Subject collection: Linguistics (2768 titles, 1967–2015)

The Japanese sentence-final particles, ne, yo and yone have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground gestalt, and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

This book is one of the pioneering historical pragmatic studies of Japanese. It closely illustrates the usage and contributions of some Japanese discourse markers, and reveals their developmental history. The section on Synchronic Analysis explores the previously uninvestigated functions of some discourse markers used in Present Day Japanese. Moment by moment in on-going conversations, where culturally rigidly-defined interactional norms are highly valued, a specific marker is chosen and used by the speakers as their strategy, based on their quite subjective judgment. The section on Diachronic Analysis then demonstrates chronologically how the meanings and forms of the same markers have come into being. Results include some noticeable changes related to the strengthened intersubjectivity. This multi-dimensional study also discusses the relevance of findings to typological characteristics and productivity. Consideration is further given to why certain expressions (rather than others) become discourse markers and independent forms in Japanese.

A classified bibliographic resource for tracing the history of Jewish translation activity from the Middle Ages to the present day, providing the researcher with over a thousand entries devoted solely to the Jewish role in the east-to-west transmission of Greek and Arab learning and science into Latin or Hebrew. Other major sections extend the coverage to modern times, taking special note of the absorption of European literature into the Jewish cultural orbit via Hebrew, Yiddish, or Judezmo translations, for instance, or the translation and reception of Jewish literature written in Jewish languages into other languages such as Arabic, English, French, German, or Russian. This polyglot bibliography, the first of its kind, contains over 2,600 entries, is enhanced by a vast number of additional bibliographic notes leading to reviews and related resources, and is accompanied by both an author and a subject index.

This classified and annotated research bibliography is meant to serve as an introduction to the rich field of Japanese psycholinguistics, by providing an exhaustive inventory of what has been done in or about Japanese in a psycholinguistic sense. Thus, this volume captures the tradition of psycholinguistic research currently being pursued in Japan, its history and development over the past thirty years, and its current directions and research themes, as well as international research in modern psycholinguistics which targets the Japanese language as the focal point of empirical procedures or deductive analysis in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The bibliography supports a broad view of psycholinguistics, acknowledging that psycholinguistic research in how natural language is learned, produced, comprehended, stored, and recalled now reaches beyond its traditional roots in the two disciplines of psychology and linguistics. The interested scholar will thus find entries from the traditional core of psycholinguistic research on natural language, as well as entries from related areas which have either influence or been influenced by psycholinguistic work on Japanese. Every article, text, and edited volume listed in the bibliography is available through normal library channels, and is thus accessible to the scholar interested in what psycholinguistic research has been done in or on the Japanese language, in Japan and internationally. The annotations for each entry have been especially written for this bibliographic inventory, and with the linguist, psychologist, and psycholinguist specifically in mind. The authors' intention is to maximize the usefulness of such an inventory by preparing annotations for the interested reader who wishes to know not only what the article contains but where it fits in the research tradition.

Two threads run through this collection of 22 papers by students and colleagues of James D. McCawley. The first is a commitment to deep reflection on the direction of linguistic study, sometimes resulting in challenges to the writings of major figures or new appreciations, sometimes questioning our assumptions about the organization of linguistic information in the mind. The second thread is a shared sense of the requirements for the rigor of a good linguistic argument, that its presentation be thoroughgoing, straightforward and clearly made. There is a strong emphasis on testing the “party line” with the widest possible range of languages and the strongest possible set of linguistic tests. Demonstrating bugs and strategizing over the choice between competing analyses is not enough. The completion of an argument lies in constructing a better alternative.

Suleiman provides a linguistic analysis of Jordanian Arabic spoken by educated groups and in particular by students at Yarmouk University. He investigates the extent to which spoken Jordanian Arabic is affected by the classical-colloquial dichotomy (i.e. the extent to which diglossia is involved). In addition, the influence of language contact between English and Arabic is studied (with reference to code-switching, interference and integration) by comparing the linguistic repertoire of Yarmouk students (where English is often used as a medium of instruction) with that of students at other Arab universities (where the medium of instruction is basically Arabic).