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.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of historically attested relative clause constructions from a diachronic typological perspective. Systematic integration of historical data and a typological approach demonstrates how typology and historical linguistics can each benefit from attention to the other. The diachronic behaviour of relative clauses is mapped across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. Central to the discussion is the strength of evidence for what have previously been claimed to be ‘natural’ or even ‘universal’ pathways of change. While many features of relative clause constructions are found to be remarkably stable over long periods of time, it is shown that language contact seems to be the crucial factor that does trigger change when it occurs. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. The findings of this study have implications for the definition of relative clauses, their syntactic structures and the relationships between the different ‘subtypes’ of this construction, as well as offering new directions for the integration of typological and historical linguistic research.

While French reflexive clitics have been widely studied, other forms of expressing co-reference within the clause have not received much attention. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the wider system of clause-mate co-reference in French, including the stressed pronouns, their suffixed form {soi/lui/elle}-même, and also the intensifier use of the latter. Its empirical backbone is a corpus analysis of the gradual replacement of stressed reflexive soi with the personal pronoun lui/elle from Old to Modern French. Apart from offering insights into the history of the language, this is important for current issues in theoretical linguistics, in particular binding, specificity, and the interaction of grammar and discourse. Within a cognitive-semantic framework, a number of analyses will help elucidate some long-standing puzzles in the study of French reflexives, while contributing to the wider theory of reflexivity and related issues. This book is of interest to the fields of French linguistics, semantics, discourse studies, and historical linguistics.

The annual Going Romance conference has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are tested. The twenty-third Going Romance conference was a very special one: for the first time it was not hosted by one of the Dutch universities, but was co-organized by the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and held in France at the Maison du Séminaire in Nice from 3–5 December 2009.

The present volume contains a broad range of peer-reviewed articles dealing with syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics and acquisition of the Romance languages as well as selected papers from the special workshop dealing with linguistic change in relation to linguistic theory.

The present collection of articles represents research efforts in the field of specialised languages, including the analysis of research articles in disciplines as diverse as Biomedicine and Computing, on the one hand, and overlapping disciplines such as in Social Sciences, on the other, all with high relevance to English for Academic Purposes, and English for specific Purposes. The volume offers empirical evidence obtained from corpus-based analyses of language, both from diachronic as well as synchronic perspectives, on topics such as the role of mother tongue in professional writing, the analysis of conference abstracts as a genre, or the analysis of visual data transfer. This collection addresses issues such as the implementation of lexicons for specialised language learning, and the development of ontologies to research language patterns. The volume thus provides a rich repertoire of research methodologies, in-depth analyses of specialised discourses, and the identification and discussion of relevant pedagogic issues.Winner of the 4th Edition of the 'Enrique Alcaraz Research Award'

This book brings together contributions which address a wide range of issues regarding resumption, gathering evidence from a great variety of languages including Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, French, Vata, Hebrew, Jordanian and Palestinian Arabic. The topics covered include the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns and epithets, the featural make-up of resumptive pronouns, as well as the syntactic diversity of resumptive constructions and the nature of A-resumption. The introduction offers a critical survey of early syntactic accounts and recent semantic advancements. One contribution presents the results of experimental research providing a new perspective on the last resort status of resumption. Two seminal papers on resumption, Doron (1982) and McCloskey (1990), have also been included. This volume, which deals with a phenomenon that has given rise to intriguing claims concerning the structure and interpretation of pronouns, will be of great interest to both semanticists and syntacticians, whichever framework they favor.

This volume explores the translation of literary and humorous style, including comedy, irony, satire, parody and the grotesque, from Italian to English and vice versa. The innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical approach places the focus on creativity and playful rewriting as central to the translation of humour. Analysing translations of works by Rosa Cappiello, Dario Fo, Will Self and Anthony Burgess, the author explores literary translation as a form of exchange between translated and receiving cultures. In a final case study she recounts her own strategies in translating the work of Milena Agus, exploring humour, creation and recreation from the perspective of the translator and demonstrating the benefits of critical engagement with both the theory and the practice of translation. This unique contribution to the study of humour and literary style in translation will be of interest to scholars of translation, humour, comparative literature, and literary and cultural studies.

This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, English) and structures (e.g., relative clauses, wh-gaps, gender, number) to examine various issues in second language processing: first language influence, whether or not non-natives can achieve native-like processing, the roles of context and prosody, the effects of working memory, and others. The researchers include both established scholars and newer voices, all offering important insights into the factors that affect processing and parsing in a second language.

This volume assembles a significant number of selected papers that were presented at the 22nd edition of Going Romance, held at the University of Groningen in December 2008. Though it contains a variety of topics, 'tense, mood and aspect' is represented most extensively. This volume contains a rich variety of Romance languages: Cape Verdean, European Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish. The collection of papers is representative of the research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and shows the vitality of this research.

It has become increasingly clear that metaphor needs to be explored in terms of the social and discourse context in which it is used, especially where the aim is to address real-world problems. The notion of 'real world' metaphor research has been developed to describe this important area of investigation. This book starts by describing the nature and scope of real world metaphor research and then illustrates, through 17 detailed, mainly empirically-based studies, the different areas it can apply to, and different methodologies that can be employed. Research problems are explored in areas such as artificial intelligence, language teaching and learning, reconciliation dialogue, university lecture discourse, poetry and wine description. Methods include corpus analysis, experimentation, discourse analysis, cross-cultural analysis and genre analysis. In each case the empirical studies refer back to Gibbs's opening overview of real-world research. The result is an invaluable and cross-referenced collection of papers addressing real-world problems.

The volumes Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ contain the selected papers of the Going Romance conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages.This volume assembles a significant number of selected papers that were presented at the 21st edition of Going Romance, which was organized by the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam in December 2007. The range of languages (both standard and non-standard varieties) analyzed in this volume is quite significant: Catalan, French, Italian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. The volume is quite representative of the spread of the variety of research carried out nowadays on Romance languages within theoretical linguistics and shows the vitality of this research.

Register Variation in Indian English constitutes the first large-scale empirical investigation of an international variety of English. Using a combination of the corpus compiled for this project and relevant sections of ICE-India as its database, this work tests existing descriptions and characterizations of English in India, and provides the first empirical account of register variation in Indian English (or indeed, any international variety of English). Included in this survey are linguistic features that have been examined before and others that have not. From an empirical standpoint, it comments on the process of Indianization of the English used in India. The book will be of interest to readers beyond specialists of Indian English as it is one of very few studies to undertake a large-scale corpus analysis for the purpose of dialect research. The book provides a model on which future studies of international Englishes can be based.

The present volume includes a selection of twenty-one peer-reviewed and revised papers from the 37th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. The papers cover a range of topics in morphology, syntax, phonology and language acquisition. A number of languages and varieties are also analyzed, including Italian, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Old Spanish, French, Old French, and Romanian. Contributions include papers from three of the invited speakers, Heles Contreras, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Julia Herschensohn. This volume highlights theoretical issues under current debate in Romance linguistics.

The main focus of this collection is to explore the question of “representational deficits” in second language acquisition, currently a much-debated topic. The volume is intended as a tribute to Roger Hawkins, a leading scholar in generative second language acquisition, whose research has been devoted to explaining lack of native-like success in terms of representational deficits. The papers in this volume feature a range of studies, all undertaken within a generative linguistic framework, which investigate various properties of L2 grammar bearing on the question of whether or not there are representational deficits in the post-critical-period L2 learners’ grammar. The significance of such deficits, if their existence can be confirmed, is that they provide support for the claim, at least for the type of L2 learner under investigation, that there are insurmountable obstacles to ultimate attainment.

This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai‘i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.

This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each other in terms of exhaustiveness and authenticity.

This study explores the similarities and differences of the request patterns that emerged in the Chinese and Korean data, and the intricate relation between request strategies and social factors (such as power and distance). The findings raise questions about the influence of methodology on data, and the applicability of so called universals to East Asian languages. They also offer new insights into generally held ideas of directness and requesting behaviours in Chinese and Korean, and the problems of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication. This research is suggestive for the disciplines of cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis.

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.

This volume brings together selected and revised papers from the international conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing”, held in Borovets, Bulgaria, in September 2005. The best papers have been selected for this volume with the aim to reflect the most promising and significant trends in natural language processing. The volume covers a wide variety of topics in Natural Language Processing, including information extraction, indexing, latent semantic analysis, dependency parsing, anaphora and referring expressions, spam analysis, document classification, rhetorical relations, textual entailment, question answering, ontologies, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, treebanks and corpora.

This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics. The volume contains scholarly research in areas such as parenthetical null topic construction, expletives, number and language change, performative verbs in colonial court Spanish, aspect shift, palatilization in Romanian, melodic contours in Majorcan Catalan, variation in verb type and position, and deviance in early child bilingualism among many others. It is a well-rounded selection of research topics that will enrich and widen our understanding of Romance languages.

Receptive multilingualism refers to the language constellation in which interlocutors use their respective mother tongue while speaking to each other. Since the mid-nineties receptive multilingualism is promoted by the European commission on par with other possibilities of increasing the mobility of the European citizens. Throughout the last ten years a marked increase in the research on this topic has been observable. This volume reveals new perspectives from different theoretical frameworks on linguistic analyses of receptive multilingualism in Europe. Case studies are presented from contemporary settings, along with analyses of historical examples, theoretical considerations and, finally, descriptions of didactical concepts established in order to transfer and disseminate receptive multilingual competence. The book contains results from research carried out at the Research Center on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg as well as contributions by various international scholars working in the field of receptive multilingualism.

This volume brings together a selection of papers from the eighteenth ‘Going Romance’ symposium, held at Leiden University, 9–11 December 2004. These papers cover a broad range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and acquisition, in a variety of Romance languages.

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.

In Reflections on Language and Language Learning: In honour of Arthur van Essen, thirty-one leading language scholars and educational linguists in the Netherlands and abroad with whom over the years Professor van Essen, one of the grandees of applied linguistics, has collaborated provide original essays and studies which discuss the most recent insights and trends in the fields of linguistics and foreign language teaching. While interdisciplinary in scope, the volume encompasses theoretical advances in (educational) linguistic thinking; for example, the perceptive articles written by Michael Byram, Christopher N. Candlin, Natalia Gvishiani, Peter Jordens, Jan Koster, Leo van Lier, and Bondi Sciarone — as well as a sample of the latest methodological developments in areas such as ELT, LSP, and content-based language teaching; cases in point are the useful contributions by Jeanine Deen & Hilde Hacquebord, Michaël Goethals, Paul Meara & Ignacio Rodríguez Sánchez, Rosamond Mitchell & Christopher Brumfit, and Uta Thürmer.

This volume brings together a selection of articles presented at 'Going Romance' 1999. The articles focus on current syntactic and semantic issues in various Romance languages, including Catalan, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number of Northern Italian dialects. A large number of articles focus on negation, which was the theme of the workshop at Going Romance 1999, but other topics investigated include Wh- in situ, free relatives, exclamatives, lexical decomposition and thematic structure, unaccusative inversion, and temporal existential constructions. Most articles are comparative in nature, relating the different syntactic and semantic properties of both Romance and non-Romance languages to principles of Universal Grammar. The theoretical frameworks adopted in the various articles are diverse, ranging from the Principles and Parameters framework to HPSG.

Reanimated Voices addresses three activities: reporters evoking speech events; interpreters (re)constituting those speech events; and historical pragmaticians eavesdropping in time on the reporters and interpreters. Can one reconstruct aspects of pragmatic competence on the basis of written texts only? Reanimated Voices answers this in the affirmative. It offers a methodology for historical-pragmatic reconstruction to explain the synchronic patterns of variation in premodern writings.

Reanimated Voices examines the distribution of reporting strategies in a corpus of medieval Russian texts. Forms preferred in specific recurring contexts are matched with the need(s) served by those contexts — a fit reflecting collective intentionality. Occasional “residual forms” -strategies that appear in contexts where others predominate- also reflect cooperative behavior; they index utterances departing from the prototype or unusual configurations of participants. Thus Reanimated Voices explores reporting as an activity of rational agents coordinating interpretation in accordance with cultural and institutional notions of relevance.

This book has won the annual book prize in the category Slavic Linguistics awarded by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

Governments communicate with the public through all kinds of documents: forms, brochures, letters, policy papers, and so on. These public documents have an important role in any democracy and their design very much affects the efficiency with which governments can perform their tasks.

Document designers, linguists and other communication experts in the Netherlands have been studying public documents from a design point of view as well as empirically for decades. In this book, the most prominent of these researchers present the results of their work, collectively giving an overview of various recurring problems in government-to-public communication, and providing suggestions for problem solving.

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the Second International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP’97) held in Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria, September 1997. The aim of the conference was to give researchers the opportunity to present new results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based both on traditional and modern theories and approaches. The conference received substantial interest — 167 submissions from more than 20 countries. The best papers from the proceedings were selected for this volume, in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and successful results) in NLP.

The contributions have been grouped according to the following topics: tagging, lexical issues and parsing, word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution, semantics, generation, machine translation, and categorisation and applications. The volume contains an extensive index.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 3rd Conference on Afroasiatic Languages, held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 1996. The languages discussed include (varieties of) Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Chaha, Wolof, and Old Egyptian.

The importance of reflexive markers in the study of language structure cannot be underestimated: they participate in the coding of the argument structure of a clause; in the coding of semantic relations between arguments and verbs; in the coding of the relationship between arguments; in the coding of aspect; in the coding of point of view; and in the Coding of the information structure of a clause.

The present volume offers an approach to reflexive forms and functions from several perspectives: a formal approach where reflexives are discussed within a well-defined model of language representation; a typological approach; a historical approach concentrating on grammaticalization of reflexives and on the changes that pronouns and anaphors undergo; and a functionalist approach where functions of reflexive forms are described. The languages from which data were drawn represent a wide variety of language families and language types: English, Old English, Dutch, German, Tsakhur (Nakh-Dagestanian), Spanish, French, Bantu and Chadic languages. The variety of languages discussed and the different approaches taken complement each other in that each contributes an important piece to the understanding of reflexives in a cross-linguistic perspective.

This volume contains selected papers from the 27th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL-27), which was held at the University of California, Irvine, on February 20-22, 1997. The 22 papers deal with current issues in linguistic theory as they can be illuminated by the close analysis and comparative study of Romance languages. A majority of the articles tackles topics in syntax and semantics; the rest is divided among topics in language acquisition, phonology, morphology, and sociolinguistics. Among the well-represented Romance languages examined are (Old) French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories.

Founded by I. Mel’cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon.

The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT’s liveliness and relevance to the field’s “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories.

This volume is based on contributions from the First International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP’95) held in Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria, 14-16 September 1995. This conference was one of the most important and competitively reviewed conferences in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for 1995 with submissions from more than 30 countries. Of the 48 papers presented at RANLP’95, the best (revised) papers have been selected for this book, in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and latest successful results) in NLP.

The book is organised thematically and the contributions are grouped according to the traditional topics found in NLP: morphology, syntax, grammars, parsing, semantics, discourse, grammars, generation, machine translation, corpus processing and multimedia. To help the reader find his/her way, the authors have prepared an extensive index which contains major terms used in NLP; an index of authors which lists the names of the authors and the page numbers of their paper(s); a list of figures; and a list of tables.

This book will be of interest to researchers, lecturers and graduate students interested in Natural Language Processing and more specifically to those who work in Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Machine Translation.