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

Sociology of Discourse takes the perspective that collective actors like social movements are capable of creating social change from below by creating new institutions through alternative discourses. Institutionalization becomes a process of moving away from existing institutions towards creating new ones. While discourses entail openness and enable the questioning of what is instituted, institutions offer continuity and stability to social mobilizations. This dual movement of openness and stabilization explains how social struggles ensure their continuity, without completely assuming the logic of the dominant order. The book proposes an analytical model of social change, which is unfolded through three intertwined areas: discourse, communication, and institution. Collective experiences of social change, from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, illustrate the main theoretical points and concepts. Through the example of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the book concludes by analyzing how social change from below is possible.

The volume contains 18 contributions from senior and junior scholars covering core issues within the theoretical investigation of the architecture and the mechanisms of the faculty of language, with particular emphasis on the computational component. They all pursue a comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects or comparing different modes of acquisition, as in Adriana Belletti’s work, to whom the volume is dedicated. The papers in the first part (by Chomsky, Rizzi, Bianchi & Chesi, Cinque, Costa, Calabrese) deal with theoretical issues such as labeling, the cartography of structures and the locality of derivations in a broad sense. The papers in the second part (by Haegeman & Lohndal, Delfitto & Fiorin, Cruschina, Lahousse, Di Domenico and Contemori, Dal Pozzo & Matteini) concentrate on the realization of structure relative to discourse, particularly on topic and focus positions in the vP periphery, and on referential dependencies. The third part collects papers (by Cardinaletti & Volpato, Friedmann, Yachini & Szterman, Snyder & Hyams, Hamann & Tuller, Cecchetto & Donati, Grewendorf & Poletto) that specifically target intervention effects in relative clauses as apparent in different structures, different languages, and different populations.

In Sign Language Interpreting (SLI) there is a great need for a volume devoted to classic and seminal articles and essays dedicated to this specific domain of language interpreting. Students, educators, and practitioners will benefit from having access to a collection of historical and influential articles that contributed to the progress of the global SLI profession. In SLI there is a long history of outstanding research and scholarship, much of which is now out of print, or was published in obscure journals, or featured in publications that are no longer in print. These readings are significant to the progression of SLI as an academic discipline and a profession. As the years have gone by, many of these readings have been lost to students, educators, and practitioners because they are difficult to locate or unavailable, or because this audience simply does not know they exist. This volume brings together the seminal texts in our field that document the philosophical, evidence-based and analytical progression of SLI work.

Second-language varieties of English in the South Pacific have received scant attention, until now. This monograph offers the first book-length analysis of the sociolinguistics and morphosyntax of three representatives of South Pacific L2 English in comparison – two of which have never been described linguistically. The book describes the spread of English, its current status and use in the three island states and compares the most frequent and salient morphosyntactic features to corresponding structures in Asian and African Englishes and the Oceanic substrate languages. As part of a larger theoretical discussion on the multiple factors that determine the evolution and dynamics of L2 varieties in general, Mufwene’s feature pool model is extended to a new model that integrates cognitive aspects of language acquisition and use, typological aspects of the languages/varieties involved and socio-cultural motivations of language use. The book also examines the role of New Zealand English as a potential epicentre in the South Pacific and considers ethical and methodological issues of linguistic field research.

Winner of the ESSE Book Award 2016 in the category language and linguistics

Winner of the Habilitationspreis of the Deutsche Anglistenverband 2016

Complementizers offer a window into the architecture of the left-periphery and further our understanding of the demarcation of the boundaries between the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) domains. Using the articulated left-periphery as a laboratory and Spanish constructions featuring more than one complementizer as a point of departure, the author delivers new insights into the syntactic positions and behavior of Spanish complementizer que along the left edge. These observations have far-reaching consequences to such fundamental linguistic concepts as the derivation of left dislocations, ellipsis, and locality of movement. Of great interest to syntax graduate students and researchers in general, this volume provides a stepping stone to cracking the code on several current syntactic questions, including the widely-contested position of preverbal subjects in null-subject languages like Spanish. In addition, it offers the linguist a bountiful toolbox for the cross-linguistic investigation of a number of left-peripheral and clausal phenomena.

This volume analyzes constructions with non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, drawing on insights from cognitive and discourse-functional linguistics. Prototypical subjects have often been characterized in terms of their semantic, syntactic and discourse features, such as animacy, agentivity, topicality, referentiality, definiteness and autonomy of existence of the subject referent. A non-canonical subject is one that lacks some of these features. This may be reflected in its meaning, grammatical coding, and/or discourse function. In discussing non-canonical subjects in individual languages and cross-linguistically, the chapters in the volume address the following more general topics: What kinds of grammatical, semantic and discourse criteria can be used to distinguish subjects from non-subjects? To what extent are subject criteria construction-specific? What kinds of constructions have non-canonical subjects? What are the semantic and discourse functions of constructions with non-canonical subjects? Are subjects which are grammatically non-canonical also atypical in terms of their discourse features?

The Semantics of German Verb Prefixes is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken in this area of German grammar. Using an extensive collection of naturally occurring data, the author proposes an image-schematic interpretation for each of the productive prefixes be-, ver-, er-, ent-, zer-, um-, über-, unter-, and durch-. These abstract semantic patterns underlie a remarkable range of particular meanings, and they consistently account for subtle contrasts between prefixed verbs and alternative constructions such as simple verbs, particle verbs, and verbs with other prefixes. Furthermore, the author develops a schematic meaning for the prefixed verb construction itself. This grammatical meaning reflects the interpreter’s perspective and attentional focus as the objective event is imagined to unfold. Underlying all of these proposals is a novel conception of meaning as a dynamic and flexible process with a constantly active role for the interpreter. This volume will be of great value to cognitive linguists as well as scholars and students of German who want to gain insights into a central and puzzling part of the morphosyntax and semantics of the German language.

The authors of this book share a common interest in the following topics: the importance of corpora compilation for the empirical study of human language; the importance of pragmatic categories such as emotion, attitude, illocution and information structure in linguistic theory; and a passionate belief in the central role of prosody for the analysis of speech. Four distinct sections (spoken corpora compilation; spoken corpora annotation; prosody; and syntax and information structure) give the book the structure in which the authors present innovative methodologies that focus on the compilation of third generation spoken corpora; multilevel spoken corpora annotation and its functions; and additionally a debate is initiated about the reference unit in the study of spoken language via information structure. The book is accompanied by a web site with a rich array of audio/video files. The web site can be found at the following address: DOI: 10.1075/scl.61.media

While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure. The book is organized around three core themes, (i) the basic building blocks of verbal representations and modes of construction of the verb-argument complex, (ii) non-canonical argument structure realization, with a particular focus on object-experiencer psych verbs, and (iii) the promises and challenges of neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigation into argument structure and the prospects for the future of interdisciplinary research on verb argument structure.

The media often point an accusatory finger at new technologies; they suggest that there is always a loss of information or quality, or even that computer-mediated communication is destroying language. Most linguists, on the contrary, are firmly convinced that it is better to consider language as an evolving and changing entity. From this point of view, language is a social tool that has to be studied in-depth through the prism of objectivity, as a process in motion which is influenced by new social and technological stakes, rather than as a fading organism. In this volume we study and describe the societal phenomenon of SMS writing in its full complexity. The aim of this volume is threefold: to present recent linguistic research in the field of SMS communication; to inform the reader about existing large SMS corpora and processing tools and, finally, to display the many linguistic aspects that can be studied via a corpus of text messages.

These articles were previously published in Lingvisticae Investigationes Vol. 35:2 (2012).

The aim of this book is to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures. The papers contained in the book approach this important problem from various points of view by focusing on language evolution and change, on multilingualism, language mixing and dialect variation, on spoken language, and on creole languages. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to theoretical linguists as well as sociolinguists, from undergraduate students to researchers.

This book presents an experimental and theoretical investigation of the interplay between information structure, word order alternations, and prosody in Italian. Left/right dislocations, focus fronting, and other reordering phenomena are analyzed, taking into account their morphosyntactic and prosodic properties. It is argued that a restricted set of discourse-related properties are inserted in the numeration as formal features. These discourse-related features drive the syntactic derivation and the formation of the prosodic representation in compliance with the T-model of grammar. Based on the cartographic approach, this study proposes a model of the syntax–prosody interface in which the phonological computation of prosody is fed by syntactically encoded properties of information structure. However, this computation is also governed by structural requirements intrinsic to the phonological domain, and thus, a bijective relation between information structure and prosodic representation is not guaranteed. The monograph will be of interest to any linguist concerned with syntax, information structure, and prosody.

This book presents an innovative approach to linguistic semantics, starting from the idea that language is a mechanism for the expression of linguistic meanings as particular surface forms (texts). Semantics is that system of rules that ensures a transition from a Semantic Representation of the meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep-Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, this volume discusses the Deep-Syntactic Representation and the transition from Semantics to Deep-Syntax via Semantic paraphrasing (the equivalence amongst Semantic Representations), Deep-Syntactic paraphrasing (the equivalence amongst Deep-Syntactic Representations), and the passage between the two. A chapter is dedicated to the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary, a semantically based and co-occurrence-centered lexicon. Reflecting the author’s life-long dedication to semantics and syntax, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to language studies whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.

This monograph conducts a syntactic study of Tuki, a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, from a cartographic perspective. The following domains are meticulously explored: The Complementizer Domain, the Inflectional Domain and the Verbal Domain. This study reveals that there is a relative phrase (RelP) located between ForceP and FocP. Moreover, a detailed analysis of an articulated IP provides the order of clausal functional heads that manifest aspectual morphology, which is theoretically closely related to issues in adverbial syntax. Additionally, the language under study unveils a very rich structural make up of DP and the surface word orders attested in this phrase can be accounted for in terms of snowballing movement operations along the lines previously sketched in the format of the Split DP Hypothesis. Overall, this cartographic analysis is bound to enrich our morphosyntactic knowledge of UG clausal architecture by demonstrating that its rich underlying structural skeleton is correlated by a wealthy surface structural and functional map.



Edmond Biloa is professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon (Africa).

Research on second language acquisition (SLA) has identified language aptitude and age of onset (AO), i.e., the age at which learners are first meaningfully exposed to the L2, as robust predictors of rate of classroom language learning and level of ultimate L2 attainment in naturalistic settings, respectively. It is not surprising, therefore, that recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the combination of age and aptitude as a powerful explanatory factor in SLA, and central to a viable SLA theory. The chapters in this volume provide new studies and reviews of research findings on age effects, bilingualism effects, maturational constraints and sensitive periods in SLA, the sub-components of language aptitude and the development of new aptitude measures, the influence of AO and aptitude in combination on SLA, aptitude-treatment interactions, and the implications of the research findings for language education policy and tailored language instruction.

Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. Communication within and about European institutions has become more challenging in this perplexing political environment, demonstrating the complex nature of EU political discourse. In order to highlight these complexities, the contributors to this volume present different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena. The approaches represent rhetorical theory, metaphor and conceptual theory, cognitive and corpus linguistics, lexical statistics, polyphony, logical semantics, pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Through this multitude of perspectives the book complements existing approaches and suggests new approaches in the study of political discourse.

This volume brings together empirical research that explores interaction in a wide range of educational settings. It includes work that takes a cognitive, brain-based approach to studying interaction, as well as studies that take a social, contextual perspective. Interaction is defined quite broadly, with many chapters focusing on oral interaction as is typical in the field, while other chapters report work that involves interaction between learners and technology. Several studies describe the linguistic and discourse features of interaction between learners and their interlocutors, but others demonstrate how interaction can serve other purposes, such as to inform placement decisions. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to interaction research, investigating interactions with different interlocutors ( learner-learner, learner-teacher), in a variety of environments (classrooms, interactive testing environments, conversation groups) and through different modalities (oral and written, face-to-face and technology-mediated).

This monograph investigates the syntax of the finite verb in Mòcheno, a minority language spoken in a German speech island of Northern Italy. Basing her study on detailed new data collected during extensive fieldwork, and focusing on finite verb movement; on multiple access to the left periphery; on pro licensing and on the distribution of OV/VO word orders, the author refutes the traditional view that the syntactic variation found in Mòcheno is due to the presence of two competing grammars as a consequence of contact with Romance varieties and accounts for the peculiarities of Mòcheno syntax within a theory couched in the framework of Generative Grammar. This book contributes to our understanding of the verb-second phenomenon and sheds new light on the asymmetries between Old Romance and Germanic verb-second languages. A useful tool for all linguists working on both theoretical and comparative syntax and to anyone interested in language variation, dialectology and typology.

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew offers an innovative perspective on sentential syntax, in which sentence patterns are introduced as constructions within the general framework of Construction Grammar. Drawing on naturally occurring data collected from the Internet, the study challenges the prevailing view of predication as the sole mechanism of sentence formation, and introduces the idea of patterning as a complementary, sometimes even alternative mechanism. Major sentence patterns of English and Hebrew are systematically presented, targeting both their form and their function. A contrastive analysis of the sentence patterns in these two languages results in postulating a typological group, in which cognitive motivations are shown to account for both similarities and differences within the typology.

Sentence Patterns in English and Hebrew will appeal to scholars of constructional approaches, cognitive linguistics, typology, syntax, as well as anyone interested in English and Hebrew.

Spaces of Polyphony covers a lot of ground. It echoes the voices of researchers and their informants from many different places and backgrounds. Among the variety of languages under study and methodological approaches there is also a common ground and narrative thread underpinning the polyphonic chorus of the contributors. From a shared starting point of discourse analysis and inspiration from Bakhtin, the various authors span from East to West, from Moscow to Texas, from Romania and Czech Republic to Mexico. They look into all ages, starting from early childhood, and many walks of life, ranging from casual chatting among relatives to parliamentary speeches and TV shows, including formal education, literary inner monologue and translation. Irony, humour and self-awareness are recurrent themes. The array of voices and dialogism studied in this book is such that it even includes the silent (silenced) voices of people forced to express their heritage by weaving their discourse.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language.

The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, culture, and cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

Switzerland is renowned for having a diverse linguistic and dialectal landscape in a comparatively small and confined space. Possibly, this is one of the reasons why Swiss German dialects have been investigated thoroughly on various linguistic levels. Nevertheless, natural speech intonation has, until today, not been examined systematically. The aim of this study is to analyze natural Swiss German fundamental frequency behavior according to linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic variables, using statistical tests against the backdrop of detecting dialect-specific patterns as well as cross-dialectal differences. The intonation analyses were conducted with the mathematically-formulated Command-Response model. This is the first large-scale study that applies this framework on a large corpus of natural, dialectal speech. It brings to light detailed underlying patterns of Swiss German dialectal fundamental frequency behavior and provides a holistic account of the truly multilayered features of natural speech intonation.

This volume explores the roots of Europe's struggle with multilingualism. It argues that, over the centuries, the pursuit of linguistic homogeneity has become a central aspect of the mindset of Europeans. In its extreme form, it became manifest in the principle of 'one language, one state, one people'. Consequently, multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration. The authors of this volume approach the relationship between standard languages and multilingualism from a historical, cross-European perspective. They provide a comprehensive overview of the emergence of a standard language ideology and its intricate relationship with matters of ethnicity, territorial unity and social mobility. They explain for different European language areas in what ways the emergence of standard languages had an impact on multilingual policies and practices. Its comparative approach makes this volume an important resource for linguists, researchers from different philologies and social historians.

Language acts are acts of identity, and linguistic variation reflects the multifaceted construction of verbal alternatives for transmitting social meaning, where style-shifting represents our ability to take up different social positions due to its potential for linguistic performance, rhetorical stance-taking and identity projection.Traditional variationist conceptualizations of style-shifting as a primarily responsive phenomenon seem unable to account for all stylistic choices. In contrast, more recent formulations see stylistic variation as initiative, creative and strategic in personal and interpersonal identity construction and projection, making a significant contribution to our understanding of this aspect of sociolinguistic variation.

In this volume social constructivist approaches to style-shifting are further developed by bringing together research which suggests that people make stylistic choices aimed at conveying (and achieving) a particular social categorization, sociolinguistic meaning, and/or to project a specific positioning in society. Therefore, there is a need, we collectively argue, to adopt permeable and flexible multidimensional, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to speaker agency that take into consideration not only reactive but also proactive motivations for stylistic variation, and where individuals – rather than groups – and their strategies are the main focus when examining style-shifting in public.

This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the areas of sociolinguistics, dialectology, social psychology, anthropology and sociology.