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

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the Sixth International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP) held in Borovets, Bulgaria, 27–29 September 2007. These papers cover a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) topics: ontologies, named entity extraction, translation and transliteration, morphology (derivational and inflectional), part-of-speech tagging, parsing (incremental processing, dependency parsing), semantic role labeling, word sense disambiguation, temporal representations, inference and metaphor, semantic similarity, coreference resolution, clustering (topic modeling, topic tracking), summarization, cross-lingual retrieval, lexical and syntactic resources, multi-modal processing. The aim of this volume is to present new results in NLP based on modern theories and methodologies, making it of interest to researchers in NLP and, more specifically, to those who work in Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and Machine Translation.

The aim of this volume is to bring non-syntactic factors in the development of case into the eye of the research field, by illustrating the integral role of pragmatics, semantics, and discourse structure in the historical development of morphologically marked case systems. The articles represent fifteen typologically diverse languages from four different language families: (i) Indo-European: Vedic Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, Latin, Latvian, Gothic, French, German, Icelandic, and Faroese; (ii) Tibeto-Burman, especially the Bodic languages and Meithei; (iii) Japanese; and (iv) the Pama-Nyungan mixed language Gurindji Kriol. The data also show considerable diversity and include elicited, archival, corpus-based, and naturally occurring data. Discussions of mechanisms where change is obtained include semantically and aspectually motivated synchronic case variation, discourse motivated subject marking, reduction or expansion of case marker distribution, case syncretism motivated by semantics, syntax, or language contact, and case splits motivated by pragmatics, metonymy, and subjectification.

The eleven studies in this volume illustrate and advance the synthesis of discourse analysis with rhetorical studies. Rhetoric in Detail shows how a variety of techniques from discourse analysis can be useful in studying such concerns as agency, legitimation, controversy, and style, and how concepts from rhetoric including genre and figuration can enrich the work of discourse analysts. The authors’ research sites range from government commissions, political speeches, newspaper reports and letters to interviews and conversations in beauty salons and online. Methodological overviews interspersed throughout survey critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, grounded theory, computer-aided corpus analysis, narrative analysis, and participant observation and provide suggestions for further reading. Rhetoric in Detail is an invaluable source for rhetoricians looking for systematic, grounded ways of approaching new, more vernacular sites for rhetorical discourse and for discourse analysts interested in seeing what they can learn from the tradition and practice of rhetorical analysis.

This volume and its companion one Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization, held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. From the rich programme of the conference (over 120 papers), the twelve contributions included in this volume were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in grammaticalization and suggest possible directions for future investigations in the field. Combining theoretical discussions with the analysis of particular test cases from a wide range of languages from various language families, the selected papers focus on such central questions as the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization, the distorting effects of grammaticalization on grammar, the areal perspective in grammaticalization and the relevance of contact-induced change to grammaticalization. Other topics discussed include the development of markers of textual connectivity and the emergence of cardinal numerals and numeral systems.

Ce recueil se compose de treize articles centrés sur la morphologie ou le lexique. Ses auteurs ont tous entretenu des relations de travail avec Danielle Corbin et la plupart sont des linguistes reconnus en morphologie. Au-delà de la diversité des approches, l’originalité de l’ouvrage tient au fait qu’il rassemble des contributions qui mettent en lumière des données nouvelles concernant plusieurs phénomènes peu ou pas décrits auparavant (l’incidence des contraintes prosodiques dans la formation des gentilés, les noms dérivés ambigus entre N de procès et N de propriété (correction), la sémantique des adjectifs dénominaux, l’inhibition dans les adjectifs dérivés d’ethniques en espagnol (Usbekistán / usbekistano), ou encore la morphologie non conventionnelle à travers les lexèmes complexes en -ouille) et des contributions qui débattent de questions théoriques plus classiques : principe de la base unique, frontière entre dérivation et composition, statut des segments fluctuants, relation entre préfixation et catégorisation, dérivation paradigmatique. Les phénomènes traités concernent essentiellement l’espagnol, le français, le grec, l’italien et le portugais.

After the accession of ten new member-states in 2004, the number of official EU languages increased from eleven to twenty. In 2005, the Council of the European Union decided to expand the existing legal framework for Irish and for other languages, such as Basque, Catalan and Galician, which are official in all or part of the territory of a given member-state. On 1 January 2007 Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, increasing the number of official EU languages still further. This book addresses the challenge of respecting linguistic diversity within the EU and is intended as an introduction to the issue for those not already familiar with EU law. It also provides an analysis of the potential of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union to enhance respect for linguistic diversity. Each chapter has been written by a recognised expert in the field. The appendices bring together the basic legal norms relating to linguistic diversity within EU institutions.

The conference series Going Romance is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages, where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages are put in an interactive perspective, giving space to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume features a selection of 18 articles (out of 28) that were presented during the 19th meeting at Utrecht University, December 8-10, 2005. Included in this volume are four papers that were presented by invited speakers: Belletti, Delais-Roussarie & Rialland, Notley & Van der Linden & Hulk, and Ordóñez; these reflect both issues discussed in the general session as well as themes of the workshop on acquisition. A number of reknown Romance linguists (Saltarelli, di Sciullo, Zubizarreta) also contributed to the volume. In general, contributions bear on a variety of topics in the field of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and include the perspective from acquisition.

This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other, The poets admire each other’s poems) have often been the subject of language-particular studies, but it is only in this work that a truly global comparative picture emerges. Nine stage-setting chapters dealing with general and theoretical matters are followed by 40 chapters containing in-depth descriptions of reciprocals in individual languages by renowned specialists. The introductory papers provide a conceptual and terminological framework that allows the authors of the individual chapters to characterize their languages in comparable terms, making it easy for the reader to see points of commonality between languages and constructions that have never been compared before. This set of volumes is an indispensable starting point and will be a lasting reference work for any future studies of reciprocals.

While parentheticals attract constant attention, they very rarely constitute the main subject of monographs. This book provides a comprehensive account of reduced parenthetical clauses (RPCs) in three Romance languages. Typical French RPCs are je crois, disons, je dirais, je pense, je sais pas, and je trouve. The research draws on 22 corpora of spoken French, Italian, and Spanish comprising a total amount of 3,975,500 words. Its results consist in a typology of the relevant expressions in the three languages, in the understanding of their pragmatic function and of the factors influencing their use, and in the description of their syntactic and prosodic properties. Other findings are that RPCs are not restricted to statements but also occur in questions and that belief verbs are not as frequent as commonly assumed. Although the book is about Romance parentheticals, its conclusions are relevant for other languages.