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

This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of instances of requests in everyday German conversation. Using the framework of CA, the study systematically analyzes the grammatical and syntactical structure of the request-turn and its response and of the conversational exchanges before and within the request base sequence, and the placement of the request sequence within the larger social interaction. Through an empirical analysis of individual cases of request sequences in German, the monograph describes in detail: (a) how speakers employ grammar and syntax as resources to construct turns at talk and accomplish the social action of request; (b) how speakers use grammatical and syntactical forms of the language to coordinate the production of the social action of requests; (c) how speakers use grammar and syntax as interactional resources to manage affiliative and remedial work (i.e., face work) when performing delicate social actions such as requests; and (d) how the context of the request activity impacts the grammatical and syntactical constructions of speakers’ utterances. Additionally, the monograph demonstrates that both the grammatical construction of turns and their placement within the talk are oriented to the sequential context of the interaction.

This comparative syntactic study claims that agreement is the most central functional category responsible for licensing predication in finite, non-finite and small clauses alike. Intriguing syntactic phenomena like Icelandic infinitival predicates taking non-nominative (quirky) subjects; psych-impersonal and modal predicates in Italian, Hungarian and Russian; meteorological predicates, existential clauses, post-verbal and null subjects in the so-called null-subject VSO languages can all be better analyzed through a concept of predication that is closely related to AGRP, manifesting subject-verb agreement. The overt agreement marking in Hungarian and Portuguese infinitival clauses further strengthens this view. Obviation and control subjunctive clauses in the Balkan languages, Welsh finite and non-finite infinitival clauses as well as case-marked secondary predicates in Icelandic, Slovak, Hungarian, Russian and Finnish also lend support to an analysis where the [+pred] feature is checked in AGRP.

The book claims that philosophy can be defined by its distinct rhetoric. This rhetoric is shaped by two values: humanism and critique. Humanism is defined as preferring the individual human deliberation to any external authority or method. Self-conviction is the touchstone of truth in philosophy. Critique is defined as suspecting your beliefs and convictions. This is the reason why the book uses Nietzsche’s definition of "the will to truth" – "the will not to deceive, not even myself" – for explaining the nature of philosophical thinking and argumentation. This rhetorical analysis reveals that the danger of self-deception is a constitutive yet irresolvable problem of philosophy.

The subjects of the book are: the relations between philosophy and rhetoric, the speaker and the addressee of philosophical arguments, the subordination of logic to rhetoric in philosophy and the philosophical problem of self-deception.

This work, unburdened with philosophers’ jargon, fits well in the current critical debate about the relevance of pragmatic features of the concepts of subjectivity and truth.

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the 2003 International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing”. A wide range of topics is covered in the volume: semantics, dialogue, summarization, anaphora resolution, shallow parsing, morphology, part-of-speech tagging, named entity, question answering, word sense disambiguation, information extraction. Various ‘state-of-the-art’ techniques are explored: finite state processing, machine learning (support vector machines, maximum entropy, decision trees, memory-based learning, inductive logic programming, transformation-based learning, perceptions), latent semantic analysis, constraint programming. The papers address different languages (Arabic, English, German, Slavic languages) and use different linguistic frameworks (HPSG, LFG, constraint-based DCG).

This book will be of interest to those who work in computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, human language technology, translation studies, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and informatics.

Through the development of a valid and reliable instrument, this book sets out to study the role that interpreters play in the various settings where they work, i.e. the courts, the hospitals, business meetings, international conferences, and schools. It presents interpreters’ perceptions and beliefs about their work as well as statements of their behaviors about their practice. For the first time, the administration and results of a survey administered across languages in Canada, Mexico and the United States offer the reader a glimpse of the interpreters' views in their own words. It also discusses the tension between professional ideology and the reality of interpreters at work. This book has implications for the theory and practice of interpreting across settings.

This volume breaks open traditional disciplinary confines and approaches the full complexity of communicative interaction from an impressive range of exciting state-of-the-art perspectives in social psychology, conversation analysis, hermeneutics, constructivist psychology, communication theory, computational neuroscience, sociology of communication, second language pragmatics, ergonomic interaction theory and computer-mediated interaction studies. In so doing, it sets out to establish a new research agenda in which communication science is understood as a human-social science par excellence. This collection of fifteen essays by seventeen scholars from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK will be of interest to scholars and students in all of the above fields. The editor, Colin B. Grant, is Reader in Modern Languages in the School of Management and Languages, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, where he runs the interdisciplinary social communication science research group. He is author of Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture (1995), Functions and Fictions of Communication (2000) and chief editor of Language-Meaning-Social Construction (2001).

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to cover issues of diachrony and Optimality theory. Work within pragmatics and sociolinguistics also explores the synchronic/diachronic link while topicalizing such issues as change of non-pro-drop Swiss French toward pro-drop status, scalar implicatures, speech acts, word order, and simplification in contexts of language contact. Finally, debates in linguistic theory are resumed in the work on syntax and semantics within both a Minimalist perspective and an Optimality framework. How do Catalan and French children acquire AGR and TNS? Can Basque Spanish be compared to topic-oriented Chinese? If Spanish preverbal subjects occur in an A-position, can Spanish no longer be compared to Greek?

The volumes Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory published in the series Current Issues in Linguistic Theory contain the selected papers of the Going Romance conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages.

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001 is the third such volume. It presents a selection of the papers that have been presented at the occasion of Going Romance 2001 (XV) — which was held at the University of Amsterdam on December 6-8, 2001. The three-day program included a workshop on Determiners. The volume contains articles on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: the architecture of the Determiner Phrase and properties of determiners, the left periphery of the sentence and clause structure, null elements and their interpretation, clitics, and other interesting phenomena in the Romance languages.

This book addresses current approaches to sequentiality in pragmatics and discourse analysis. It reflects the current moves in ethnomethodological conversation analysis and speech act theory to cross methodological borders to arrive at a conception of a sequence, which extends the local notion of sequentiality by integrating further constitutive components, such as cognition, intentionality, activity type, culture and genre. The individual contributions were presented at the 7th IPrA Conference held in Budapest in the year 2000. They range from critical analyses of speech act theory and cognitive pragmatics to detailed micro analyses of genre- and activity-specific constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. The first part “sequences in theory and practice: minimal and unbounded” discusses the theoretical premises and exemplifies these by detailed data analyses. The second part “sequences in discourse: the micro-macro interface” examines genre-specific constraints on individual sequences and shows the benefits of supplementing the microanalytic concept of sequentiality with macroanalytic categories.

This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 2000 'Going Romance' conference, held in Utrecht. The papers discuss current topics in formal syntax in Romance languages.