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

The grammaticalized expression of negation is a linguistic universal. This volume deals with negation in the Uralic language family in a typological perspective. As in no other major language family before, a comprehensive typological questionnaire provides the basis for the chapters documenting negation in 17 languages. Most of them are endangered. The chapters highlight negative auxiliary verbs—the special Uralic feature—and their ways of combining with the rich inventory of other negators in different types of clauses, as well as negative replies, negative indefinites, abessives/caritives/privatives, scope, polarity and emphatic negation. Selected aspects of negation, such as negative indefinites, negation of non-verbal predicates and information structure, are discussed in more detail in five further chapters. The book brings new typologically informed perspectives on negation in the Uralic family, and it provides valuable data and insights for any linguist working on negation.

The articles in this volume examine a number of critical issues in grammaticalization studies, including the relationship between grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, subjectification and intersubjectification, and grammaticalization and language contact. The contributions consider data from a broad range of spoken and signed languages, including Greek, Japanese, Nigerian Pidgin, Swedish, and Turkish Sign Language. The authors work in a variety of theoretical frameworks, and draw on a number of research traditions. The volume will be of primary interest to historical linguists, though the diversity of approaches and sources of data mean that the volume is also likely have considerable general appeal.

Historical sociolinguistics has successfully challenged the traditional focus on standardization in linguistic historiography. Extensive research on newly uncovered textual resources has shown the widespread variation in the written language of the past that was previously hidden or neglected. The time has come to integrate both perspectives, and to reassess the importance of language norms, standardization and prescription on the basis of sound empirical studies of large corpora of texts.

The chapters in this volume discuss the interplay of language norms and language use in the history of Dutch, English, French and German between 1600 and 1900. Written by leading experts in the field, each chapter focuses on one language and one century. A substantial introductory chapter puts the twelve research chapters into a comparative perspective.

The book is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.

Despite a recent spate of publications, the valency of nouns is a topic that still remains in the shadow of the valency of verbs. This volume aims to contribute to the discussion of noun valency not only from a theoretical point of view, as is often the case, but also from an empirical one by presenting a series of studies focusing on particular questions and based on data-driven research. It explores properties of valency nouns in a variety of languages, including Bulgarian, Czech, German, Latin, Romanian, and Spanish. The specificity of this book consists in the diversity of the methodological approaches used. It includes empirical studies and it explores different theoretical frameworks: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), the Minimalist Program within Generative Grammar, Functional Generative Description (FGD), and Construction Grammar. Special attention is paid to deverbal nouns, but nouns expressing quantity and “compound-like” constructions involving relationship and interactivity are also dealt with.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the study of gender and classifiers throughout the history of Western linguistics. Based on an analysis of over 200 genetically and typologically diverse languages, the author shows that these seemingly arbitrary and redundant categories play in fact a central role in the lexicon, grammar and the organization of discourse. As a result, the often contradictory approaches to their functionality and semantic motivation encapsulate the evolving conceptions of such issues as cognitive and cultural correlates of linguistic structure, the diverse functions of grammatical categories, linguistic complexity, agreement phenomena and the interplay between lexicon and grammar. The combination of a typological and historiographic perspective adopted here allows the reader to appreciate the detail and insight of earlier, supposedly ‘prescientific’ accounts in light of the data now available and to examine contemporary discussions in the context of prevailing conceptions in the study of language at different points in its history since antiquity.

This book envisions the study of bare noun phrases as a field of research in its own right rather than an accessory matter in the wider domain of nominal determination. Combining insights from different theoretical backgrounds and extending the empirical coverage of bare noun phenomena, the ten contributions provide new perspectives on long-standing but still actively debated problems as well as investigations into previously ignored issues. The volume focuses on the wide range of bare noun phenomena in Romance languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Italian and French; but also widens its inherently comparative perspective to languages such as Bulgarian and Modern Hebrew. The authors discuss the importance of cross-linguistic patterns in the modeling of the syntax and semantics of noun phrases and of common noun denotations, the role of information structure as well as that of discourse traditions and coordination.

In addition to the hands, sign languages make extensive use of nonmanual articulators such as the body, head, and face to convey linguistic information. This collected volume focuses on the forms and functions of nonmanuals in sign languages. The articles discuss various aspects of specific nonmanual markers in different sign languages and enhance the fact that nonmanuals are an essential part of sign language grammar. Approaching the topic from empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives, the book is of special interest to sign language researchers, typologists, and theoretical as well as computational linguists that are curious about language and modality. The articles investigate phenomena such as mouth gestures, agreement, negation, topicalization, and semantic operators, and discuss general topics such as language and modality, simultaneity, computer animation, and the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and prosody.

Originally published in Sign Language & Linguistics 14:1 (2011).

This volume brings together current research by international scholars on the varieties of English spoken in Ireland. The papers apply contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches and frameworks to a range of topics. A number of papers explore the distribution of linguistic features in Irish English, including the evolution of linguistic structures in Irish English and linguistic change in progress, employing broadly quantitative sociolinguistic approaches. Pragmatic features of Irish English are explored through corpus linguistics-based analysis. The construction of linguistic corpora using written and recorded material form the focus of other papers, extending and analyzing the growing range of corpus material available to researchers of varieties of English, including diaspora varieties. Issues of language and identity in contemporary Ireland are explored in several contributions using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The volume will be of interest to linguists generally, and to scholars with an interest in varieties of English.

Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) considers how people can interact with robots in order to enable robots to best interact with people. HRI presents many challenges with solutions requiring a unique combination of skills from many fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, social sciences, ethology and engineering. We have specifically aimed this work to appeal to such a multi-disciplinary audience. This volume presents new and exciting material from HRI researchers who discuss research at the frontiers of HRI. The chapters address the human aspects of interaction, such as how a robot may understand, provide feedback and act as a social being in interaction with a human, to experimental studies and field implementations of human–robot collaboration ranging from joint action, robots practically and safely helping people in real world situations, robots helping people via rehabilitation and robots acquiring concepts from communication. This volume reflects current trends in this exciting research field.

Research on nominalization, a process that gives rise to referring expressions, has always played a central role in linguistic investigations. Over the years there has also been growing evidence that nominalization constructions often extend to non-referential domains. They participate in noun-modifying expressions (e.g. genitive and relative clauses), subordinate clauses and topic constructions, finite structures with the nominalizers reanalyzed as TAM markers, and stance constructions with evaluative, attitudinal, evidential and epistemic overtones. This volume brings together historical and crosslinguistic evidence from more than 20 different languages representing six different language families spanning the Asian continent and the Pacific and Indian oceans to elucidate the strategies and grammaticalization pathways that give rise to both referential and non-referential uses of nominalization constructions. This collection highlights the diversity of strategies and at the same time the robust cyclical nature of change within and across languages. The combined diachronic and typological analyses in this volume are particularly valuable for linguistic research on diachronic morphosyntax and linguistic ‘universals’, and are also an important supplementary cross-referencing tool for linguistic investigations of versatile and ubiquitous morphemes in under-documented languages.

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.

This book focuses on the Norse-derived vocabulary in the works of Archbishop Wulfstan II of York (d. 1023). A considerable advantage derives from studying Wulfstan's compositions because, unlike most Old English texts, they are closely dateable and, to a certain extent, localizable. Thus, they offer excellent material for the examination of the process of integration and accommodation of Norse-derived vocabulary in Old English. After establishing the list of terms which can be accepted to be Norse-derived, this book analyses their relations with their native synonyms, both from a semantic and a stylistic point of view, and their inclusion in the word-formation processes to which Wulfstan submitted his vocabulary, native and borrowed alike. The information derived from this approach is used to explore the possible reasons for the archbishop's selection of the borrowed terms and the impact which his lexical practices had on contemporary and later English writers.

This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

This monograph presents a new model of the internal syntax of nominal phrases. The model is mainly based on Scandinavian, since with the wide range of variation that Scandinavian displays in the nominal domain, despite the close genetic relationship between the different varieties, Scandinavian is particularly well-suited for explorations into nominal syntax. Among the topics covered are the basic syntactic structure of nominal phrases, definiteness, adjective phrases, possessors, relative clauses, and nominal predicates. The model is however meant to be a tool for analysing the nominal phrases of any language. While the base-generated structure is taken to be universally uniform, the model allows for variation in the feature makeup of individual elements, in the phonological realisation of the features, and in the movements that may or may not apply. Hence, as shown in the final chapter, patterns found in languages outside of Scandinavian can also be accounted for within the model.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has established itself over the past two decades as an area of academic activity in which scholars and students from many different disciplines are involved. It is a field that draws on social theory and aspects of linguistics in order to understand and challenge the discourses of our day. It is time for A New Agenda in the field. The present book is essential for anyone working broadly in the field of discourse analysis in the social sciences. The book includes often critical re-assessments of CDA's assumptions and methods, while proposing new route-maps for innovation. Practical analyses of major issues in discourse analysis are part of this agenda-setting volume.

Volume 2 of Non-nominative Subjects (NNSs) presents the most recent research on this topic from a wide range of languages from diverse language families of the world, with ample data and in-depth analysis. A significant feature of these volumes is that authors with different theoretical perspectives study the intricate questions raised by these constructions. Some of the central issues include the subject properties of noun phrases with ergative, dative, accusative and genitive case, case assignment and checking, anaphor–antecedent coreference, the nature of predicates with NNSs, whether they are volitional or non-volitional, possibilities of control coreference and agreement phenomena. These analyses have significant implications for theories of syntax and verbal semantics, first language acquisition of NNSs, convergence of case marking patterns in language contact situations, and the nature of syntactic change.

What actually happens in counselling interactions? How does counselling bring about change?

How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?

By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.

This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.

This is the first of two volumes of papers selected from those given at the 12th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. The second is New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics (2): Lexis and Transmission. Together the volumes provide an overview of many of the issues that are currently engaging practitioners in the field. In this volume, the primary concern is with the historical grammar of English. Some papers take a broad overview of the subject, positioning it within current advances in linguistic theory, while others deal with specific points of syntax and morphology in a historical context. There is a recurrent emphasis on data collection and analysis, with a chronological range from Old to Present Day English, and a geographical spread from Scotland to Newfoundland. Contributions from scholars around the world remind us that not only English itself but the history of English is now an international possession.

Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders surveys a broad range of expository, polemical, and analytical literary forms that came into prominence during the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. They stand in contrast to better-known romantic fiction in that they endeavor to address the world of daily, empirical experience rather than that of more explicitly self-referential, fanciful creation. Among them are genres that have since the nineteenth century come to characterize many aspects of modern life like the periodical or the psychological case study; others flourished and enjoyed wide-spread popularity during the nineteenth century but are much less well-known today like the almanac and the diary. Travel narratives, pamphlets, religious and theological texts, familiar essays, autobiographies, literary-critical and philosophical studies, and discussions of the visual arts and music all had deep historical roots when appropriated by romantic writers but prospered in their hands and assumed distinctive contours indicative of the breadth of romantic thought.

SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series’ total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism’s own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.romanticism.pdf

Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative, Artificial Intelligence, and media studies — studies, models, and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers, providing perspectives from computational linguistics, agent research, psychology, ethology, art, and media theory. It describes artificial agents with narratively structured behavior, agents that take part in stories and tours, systems that automatically generate stories, dramas, and documentaries, and systems that support people telling their own stories. It looks at how people use stories, the features of narrative that play a role in how people understand the world, and how human narrative ability may have evolved. It addresses meta-issues in NI: the history of the field, the stories AI researchers tell about their research, and the effects those stories have on the things they discover. (Series B)

The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.

Paralanguage and kinesics define the tripartite nature of speech. Volume 2 builds on Poyatos’ book Paralanguage (1993) – reviewed by Mary Key as “the most amplified description of paralanguage available today”. It covers our basic voice components; the many normal or abnormal voice types; the communicative uses of physiological and emotional reactions like laughter, crying, sighing, coughing, sneezing, etc.; and word-like utterances beyond the official dictionary. Kinesics is viewed from interactive, intercultural and cross-cultural, and literary perspectives, with much needed research principles for the realistic study of gestures, manners and postures in their intersystemic links. Applications are given in the social or clinical sciences, intercultural communication, literature, painting, theater and cinema, etc. Related to both paralanguage and kinesics are the many eloquent sounds produced bodily, by manipulated objects and by the environment. A discussion of silence and stillness as opposed to sound and movement and related to darkness and light, shows their true interactive status, coding, functions, qualifiers, intersystemic co-structurations, positive and negative functions, and cross-cultural attitudes toward silence. The first two volumes are then brought together in a detailed model for studying our interactions with people and the environment, including certain emitting and transmitting congenital or traumatic limitations.1608 quotations from 133 authors and 216 works vividly illustrate all topics.

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories, such as temporality, perspective, connectivity, and narrative coherence. Moreover, a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume, an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally, the effects of input on narrative construction in children’s first and second language are examined in several studies.

In some languages every subject is marked in the same way, and also every object. But there are languages in which a small set of verbs mark their subjects or their objects in an unusual way. For example, most verbs may mark their subject with nominative case, but one small set of verbs may have dative subjects, and another small set may have locative subjects. Verbs with noncanonically marked subjects and objects typically refer to physiological states or events, inner feelings, perception and cognition. The Introduction sets out the theoretical parameters and defines the properties in terms of which subjects and objects can be analysed. Following chapters discuss Icelandic, Bengali, Quechua, Finnish, Japanese, Amele (a Papuan language), and Tariana (an Amazonian language); there is also a general discussion of European languages. This is a pioneering study providing new and fascinating data, and dealing with a topic of prime theoretical importance to linguists of many persuasions.

This formidable selection of papers reflects the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic underpinnings of the interface between language and education. Following an introduction that positions the field of educational linguistics historically and conceptually, the volume presents 15 contributions by leading scholars that cover the four areas most central to the field:

- Language teaching, language learning and literacy (Widdowson, Bialistok, Cohen & Allison);

- Language testing (Bachman, Davies, and Shohamy);

- Multilingualism, minority languages and language planning (Bratt-Paulston, Fishman, Lambert, Amara, de Bot & van Els);

- Language policy (Clyne, Tucker, Donato & Murday, McNamara & Lo Bianco, and Hornberger).

New Perspectives and Issues in Educational Language Policy is published in honour of Bernard Dov Spolsky and reflects his impact on applied linguistics in general and educational linguistics in particular. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for future research in the field of educational linguistics.

New Zealand English is currently one of the most researched varieties of English world-wide. This book presents an up-to-date account of all the major aspects of New Zealand English by leading scholars as well as younger specialists in each of the major fields of enquiry. The book is authoritative in its range and represents not only a synopsis of past research, but also new research in many areas of study. It is of interest not just to specialists in regional varieties of English but many of the chapters detail new approaches to the study of dialect phenomena. It contains an introduction describing the external history of New Zealand English and the development of the study of New Zealand English. It comes with a full bibliography of work on New Zealand English and is fully indexed. This book is a significant landmark in the study of English varieties and will prove indispensable for anyone who is a student of English and New Zealand English.

This book addresses some of the most fundamental questions that can be asked about target language (TL) acquisition in the classroom context, namely

1. What is negotiated interaction?

2. What are the main discourse functions of negotiated interaction?

3. How frequent is negotiated interaction in TL classrooms, and does this frequency vary by proficiency level?

4. To what extent does the initiation of negotiation overlap with the negotiation of power in such a setting of unequal-power discourse as the TL classroom?

The negotiation process allows TL learners to obtain ‘comprehensible input’, to receive ‘negative input’, and to produce ‘comprehensible output’. Since these are key variables in the acquisition process, by researching the negotiation work occurring in TL classroom discourse, the book fully contributes to the understanding of the process of interlanguage development in TL classrooms and thereby has major implications for TL teaching and teacher training. The book also contributes to further the understanding of negotiated interaction from a sociolinguistic standpoint: the asymmetrical nature of negotiation work in TL classrooms reflects the role and power relationships, the social organization, as well as the tacit interactional and cultural rules that seem to be at work in the TL classroom context.

The “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.

The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.

In the last decade, there has been a revival of interest regarding negation and polarity, with much cross-fertilization between semantic and syntactic approaches. The papers in the present volume address key issues regarding the syntax and semantics of negation and polarity, including both synchronic and diachronic perpectives. Central to the discussions are the distribution of negative markers and the structure of the clause, negative concord phenomena, licensing of polarity items, similarities between Neg-movement and wh-movement. The papers, by main contributors to the field, reflect different theoretical frameworks, including Principles and Parameters and Minimalist approaches, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Formal Semantics, or approaches interested in pragmatics. The volume is of interest to syntacticians, semanticians, historical linguists, typologists, and philosophers.

This volume aims to extend both the range of analyses and the database on nominal classification systems. Previous analyses of nominal classification systems have focussed on two areas: the semantics of the classification system and the role of the system in discourse. In many nominal classification systems, there appear to be a significant percentage of nominals with an arbitrary classification. There is a considerable body of literature aimed at elucidating the semantic bases of clasification in such systems, thereby reducing the degree of apparent arbitrariness. Contributors to this volume continue this line of enquiry, but also propose that arbitrariness in itself has a role from a wider socio-cultural perspective. Previous analyses of the discourse role of classification systems posit that they play a significant role in referential tracking. For the languages surveyed in this volume, contributors propose that reference instantiation is an equally significant function, and indeed that reference instantiation and tracking cannot be properly divided from one another. This volume provides detailed information on classification in a number of northern Australian languages, whose systems are otherwise poorly known.

Conversational narratives provide valuable resources for the discursive construction and invoking of personal and sociocultural identities. As such, their sociolinguistic and cultural analysis constitute a high priority in the agenda of discourse studies. This book contributes to the growing line of discourse-analytic research on the dynamic relations between narrative forms and functions and their immediate and wider communicative contexts. The volume draws on a large corpus of spontaneous, conversational stories recorded in Greece, where everyday stortytelling is a central mode of communication in the community’s interactional contexts and thus a rich site for a meaningful enactment of social stances, roles, and relations. The study brings to the fore the stories’ text-constitutive mechanisms and explores the ways in which they situate the narrated experiences globally, by invoking sociocultural knowledge and expectations, and locally, by making them sequentially and interactionally relevant to the specific conversational contexts. The stories’ micro- and macro-level analysis, richly illustrated with narrative transcripts throughout, leads to the uncovery of a global mode of narrative performance which is based on a closed set of recurrent devices. It is argued that the choice or avoidance of this mode is at the heart of the stories’ (re)constitution of a self, an other and a sociocultural world. The numerous cases of intergenerational narrative communication (adults-children) shed additional light on the performance’s contextualization aspects and contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of the dynamics of oral performances.

Besides students and researchers of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, narrative analysis and Greek studies, this book will also appeal to all those interested in communication and cultural studies.

Die vorliegende Monographie behandelt die nordfriesischen Grabhügelnamen und die darin enthaltenen Anthroponyme. Die sprachgeschichtliche Analyse des Namenmaterials stützt sich dabei auf ein vielschichtiges Quellenmaterial, wobei ein spezielles Augenmerk den morphologischen Merkmalen gilt. Insbesondere die Art der genitivischen Kompositionsfuge scheint Rückschlüsse auf die Genese bestimmter Namentypen und ihrer Deklinationszugehörigkeit im (Nord)friesischen zuzulassen. Schließlich versteht sich die Arbeit auch als ein Beitrag zu einem (Nord)friesischen Namenbuch, das nach wie vor eines der größten Desiderate friesischer Namenkunde ist.

The region of Najd in Central Arabia has always been regarded as inaccessible, ringed by a belt of sand deserts, the Nafūd, Dahana and the Rub’ al-Khāli and often with its population at odds with the rulers of the outer settled lands. It is however the centre of a purely Arabian culture based on a partnership between bedouin camel husbandry and settled palm cultivation. Possibly as a result of overpopulation the bedouin have periodically spread over into the lands of the Fertile Crescent. Because of their isolated position the Najdi dialect is of a very interesting and archaic type showing very little non-Arabic influence, which has led to the reputation of the Arabian bedouin as preservers of the original Classical form and considerable prestige being attached to the Najdi type. Consequently the region is a powerhouse of dialect influence so that Najdi based dialects are spoken all along the Gulf Coast and throughout most of the Syrian Desert.

Interest in these dialects has led to a number of recent studies of their oral literature and of the morphology and phonology. Ingham's work concentrates on the grammatical system, syntax and usage and is based on a number of trips to the region over the last fifteen years. The data base includes bedouin oral narrative, ordinary conversation and radio plays.

The papers in this volume reflect the renewed interest in the semantics of grammatical categories and the issues of invariance and variation in grammar. In particular, this collection presents the current understanding of invariance of grammar with respect to the synchronic and diachronic analyses of specific languages, and as realized in work on typology and universals.The book is divided into five sections: The Question of Invariance; Invariance and Grammatical Categories; Grammar and Discourse; Grammar and Pragmatics; Typology and Universals.

The 29 papers in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the Glottalic Theory and Lachmann's Law to the hermeneutic analysis of text-structure in Tacitus' Germania. The volume focuses on three themes specifically: the morphology and semantics of lexical formation; the internal and external syntax of the noun phrase; and the pragmatics of textual cohesion. The papers are descriptive rather than historical in approach, and most of the contributors are Latinists by training. For this reason the volume will be of interest not only for philologists and general linguists but also for those working with the Latin language.

This volume unites papers given by members of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS) at meetings held in Washington, D.C., in March and December 1989, respectively. They represent the scope and breadth of interest of North American scholars in this growing field, ranging from linguistic concepts, ideas, and theories in the Classical Greek and Roman period to developments in grammatical theory and sociolinguistics in the second half of the 20th century, and from the study of American Indian languages in the 17th through the present century and the philosophy of language from Aristotle to John Locke, to F.B. Skinner and Chomsky. A detailed Index of Authors, including life-dates, rounds off the volume.

The text of this volume has also been published in Historiographia Linguistica XVII:1/2.

This volume challenges and extends the definition of right and right-wing discourse as traditionally conceived in male scholarship. The eleven papers share a common perspective: a critique of the ideology of 'natural difference' as the basis for oppression of the dominated group. In a radical feminist analysis, the relation of domination between the sexes is seen as central to the projects of the right, in which the constructions of 'nations', 'races' and 'gender' present variations in time and space. In its linking of oppressions, this books makes an important and timely contribution to feminist theory and puts the case for a radical and altogether coherent rethinking of right-wing political space.

Jucker endeavors to test pragmatic concepts (such as Grice’s principles of conversational inference) by applying them to concrete data. This application leads to suggestions for various modifications in the available pragmatic methodology. While pursuing this theoretical goal, he makes a significant contribution to descriptive pragmatics by offering a detailed picture of linguistically relevant aspects of news interviews, which show communicative behavior in ‘laboratory conditions’ where as many influencing factors as possible are kept stable while the influence of one specific factor at a time can be tested.

This volume is about the nature of categories in cognition and the relevance of these in language description, especially classifier systems. The classical view of categories was that they were discrete and based upon clusters of properties which were inherent to the entities. In recent years this conception has been challenged in different fields. By now prototype theory has established itself as one of the main approaches in linguistics. This volume brings classifier systems to the attention of cognitive psychologists dealing with the phenomenon of human categorization. For the general linguist it shows what can be learned from classifier systems into any theory on the nature of language organization, it will challenge some of the most entrenched notions in the field of linguistics, notions of what language is made of and how it functions.

Non-declarative sentences such as interrogatives, imperatives and exclamations are analyzed together as a single class. The author gives a general characterization of all three types and shows that there are no other types of non-declarative sentences. Definitions are offered for the notions of declaration and presupposition. These definitions are applicable to all types of sentence, both declarative and non-declarative. A defining characteristic of non-declarative sentences is that only strongly intensional operators can apply to them to form complex sentences. It is shown that this property of non-declaratives implies that such sentences do not have declarations. A particular case of the relation between questions and conditionals is studied in more detail.