studies reported in the volume draw upon data of different kinds including recorded spontaneous speech, corpus, questionnaires and experimental data. The findings not only highlight a number of developmental patterns which may be attributed to the Chinese language(s) and culture, but also contribute to the understanding of some key issues in the development of pragmatic and discourse skills irrespective of linguistic backgrounds.