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

This book is about responses to language variety — their variability, shape, and content, as well as the variable cognitive and neural pathways underlying them. The chapters explore access to, processing of, and outcomes of that diversity and complexity. Many traditions are represented: from social psychology come classic experimental methods as well as more current discourse-based analyses; anthropology is represented in indexicality, iconization, recursivity, erasure, enregisterment, and ideologies; the sociolinguistic focus on specific rather than global elements that trigger responses is highlighted. The individual chapters address a variety of questions concerning language attitude, belief, and ideology, in some cases singly, in others with a more general focus, including attempts to relate one style of research to another. If we accept the fact that individuals house great variability in the underlying cognitive structures that inform responses, it follows that no single way of eliciting and studying them will do. This book provides a tour of the emerging tools that have been productive in such investigations.

The term ‘syntactocentrism’ has been used to criticize the claim that syntax, as regarded in generative linguistics, plays the central role in modeling the mental architecture of the human language faculty. This research monograph explores the conjecture that many of the objections to the generative perspective, as they are formulated in alternative frameworks such as construction grammar, disappear once the consequences of recent minimalist theory are taken seriously. To show this, the book applies recent concepts of minimalist grammar to phenomena like the syntactic flexibility of idioms, the pragmatics of left-periphery-movement, or opacity effects involved in subextraction patterns. The book makes a new contribution to the field, as existing monographs on architectural matters in minimalism neither discuss alternative frameworks at length nor place a premium on pragmatic explanations for syntactic facts. The primary audience of this book are researchers and graduate students interested in a state-of-the-art discussion of grammatical architecture.

Realism and Individualism. Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism discusses the main problems, tenets, assumptions, and arguments involved in Charles S. Peirce's early and late realist stances and subjects to critical scrutiny the still dominant view that Pragmatic Realism merely extends or refines new arguments in support of Scholastic Realism without questioning its basic assumptions. The book presents a critical overview of Peirce’s views on modern nominalism and offers a novel approach to the social-anthropological underpinnings of his realism, especially Pragmatic Realism vis à vis the individualist tendencies in modern thought.

The book is of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, especially students of American pragmatism, anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, as well as to anyone interested in Charles S. Peirce, Duns Scotus, Ockham, and generally to semioticians, social scientists, and sociologists.

There has been a remarkable revival of interest in how we conduct social actions in interaction – particularly in requesting, where recent research into video-recorded face-to-face interaction has taken our understanding in novel directions. This collection brings together some of the latest, cutting-edge research into requesting by leading international practitioners of Conversation Analysis. The studies trace a line of conceptual development from ‘directive’ to ‘recruitment’, and explore the acquisitional, cultural, situational and species-specific differentiation of forms for requesting in human social interaction.They represent the latest explorations into the complexities and controversies associated with the apparently simple but essential matter of how we ask another to do something for us.

The chapters in this book show how the different flavors of Construction Grammar provide illuminating insights into the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse-functional properties of specific phenomena in Romance languages such as (Castilian) Spanish, French, Romanian, and Latin from a synchronic as well as a diachronic viewpoint. The phenomena surveyed include the role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish, the relevance of lexicalization for a constructionist analysis of complex prepositions in French, the complementariness of fragments, patterns and constructions as theoretical and explanatory constructs in verb complementation in French, Latin, and Spanish, non-constituent coordination phenomena (e.g. Right Node Raising, Argument Cluster Coordination and Gapping) in Romanian, and variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion in the light of Leonard Talmy’s (2000) typological differences of lexicalization between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.

Les ressources lexicales (dictionnaires, bases de données, thesaurus, etc.) rassemblent des connaissances sur les mots, leurs sens et leurs usages. Si pendant des siècles elles ont été tributaires de l'imprimerie et du format textuel, il existe de nos jours une grande variété d'outils et de ressources accessibles sous des formats électroniques divers. Ainsi, la façon de considérer les ressources lexicales a changé considérablement ces dernières décennies. On a vu notamment apparaître des ressources non plus conçues en tant qu'entités statiques, mais modélisées sous forme de bases de données ou de graphes, dans lesquelles les informations sont liées et accessibles dynamiquement. Le domaine des ressources lexicales, au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines dont la linguistique, la lexicologie, la lexicographie et le traitement automatique des langues, est sans nul doute en pleine effervescence. Le but de ce volume est d'en dresser un panorama général qui rend compte de l’existant et des évolutions en cours.

Lexical resources store knowledge concerning words, their meanings and uses. While dictionaries were confined to printed media, there are now a variety of tools available in electronic form for different purposes. The way we look at these resources (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Indeed, there is hardly any task in Natural Language Processing which can be conducted without them. While being built by hand in the past, lexical resources are nowadays built with the help of machines, more or less automatically. Also, rather than being conceived as static entities (data-base view), lexical resources are often viewed as graphs, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines also apply to lexical resources: everything is linked, hence accessible, and everything is evolving. While the field is still in evolution, a snapshot may nevertheless be useful to reveal where we stand. This is precisely one of the goals of this volume.

This volume further complicates and advances the contemporary perspective on language endangerment by examining the outcomes of the most commonly cited responses to language endangerment, i.e. language documentation, language revitalization, and training. The present collection takes stock of many complex and pressing issues, such as the assessment of the degree of language endangerment, the contribution of linguistic scholarship to language revitalization programs, the creation of successful language reclamation programs, the emergence of languages that arise as a result of revitalization efforts after interrupted transmission, the ethics of fieldwork, and the training of field linguists and language educators. The volume’s case studies provide detailed personal accounts of fieldworkers and language activists who are grappling with issues of language documentation and revitalization in the concrete physical and socio-cultural settings of native speaker communities in different regions of the world.

This volume presents an in-depth study of the so-called irregular Past Tense (sing/sang) and Noun Plural (foot/feet) forms with Internal Vowel Alternation (IVA) in English demonstrating that they possess both a fixed phonological and semantic regularity. The innovative sign-oriented analysis and inductive methodology employed in this study are further supported by additional first language acquisition data, experimental studies and historical evidence. The data culled from multiple linguistic anthologies, dictionaries and thesauri have shown that although the IVA process comprises a relatively small number of nominal and verbal forms in Modern English, IVA, originally, was a prevalent and productive process in Old English, Indo-European and other language families. The results of this empirical study present and introduce a novel classification based on the regular and systematic iconic-phonological and semantic nature of all these diverse IVA processes both nominal and verbal that has been maintained throughout the history of English.

Why is it that we tend to think about our lives as stories? Why do we strive to create coherent narratives that reflect a particular perspective? What happens when we discover multiple, perhaps conflicting perspectives in our narratives? Following groundbreaking work in the study of narrative identity in the last 20 years, the scholars of this volume have expanded and merged their theories of narrative identity with new perspectives in fields such as narratology, literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, gender studies and history. Their contributions focus on the significance of perspective in the formation of narrative identities, probing the stratagems and narrative means of individuals in testing out personae for themselves.

This edited volume proposes key contributions addressing the connections between two important themes: dialogue and representation. These connections were approached or interpreted in three possible ways: 1. Dialogue as representation, 2. Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues, and 3. Representations of dialogue. The first interpretation -- Dialogue as representation -- consists of exploring dialogue as an activity where many things, beings or voices can be made present, whether we think in terms of ideologies, cultures, situations, collectives, roles, etc. The second interpretation – Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues – leads scholars to explore questions of normativity, which are often associated with the notion of dialogue, when conceived as a morally stronger form of conversation. Finally, the third interpretation – Representations of dialogue – invites us to address methodological questions related to the representation of this type of conversation. Echoing Bakhtin, contributors were invited to explore the polyphonic, heteroglot, or dialogic character of any text, discourse or interaction.