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

This volume presents a selection of French varieties representing the great diversity of this language along geographical, social, and stylistic dimensions. Twelve illustrations from regions as far removed as Western Canada and Central Africa represent widely divergent social contexts of language use. Each chapter is based on original surveys conducted within the framework of the Phonology of Contemporary French project, described in the Introduction. These surveys constitute an invaluable source of new data for researchers, as many of the varieties included are otherwise undocumented in any systematic way. The chapters follow a similar format: presentation of the survey(s) and the sociolinguistic dimensions of the variety studied; description of the phonological inventory of the system(s), principal allophonic realizations, phonotactic constraints, behavior of schwa, behavior of liaison consonants, and other notable characteristics. The book opens with an informative introduction and closes with a chapter providing a synthesis of the major findings by continent.

In our everyday life we are flooded by a pandemonium of information which consciousness organizes into more easily manageable phonetic and semantic categories. In poetry reading, however, the total effect of a poem is not only obtained by some of these categories but also by precategorial information, for which there is a growing body of empirical evidence of its psychological reality. In the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon, a great amount of diffuse precategorial information is present but fails to “grow together” into a compact word, generating a feeling of some dense, undifferentiated mass. Poetic language typically exploits such precategorial information for its effects. By way of theoretical considerations and close readings, this book explores the semantic and phonetic strategies by which a text may increase or decrease the impact of such information. It investigates the conditions that boost or inhibit overtone fusion in rhyme and alliteration. By seeking empirical evidence for the claims he makes in different fields such as music, art, literature, linguistics, experiments in the speech laboratory, the author provides ample and sound examples (ambiguity intended) in an almost conversational tone, which makes us really anticipate reading each new chapter.

Departing from Schneider and Barron (2008), representing the emerging field of Variational Pragmatics, this volume examines pragmatic variation focusing on methods utilized to collect and analyze data in a variety of first (L1) and second (L2) language contexts. The objectives are to: (1) examine variation in such areas of pragmatics as speech acts, conventional expressions, metapragmatics, stance, frames, mitigation, communicative action, (im)politeness, and implicature; and (2) critically review central methodological concerns relevant for research in pragmatic variation, such as coding, ethical issues, qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual variation. Theoretical frameworks vary from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, to variational pragmatics. This collection contains eleven chapters by leading scholars, including two state-of-the art chapters on key methodological issues of pragmatic variation study. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to those who study pragmatics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and language variation.

Public information messages are an important means of state-citizen communication in today’s societies. Using this genre, citizens are directed to “never ever drink and drive”, to “slow down” and to “learn to say no”. Yet, this book presents the first in-depth analysis of public information messages from a linguistic perspective, and indeed also from a cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, the study, adopting genre analysis, contrasts a corpus of state-run national public information campaigns in Germany and Ireland. A taxonomy of moves is developed inductively and the interactional features of the genre are analysed and related to the context of use. The comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, the in-depth analysis and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to researchers and students in (contrastive) discourse analysis, (cross-cultural) pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, advertising, social psychology, mass communication and media studies. Copy-writers will also profit from the insights gained, particularly within the context of an increase in Europe-wide public information campaigns.

This book shifts the focus of Pidgin and Creole Studies from the better-known Atlantic/Caribbean contexts to the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and Mongolia. By looking at Asian contexts before and after Western colonial expansion, we offer readers insights into language contact in historical settings and with empirical features substantially different from those that have shaped the theory of the field. Two pidgin varieties of the Far East are described in detail, namely Chinese-Pidgin Russian and China Coast Pidgin. The former offers a unique opportunity to observe the typological dynamics of contact between Slavic, Tungusic and Sinitic, while the latter presents one of the better-documented studies of any pidgin so far. The third contribution is an in-depth analysis of the Portuguese India slave trade in relation to contact phenomena. The remaining two chapters look at Southeast Asia and discuss Malayo-Portuguese Creoles and the ubiquitous Malay-Sinitic lingua franca respectively. From a linguistic perspective the diversity of language families, the historical time depth, the complex patterns of population movements, and the wealth of contact phenomena that define Asia are so many and at times still so little understood that no single volume could ever pretend to shed sufficient light on all these aspects of the region. Despite providing what can be seen as a sample platter of the field of contact linguistics in this part of the world, the in-depth analysis of exotic socio-historical settings, the typologically diverse and rich data sets, and the notions of pidgins and Creoles as applied here will nonetheless stretch the limits and limitations of current theories in the field, and are a must read for anyone interested in arriving at solid theoretical generalizations.

Published earlier as Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics 25:1, 2010.

The present volume presents cutting-edge research on Arabic linguistics. It features a set of papers which continue a long tradition of seeking new explanations for familiar or previously undiscovered structural patterns. While the papers illustrate a range of approaches, from formalist to functionalist, each paper combines rigorous analysis of a set of Arabic data within the context of explicit models of some aspect of human language. The volume consists of three sections, the first section devoted to phonetics and phonology, the second to syntax, and the third to language acquisition and language contact.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thereby attempting to divide up its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, discursive, variational, or interactional angles, this 9th volume focuses on what pragmatics is good for – beyond the very discipline of pragmatics as such. The chapters in the volume thus address the importance of taking a pragmatic perspective on traditional fields of applied linguistics (contrastive and error analysis, translation), and they address the core of pragmatics as the study of language use (with phenomena ranging from irony and emphasis to literacy and mass media, and with approaches to the function of language like rhetoric, stylistics, corpus analysis, and general semantics). The volume contains chapters not only on the spoken and written modes of communication, but also on signed language pragmatics and on computer-mediated communication. The impact and usefulness of taking a pragmatic perspective on language for a deeper understanding of clinical and rehabilitation practices has recently received ever more focus; in this volume, aspects of this direction of research are dealt with in the chapter on clinical pragmatics. In most of the chapters in the volume, ethics has a core role to play, not only in issues of authenticity in general in relation to research on language use, but also in issues that have a direct influence on the (linguistic) culture and society we live in, irrespective of whether we are part of a (linguistic) majority or a minority, or a minority within a minority: language policy and language planning, language ecology, and language in relation to legal matters. In all of these fields, we see the importance of research within pragmatics as a discipline dealing with how language influences our everyday lives. All in all, the volume presents different perspectives on how research in pragmatics not only can be put to practice, but how pragmatics is used as a tool to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.

The claim of this book is that truth is a matter of language games and practical achievements: it is a “member phenomenon”. To document this statement, it proceeds to the investigation of instances of truth-related practices in various Arab contexts. Bearing on the constitution of actions and events, on what is factual or objective, on predictability, consequentiality, intentionality, causality, and on the many ways people orient to them, such a varied set of questions appears thoroughly moral. The praxeological respecification this book undertakes leads to important considerations regarding the question of morality in ordinary reasoning, and the categories and categorizations on which that morality is based: moral values are publicly available; morality has a modal logic; moral values and conventions have an open texture; objectivity is a practical achievement carried out by members of society; the moral order is an omnipresent, constitutive characteristic of social practice.

The purpose of this research is to analyse the pragmatic development of language groups at different proficiency levels and to investigate the relationship between interlanguage pragmatics and grammatical competence. For this study, 36 native Spanish speaking EFL learners at different proficiency levels were asked to respond in English to 24 different situations that called for the speech acts of request and apology. Results showed three important aspects. The first finding suggested that basic adult learners possess a pragmatic knowledge in their L1 that allows them to focus on the intended meaning and, in most cases, to assemble an utterance that conveys a pragmatic intention and satisfies the communicative demands of a social situation. The second finding revealed that there are two essential conditions to communicate a linguistic action: the knowledge of the relevant linguistic rules and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately and effectively in a specific context. The findings further suggested that advanced learners possess the grammatical knowledge to produce an illocutionary act, but they need to learn the specific L2 pragmatic conventions that enable them to know when to use these grammatical forms and under which circumstances.

This edited volume brings together a range of contributions solely on the linguistics of humour. Rather than favour one approach, this collection of articles gives a state-of-the-art picture of current directions in pragmatic humour studies. The contributors assume multifarious theoretical perspectives and discuss a wide array of issues germane to different types of humour across discourse domains. Consequently, the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms are elucidated, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour. In addition, the papers address diversified manifestations of humour, such as puns in Shakespeare’s plays, gendered jokes on the Internet, sexuality in anti-proverbs, Woody Allen’s prose, humour in “Friends”, and parody by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most importantly, the chapters offer new research findings and advocate novel theoretical conceptualisations of humorous phenomena, drawing on the wealth of existing scholarship. Therefore, the volume is bound to serve as a well of knowledge and inspiration for both seasoned and beginning researchers with interests in the pragmatics of humour.