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

This volume brings into focus the conceptual roots of the notion ‘grammatical construction’ as the theoretical entity that constitutes the backbone of Construction Grammar, a unique grammatical model in which grammatical constructions have the status of elementary building blocks of human language. By exploring the analytic potential and applicability of this notion, the contributions illustrate some of the fundamental concerns of constructional research. These include issues of sentence structure in a model that rejects the autonomy of syntax; the contribution of Frame Semantics in establishing the relationship between syntactic patterning and the lexical meaning of verbs; and the challenge of capturing the dynamic and variable nature of grammatical structure in a systematic way. All the authors share a commitment to studying grammar in its use, which gives the book a rich empirical dimension that draws on authentic data from typologically diverse languages.

This book provides much detail on the changes involving the grammaticalization of personal and relative pronouns, topicalized nominals, complementizers, adverbs, prepositions, modals, perception verbs, and aspectual markers. It accounts for these changes in terms of two structural economy principles. Head Preference expresses that single words, i.e. heads, are used to build structures rather than full phrases, and Late Merge states that waiting as late as possible to merge, i.e. be added to the structure, is preferred over movement. The book also discusses grammar-external processes (e.g. prescriptivist rules) that inhibit change, and innovations that replenish the grammaticalized element. Most of the changes involve the (extended) CP and IP: as elements grammaticalize clause boundaries disappear. Cross-linguistic differences exist as to whether the CP, IP, and VP are all present and split and this is formulated as the Layer Principle. Changes involving the CP are typically brought about by Head Preference, whereas those involving the IP and VP by Late Merge.

The linguistic study of workplace language is a new and exciting area of research. This book explores the expression of power in a New Zealand workplace through examination of 52 everyday interactions between four women and their colleagues. The main focus of this research is the expression of three types of "control acts", i.e., directives, requests and advice. The women include two managers who demonstrate an interactive participative style of management. They tend to minimise rather than exert power, although their status is still evident in their speech. The study is original in its combination of a quantitative and a qualitative approach, as well as in its combination of a detailed categorisation of head acts and an analysis of context and role relationships. Through the design of the study and the methodology used, the results which are brought forward challenge earlier research both on power and control acts. The data analyzed is drawn from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project.

Since the 1980s, metaphor has received much attention in linguistics in general. Within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) the area of 'grammatical metaphor' has become increasingly more important. This volume aims to raise and debate problematic issues in the study of lexico-grammatical metaphor, and to foreground the potential of further study in the field. There is a need to highlight the SFL perspective on metaphor; other traditions focus on lexical aspects, and from cognitive perspectives, while SFL focuses on the grammatical dimension, and socio-functional aspects in the explanation of this phenomenon.

This is the third of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and the previous two volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 3: Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Oriya, Polish, Serbian, Swahili and Swedish.

Gender and discourse interface in many more epistemological sites than can be represented in one collection. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis therefore focuses on a principled diversity of key sites within four broad areas: the media, sexuality, education and parenthood. The different chapters together illustrate how taking a discourse perspective facilitates understanding of the complex and subtle ways in which gender is represented, constructed and contested through language.

The book engages critically with long-running and on-going debates, but also reflects and develops current understandings of gender, identity and discourse, particularly the shift from 'gender differences' to the discoursal shaping of gender. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis thus offers not only insights and methodologies of new empirical studies but also careful theorisations, in particular of discourse, text, identity and gender.

The collection is a valuable resource for researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates working in the area of gender and discourse.

In this volume, gender is seen as a communicative achievement and as a social category interacting with other social parametres such as age, status, prestige, institutional and ethnic frameworks, cultural and situative contexts. The authors come from a variety of backgrounds such as sociology of communication, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, social psychology, and text linguistics. Masculinity and femininity are conceived of as varying culturally, historically and contextually. All contributions discuss empirical research of communication and the question of whether (and how) gender is a salient variable in discourse. So, one aim of the book is to trace the varying relevance of gender in interaction. Emotion politics, ideology, body concepts, and speech styles are related to ethnographic description of the contexts within which communication takes

place. These contexts range from private to public communication, and from mixed-sex to same-sex conversations framed by different cultural backgrounds (Australian, German, Georgian, Turkish, US-American).

This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds.

Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and its follow-up volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 1: Arabic, Belizean Creole, Eastern Maroon Creole, English (American, New Zealand, Australian), Hebrew, Indonesian, Romanian, Russian, Turkish.

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field.

A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text.

Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves.

The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.