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

The volume examines the role of narratives in old and new media. Its ten contributions firstly center on the various forms and functions narratives assume in computer-mediated environments, e.g. websites, weblogs, message boards, etc. In this light, past and present approaches to the description of narratives are presented and reevaluated based on their ability to capture the conceptual and methodological exigencies of new media. Secondly, the volume sheds new light upon the multimodal composition of new media narratives which typically feature multiple co-occurring semiotic modes such as speech, sound, text, static or moving images. In this vein, each paper explores a wide array of authentic examples from text genres as diverse as political speeches, real-time narratives and contemporary feature films. Its wide scope should not only appeal to linguists interested in the discursive and pragmatic dimension of narratives but also to scholars and students in other scientific disciplines.

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. New Adventures in Language and Interaction gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.

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The general aim of the Senshu University Project The Development of the Anglo-Saxon Language and Linguistic Universals is investigation of structural characteristics common to the Germanic languages, such as English, German and Norwegian, and of works on and in the tradition of Generative Grammar founded by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. The central idea of Generative Grammar, that the nature of natural-language syntax can be captured by a finite set of rules which are able to produce an infinite set of well-formed structures has been highly evaluated and influential even in related fields such as biolinguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science. Noam Chomsky and Language Descriptions is a collection of articles that focus on the earliest but essential linguistic theory proposed by Noam Chomsky and articles that discuss specific topics pertaining to the study Germanic languages, in particular English and German. It is divided into two parts: Part 1. Genesis of Generative Grammar; and Part 2. Current Issues in Language Descriptions. The present book will be of general interest to linguists who seek to understand the original idea of Generative Grammar and nature of the Germanic languages.

Named Entities provides critical information for many NLP applications. Named Entity recognition and classification (NERC) in text is recognized as one of the important sub-tasks of Information Extraction (IE). The seven papers in this volume cover various interesting and informative aspects of NERC research. Nadeau & Sekine provide an extensive survey of past NERC technologies, which should be a very useful resource for new researchers in this field. Smith & Osborne describe a machine learning model which tries to solve the over-fitting problem. Mazur & Dale tackle a common problem of NE and conjunction; as conjunctions are often a part of NEs or appear close to NEs, this is an important practical problem. A further three papers describe analyses and implementations of NERC for different languages: Spanish (Galicia-Haro & Gelbukh), Bengali (Ekbal, Naskar & Bandyopadhyay), and Serbian (Vitas, Krstev & Maurel). Finally, Steinberger & Pouliquen report on a real WEB application where multilingual NERC technology is used to identify occurrences of people, locations and organizations in newspapers in different languages.

The contributions to this volume were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes 30:1 (2007).

One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short story scholars.

This book details the development of eleven modal auxiliaries in late 18^th- and 19^th-century Canadian English in a framework of new-dialect formation. The study assesses features of the modal auxiliaries, tracing influences to British and American input varieties, parallel developments, or Canadian innovations. The findings are based on the Corpus of Early Ontario English, pre-Confederation Section, the first electronic corpus of early Canadian English. The data, which are drawn from newspapers, diaries and letters, include original transcriptions from manuscript sources and texts from semi-literate writers. While the overall results are generally coherent with new-dialect formation theory, the Ontarian context suggests a number of adaptations to the current model. In addition to its general Late Modern English focus, New-Dialect Formation in Canada traces changes in epistemic modal functions up to the present day, offering answers to the loss of root uses in the central modals. By comparing Canadian with British and American data, important theoretical insights on the origins of the variety are gained. The study offers a sociohistorical perspective on a still understudied variety of North American English by combining language-internal features with settlement history in this first monograph-length, diachronic treatment of Canadian English in real time.

Negation has always been and still is a central topic in typological studies and theoretical research. Its centrality shows itself in the fact that it is not restricted to a given linguistic field but compasses the whole domain of linguistic studies. Very often, works on negation are brought about in a one-sided perspective which excludes other points of view. This book, on the contrary, puts together studies on negation based on various theoretical frameworks and aims to cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives. The book offers contributions on negation in Old Occitan, in Old Italic languages, and in several modern Romance languages (Italian, Roumanian, French, Spanish, Occitan, Catalan, among others). It covers the diachronic dimension of negation, and explores the syntactic as well as the semantico-pragmatic side of the phenomenon; aspects of negative affixation provide the morphological dimension. The originality of this volume thus lies in the multidisciplinarity of the approaches and perspectives offered.La question de la négation a toujours été et demeure un sujet central dans les recherches en linguistique théorique et typologique. Son caractère central réside en ceci qu’elle n’est pas limitée à un domaine linguistique donné, mais embrasse le champ entier de la recherche linguistique. Aussi les travaux sur la négation sont-ils très souvent réalisés dans une perspective donnée qui exclut de facto d’autres points de vue ou d’autres approches. Cet ouvrage prend au contraire le parti de réunir des études dont les postulats théoriques et méthodologiques sont variés, couvrant ainsi un éventail de perspectives théoriques. Le présent volume propose donc des contributions sur la négation en Ancien Occitan, dans les langues de l’Italie ancienne et dans diverses langues romanes contemporaines (notamment en Italien, Roumain, Français, Espagnol, Occitan, Catalan). Il couvre ainsi la dimension diachronique de la négation, et s’attache à en décrire le fonctionnement d’un point de vue syntaxique aussi bien que sémantico-pragmatique. La dimension morphologique de la négation est également abordée via la problématique de l’affixation négative. L’originalité de cet ouvrage réside donc dans la multidisciplinarité des approches et des perspectives qu’il offre.

This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.

Narrative – State of the Art which was originally published as a Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006) is edited by Michael Bamberg and contains 24 chapters (with a brief introduction by the editor) that look back and take stock of developments in narrative theorizing and empirical work with narratives. The attempt has been made to bring together researchers from different disciplines, with very different concerns, and have them express their conceptions of the current state of the art from their perspectives. Looking back and taking stock, this volume further attempts to begin to deliver answers to the questions (i) What was it that made the original turn to narrative so successful? (ii) What has been accomplished over the last 40 years of narrative inquiry? (iii) What are the future directions for narrative inquiry? The contributions to this volume are deliberately kept short so that the readers can browse through them and get a feel about the diversity of current narrative theorizing and emerging new trends in narrative research. It is the ultimate aim of this edited volume to stir up discussions and dialogue among narrative researchers across these disciplines and to widen and open up the territory of narrative inquiry to new and innovative work.