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

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

When politicians and pundits in the Middle East discuss democracy, do they mean it? Looking at public discourse about democracy in contemporary Egypt, Dunne proposes a fresh way of reading Arabic political discourse. She charts a method combining ethnographic research into communities of people producing political discourse with investigation of the texts themselves, using tools from anthropology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics — a method with broad applicability to political discourse generally. Taking off from the premise that all discourse is based in social interaction, this book demonstrates that looking at the ways individuals and groups use public discourse to perform critical social and political functions yields entirely new perspectives on the significance of the discourse. Democracy in Contemporary Egyptian Political Discourse is a valuable resource for students of linguistics, political science, democracy studies, Arabic language, and Middle East area studies.

This book considers the discourses that come into play in organizational change. The book outlines the tensions that arise for people having to enact change, and analyzes the ways in which they position themselves in changing organizational environments. The book takes a social semiotic perspective on discourse, organization and change. Here, discourse encompasses not only the multi-modal resources that people mobilize in organizational (inter)action, but also the practices and transformative dynamics afforded by those resources. The organizational changes highlighted in the book revolve around three dimensions of work that are increasingly coming to the fore: participation, boundary-spanning and knowledging. These dimensions are explored through case studies, including a health planning project, an initiative to standardize work practices, and the tension between paper-based and IT-based reporting. The book addresses the relevance of this discourse perspective to organizational research more broadly, by investigating organization as a dynamic of ‘resemiotizations’.



Cover illustration by John Reid

This is the first English version of a text out of print for more than 40 years, summarising the positions and key concepts of an influential stream of linguistic thought. Using quotations as entries, J. Vachek (1909-1997), a leading advocate of the Prague School, employed more than 160 sources, papers and monographs, by well over 30 representatives of the school (Mathesius, Trnka, Skalička, Daneš, Dokulil, Mukařovský, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Isachenko, and others). The dictionary both captures the pioneering efforts and achievements of the school from its foundation in 1926, and provides a framework for assessing the current state of affairs, attesting to its originality and serving as a preventive to treading paths already explored. The headword concepts are provided with French, German and Czech equivalents and Vachek's original preface is supplemented by a foreword which traces the development of the school up to the present date and puts it into perspective.

Discussing Conversation Analysis: The work of Emanuel A. Schegloff presents an in-depth view on Schegloff’s complex and stimulating work in Conversation Analysis (CA) and offers clear insights into how it has and may be developed further as a research tool in social psychology, social science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics.

• What is the status of fine-grained empirical studies of human interaction in CA and how does CA relate to other approaches to linguistic interaction?

• What is Schegloff’s contribution to CA and how does his work relate to that of Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks?

• How does CA distinguish its own analytical tools and terms from the categories of the participants in talk?

• What can CA reveal about human-computer interaction?

• What can CA contribute to the neurosciences in the study, diagnosis, and treatment of linguistically impaired individuals?

• How does CA account for the socio-historical dimension of the material and semiotic resources that participants co-deploy in talk?



By addressing these and other questions this volume proposes a critical guide to CA and its applications with an extraordinary interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff, and new contributions towards a debate on his work by six commentators — conversation analysts (John Heritage and Charles Goodwin), critics (Rick Iedema and Pär Segerdahl) and appliers of CA in the study of human-computer interaction (Pirkko Raudaskoski) and language disorders (Ruth Lesser).

Schegloff’s Response and a closing discussion with the editors conclude the volume, which also features a comprehensive bibliography of his work edited by Susan Eerdmans.

Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, he has taught at Columbia University as well as at UCLA. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a resident Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1978–79) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1998–99).

Definition is a basic activity of language, of particular importance to linguists because of its use of language to describe itself. Beyond this inherent significance as a crucial element of language study, definitions also provide a rich potential source of the information needed for Natural Language Processing systems. This book describes an investigation of the subset of general language used in definition sentences and the development of a taxonomy of definition types, a grammar of definition sentences and parsing software which can extract their functional components. The work is based on definition sentences used in one of the dictionaries from the Cobuild range, and the book includes a brief history of the development of monolingual English dictionaries, an assessment of the concepts of sublanguages and local grammars and a full exploration of the results of the analysis and of the present and future applications of the taxonomy, grammar and parser.

The discovery of rules for the systematicity and dynamics of terminology creations is essential for a sound basis of a theory of terminology. This quest provides the driving force for The Dynamics of Terminology in which Dr. Kageura demonstrates the interaction of these two factors on a specific corpus of Japanese terminology which, beyond the necessary linguistic circumstances, also has a model character for similar studies. His detailed examination of the relationships between terms and their constituent elements, the relationships among the constituent elements and the type of conceptual combinations used in the construction of the terminology permits deep insights into the systematic thought processes underlying term creation. To compensate for the inherent limitation of a purely descriptive analysis of conceptual patterns, Dr. Kageura offers a quantitative analysis of the patterns of the growth of terminology. His fascinating and unique contribution to our understanding of the terminological process reveals the powerful interaction of linguistic possibilities and the naming process of conceptual entities.

This book explores factors relevant in the choices speakers and writers make in regard to explicitness of reference to the subjects and objects in their utterances. Bulgarian is a particularly felicitous target language for this type of study, since it possesses a rich inventory of available packaging techniques, ranging from zero reference, to various stressed and unstressed single forms, to actual doubled (“reduplicated”) constructions. The study systematically addresses the need to avoid referential and grammatical ambiguity, and the crucial influence of emphasis. Another, and perhaps most interesting central factor is the status of what the communication is about, which is assessed on two different levels. The book makes use of data from both published Bulgarian fiction and naturally occurring oral conversations. The fundamental similarities between these modes of communication with respect to noun phrase selection is demonstrated, but explanations are also proposed for the observable differences.