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

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.

This collection consists of thirteen contributions focusing on the latest trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the most current developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. Some chapters focus on the syntax of information structure in relation with the position occupied by different constituents in the CP domain and their interpretation such as the distinction between contrastive and corrective focus; the inclusion of given information in focus; the interplay of information structure and binding; the relative position of complementisers; and discourse-based constituents in the left periphery. Information structure is also analysed with regards to prominence phenomena at word level. Other chapters deal with the notion of agreement and its role in the syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives, correlatives, or different types of CP like relatives or embedded interrogatives. This selection of papers was originally presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held at the University of Seville in April 2011.

Starting in 1498, contact between Ibero-Romance and Asian languages has taken place along a vast stretch of the coastlines of continental and insular Asia, producing a string of contact varieties which are among the least visible in the field of Creole Studies. This volume, the first one dedicated to the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creoles of Asia, brings together comparative studies on various issues across the Ibero-Asian creoles and beyond, by specialists in these languages. This type of cross-linguistic analysis allows progress on many fronts, including the reconstruction of past stages of the languages, the explanation of observed similarities and differences, the identification and consolidation of typological/taxonomic clusters, or the assessment of the linguistic effects of different contact equations. The volume provides a timely window onto aspects of current research on the Ibero-Asian creoles, including unsettled debates and ways in which their study can contribute to advance several areas of linguistic enquiry.

This clear and accessible introduction to linguistic typology covers all linguistic domains from phonology and morphology over parts-of-speech, the NP and the VP, to simple and complex clauses, pragmatics and language change. There is also a discussion on methodological issues in typology. This textbook is the first introduction that consistently applies the findings of the World Atlas of Language Structures, systematically includes pidgin and creole languages and devotes a section to sign languages in each chapter. All chapters contain numerous illustrative examples and specific feature maps. Keywords and exercises help review the main topics of each chapter. Appendices provide macro data for all the languages cited in the book as well as a list of web sites of typological interest. An extensive glossary gives at-a-glance definitions of the terms used in the book. This introduction is designed for students of courses with a focus on language diversity and typology, as well as typologically-oriented courses in morphology and syntax. The book will also serve as a guide for field linguists.

The origins of sound change is one of the oldest and most challenging questions in the study of language. The goal of this volume is to examine current approaches to sound change from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including articulatory variation and modeling, speech perception mechanisms and neurobiological processes, geographical and social variation, and diachronic phonology. This diversity of perspectives contributes to a fruitful cross-fertilization across disciplines and represents an attempt to formulate converging ideas on the factors that lead to sound change. This book is addressed to scholars in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and phonology as well as to researchers in speech production and perception, cognition and modeling. Given the theoretical and methodological interest of the contributions as well as the novel instrumental techniques applied to the study of sound change, this volume will interest professionals teaching language typology, laboratory phonology, sound change, phonetics and phonological theory at the graduate level.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to interlanguage request modification. It is a collection of empirical studies carried out by an international array of scholars which provides insights for researchers, graduate students and language teachers on patterns of interlanguage request modification in a range of research contexts and linguistic/cultural settings. The research in this volume takes the reader from a consideration of interlanguage request modification in naturally-occurring e-mail data, through to elicited data from e-DCT questionnaires on cyber-consultations, to the interactive oral discourse of requests in open role-plays. As a whole, the contributions incorporate research with learners from a range of proficiency levels and from diverse linguistic/cultural backgrounds while the chapters individually examine developmental aspects of interlanguage request modification, requests in electronic contexts, comparative learner/native speaker requests, and instructional effects on mitigation. The book will undoubtedly become an important reference for researchers and teachers not only in the field of pragmatics but also in second language acquisition, language teaching, (socio-)linguistics and discourse analysis.

Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural and emphatic consonants and their pharyngeal and laryngeal mechanisms, intonation, and language acquisition. In addition to presenting new data and new descriptions and interpretations, a key aim of the volume is to demonstrate the depth of objective analysis that instrumental methods can enable researchers to achieve. A special feature of many chapters is the use of more than one type of instrumentation to give different perspectives on phonetic properties of Arabic speech which have fascinated scholars since medieval times. The volume will be of interest to phoneticians, phonologists and Arabic dialectologists, and provides a link between traditional qualitative accounts of spoken Arabic and modern quantitative methods of instrumental phonetic analysis.

This monograph examines interpreters in early imperial China and their roles in the making of archival records about foreign countries and peoples. It covers ten empirical studies on historical interpreting and discusses a range of issues, such as interpreters’ identities, ethics, non-mediating tasks, status, and relations with their patrons and other people they worked with. These findings are based on critical readings of primary and secondary sources, which have rarely been utilized and analyzed in depth even in translation research published in Chinese.

Although this is a book about China, the interpreters documented are, surprisingly, mostly foreigners, not Chinese. Cases in point are the enterprising Tuyuhun and Sogdian interpreters. In fact, some Sogdians were recruited as China’s translation officials, while many others were hired as linguistic and trading agents in mediation between Chinese and Turkic-speaking peoples. These idiosyncrasies in the use of interpreters give rise to further questions, such as patterns in China’s provision of foreign interpreters for its diplomatic exchanges and associated loyalty concerns. This book should be of interest not only to researchers in Translation and Interpreting Studies, but also to scholars and students in ancient Chinese history and Sinology in general.

Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of gesture studies has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, communication, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, primatology, psychology, robotics, sociology and semiotics. This volume presents an overview of the depth and breadth of current research in gesture. Its focus is on the interdisciplinary nature of gesture. The twenty-six chapters included in the volume are divided into six sections or themes: the nature and functions of gesture, first language development and gesture, second language effects on gesture, gesture in the classroom and in problem solving, gesture aspects of discourse and interaction, and gestural analysis of music and dance.

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Languages differ regarding both the ways they group words into phrases and the surface cues they use to indicate relevant phrasing patterns. Modeling intonation in as many languages as possible has become a central goal of theoretical and empirical linguistics. However, intonational research has only recently begun to devote attention to the analysis of spontaneous speech, one of the central issues of this book. The volume contains eight contributions by international scholars, some of them members of the Research Center on “Multilingualism” (Hamburg, Germany), all of them experts on intonation and most also on multilingualism. A central goal of the present volume is to expand the cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective of phrasing, focusing thereby on languages from the Romance and Germanic families, among them Catalan, French, German, Italian, Occitan, and Spanish. Within Spanish, special attention is given to several Argentinean varieties, and within Italian, the Neapolitan variety is compared with the standard one.