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

This volume aims at contributing to an interpretive approach to writing and its dynamics. It offers a general scope on the process-product interface by multiplying the points of view on both the process and the product and their links. The book presents new findings and perspectives in the study of language and writing, both theoretical and methodological (e.g. dual process models of writing, pragmatics of writing, linguistic analysis of psycholinguistic units such as bursts of production). It also presents new tools for a longitudinal approach to the writing steps, key-stroke logging with integrated linguistic modules, and textometric analysis of written texts. The volume is composed of five sections that highlight different approaches to writing from the viewpoint of multiple disciplines: Anthropology, Cognitive Psycholinguistics, Communication Studies, Didactics (Applied Linguistics), Discourse Analysis, Literacy, Sociolinguistics and Text Genetics. This book will be relevant for scholars and students interested in writing, text analysis, literacy, learning and teaching.

As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind.

In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest.

The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.

This volume focuses on word formation processes in smaller and so far underrepresented indigenous languages of South America. The data for the analyses have been mainly collected in the field by the authors. The several language families described here, among them Arawakan, Takanan, and Guaycuruan, as well as language isolates, such as Yurakaré, Kalapalo and Cholón, reflect the linguistic diversity of South America. Equally diverse are the topics addressed, relating to word formation processes like reduplication, nominal and verbal compounding, clitic compounding, and incorporation. The traditional notions of the processes are discussed critically with respect to their implementation in minor indigenous languages. The book is therefore not only of interest to readers with an Amerindian background but also to typologists and historical linguists, and it is a supplement to more theory-driven approaches to language and linguistics.

Located at the intersection of historical pragmatics, letters and manuscript studies, this book offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. It investigates multiple ways in which socio-culturally and socio-familially contextualized reading of particular collections may increase our understanding of early modern letters as a particular type of handwritten communicative activity. The book also adds to our understanding of these women as individual users of English in their historical moment, especially in terms of literacy and their engagement with cultural scripts. Throughout the book, analysis is based on the manuscript letters themselves and in this way several chapters address the importance of viewing original sources to understand the letters' full pragmatic significance. Within these broader frameworks, individual chapters address the women's use of scribes, prose structure and punctuation, performative speech act verbs, and (im)politeness, sincerity and mock (im)politeness.

This volume offers a timely reconsideration of the function, content, and origin of phonological features, in a set of papers that is theoretically diverse yet thematically strongly coherent. Most of the papers were originally presented at the International Conference "Where Do Features Come From?" held at the Sorbonne University, Paris, October 4-5, 2007. Several invited papers are included as well. The articles discuss issues concerning the mental status of distinctive features, their role in speech production and perception, the relation they bear to measurable physical properties in the articulatory and acoustic/auditory domains, and their role in language development. Multiple disciplinary perspectives are explored, including those of general linguistics, phonetic and speech sciences, and language acquisition. The larger goal was to address current issues in feature theory and to take a step towards synthesizing recent advances in order to present a current "state of the art" of the field.

This book presents a new perspective on the interaction between word-order and grammaticalisation by investigating the changes that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have undergone in Romance (Catalan, French, Spanish) as compared to Germanic (English, Icelandic). It discusses a great deal of historical comparative data showing that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have (had) a semantic effect in the Germanic and in the Romance languages, and that they both appear in the same functional category. The loss of stylistic fronting and oblique subjects is seen as an effect of grammaticalisation, where grammaticalisation is taken to be a regular case of parameter change. In contrast to previous and recent approaches to grammaticalisation, however, the author shows that it is not the loss of morphology that triggers grammaticalisation with subsequent word-order changes, but that the word-order change sets off grammaticalisation in the functional categories, which is then followed by the loss of morphology.

John Sinclair’s work is widely known and has had a far-reaching influence, particularly in the areas of corpus linguistics, lexis, phraseology, lexicography, grammar, and discourse analysis. This collection of papers, written by former colleagues at Birmingham University, looks at some key writings by John Sinclair, with the intention of showing why his ideas are of lasting significance. Contributions deal with the Cobuild Project (directed by Sinclair) and its innovative first dictionary; collocation and the Open Choice and Idiom Principles; the interactions between and interdependence of phraseology and grammar; semantic prosody; and the construction of meaning in text. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2 (2007).

This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants, we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice, the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered, how it is remembered, and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts, historians, sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.

Contemporary metaphor theory has recently begun to address the relation between metaphor, culture and ideology. In this wide-ranging book, Andrew Goatly, using lexical data from his database Metalude, investigates how conceptual metaphor themes construct our thinking and social behaviour in fields as diverse as architecture, engineering, education, genetics, ecology, economics, politics, industrial time-management, medicine, immigration, race, and sex. He argues that metaphor themes are created not only through the universal body but also through cultural experience, so that an apparently universal metaphor such as event-structure as realized in English grammar is, in fact, culturally relative, compared with e.g. the construal of 'cause and effect' in the Algonquin language Blackfoot. Moreover, event-structure as a model is both scientifically reactionary and, as the basis for technological mega-projects, has proved environmentally harmful. Furthermore, the ideologies of early capitalism created or exploited a selection of metaphor themes historically traceable through Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Malthus and Darwin. These metaphorical concepts support neo-Darwinian and neo-conservative ideologies apparent at the beginning of the 21^st century, ideologies underpinning our social and environmental crises. The conclusion therefore recommends skepticism of metaphor’s reductionist tendencies.

Winner of ABC's award for Distinguished Publication for 2006

This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia, New Zealand and China. It is also one of those inspired by contrastive rhetoric but has contributed innovatively and uniquely by incorporating research findings from genre analysis, in particular, the sociocognitive genre perspective into this cross-cultural study.



On the one hand, the endeavor represents an in-depth theoretical exploration by considering not only discourse community and cognitive structuring, but also the deep semantics of genre and intertextuality, while broadening genre study by integrating insights from cross-cultural communication as well as the Chinese perspectives. On the other hand, the book also addresses pragmatic issues. As a particular feature, it solicits professional members’ intercultural viewpoints; thus confirming the shared social "stock of knowledge" employed in the culturally defined writing conventions.

Last but not least, this book explores the implications for genre education and training, and develops an appropriate model for cross-cultural genre learning, which encourages learning through legitimate peripheral participation and intercultural learning in business organizations.

Williams Syndrome (WS), aka Williams Beuren Syndrome, is a developmental disorder that we have known about for some forty years. The cause for WS was detected only recently: a micro deletion on chromosome 7, more specifically at the region of chromosome 7q11.23. The cognitive and behavioral profile in WS is characterized by a marked discrepancy between verbal and non-verbal skills combined with relatively spared linguistic skills. Recent research has shown considerable progress defining the areas of intactness in linguistic abilities. This volume builds on that research, giving an overview of the psycholinguistic research undertaken and opening up new perspectives and insights through new data and analyses. This book is of interest to researchers of applied cognitive science and to linguists more occupied with theoretical research.

Carl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.

While Modern Icelandic exhibits a virtually uniform VO order in the VP, Old(er) Icelandic had both VO order and OV order, as well as ‘mixed’ word order patterns. In this volume, the author both examines the various VP-word order patterns from a descriptive and statistical point of view and provides a synchronic and diachronic analysis of VP-syntax in Old(er) Icelandic in terms of generative grammar. Her account makes use of a number of independently motivated ideas, notably remnant-movement of various kinds of predicative phrase, and the long movement associated with “restructuring” phenomena, to provide an analysis of OV orders and, correspondingly, a proposal as to which aspect of Icelandic syntax must have changed when VO word order became the norm: the essential change is loss of VP-extraction from VP. Although this idea is mainly supported here for Icelandic, it has numerous implications for the synchronic and diachronic analysis of other Germanic languages.

This volume is the first comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of wh-scope marking. Wh-scope marking constructions have recently received a lot of attention; their very existence and their intricate properties have important consequences for syntax, semantics, and the syntax–semantics interface (e.g., with respect to the wh-criterion, the wh-movement parameter, feature checking, the theory of locality, the interpretation of wh-phrases and why-chains, and the nature of LF). The fifteen contributions share the basic assumptions of the Chomskyan approach to syntax and the model-theoretic approach to semantics; they address a variety of languages (among them German, Hindi, Hungarian, English, Frisian, Kikuyu, and Malay). A recurrent theme in all articles is whether wh-scope marking should be analyzed in terms of a direct, indirect, or mixed dependency. The wealth of cross-linguistic empirical evidence and the theory-independent relevance of the conclusions should make this book the ultimate source of information on wh-scope marking for years to come.

Wh-movement and the theory of feature-checking argues that cross-linguistic variation in wh-constructions reduces to the availability of different lexical instantiations of a +wh C0 both across languages and within a single language, and the way in which such lexical elements are syntactically identified, either via movement or base-generation. Evidence from a wide range of patterns including wh-expletive questions leads to the conclusion that wh-feature checking may sometimes be effected non-locally and ‘at a distance’ (long-distance wh-agreement), and that movement in general takes place for two related but discrete reasons: both to identify and activate an underspecified licensing head and in order for an element to occur in the checking domain projected by its relevant licensing head. Developing and generalizing the proposals beyond wh-phenomena, the study also goes on to argue for a Minimalist model of syntax in which feature-dependencies are in fact all licensed in the overt syntax and where there is no need for any further level of LF.

This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest.

The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.

Writing is not just about conveying ‘content’ but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the ‘me’ they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the ‘self’ which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)

The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing:

• a case study of one writer’s dilemmas over the presentation of self;

• a discussion of the way in which writers’ life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;

• an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;

• linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.

The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.

The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.

At last — a comprehensive account of the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf which not only explains the nature and logic of the linguistic relativity principle but also situates it within a larger ‘theory complex’ delineated in fascinating detail. Whorf’s almost unknown unpublished writings (as well as his published papers) are drawn on to show how twelve elements of theory interweave in a sophisticated account of relations between language, mind, and experience. The role of language in cognition is revealed as a central concern, some of his insights having interesting affinity with modern connectionism. Whorf’s gestaltic ‘isolates’ of experience and meaning, crucial to understanding his reasoning about linguistic relativity, are explained. A little known report written for the Yale anthropology department is used extensively and published for the first time as an appendix. With the Whorf centenary in 1997, this book provides a timely challenge to those who take pleasure in debunking his ideas without bothering to explore their subtlety or even reading them in their original form.

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

Josef Vachek, one of the last living exponents of the Prague School, has dedicated 50 years of his life to the study of written language in all its aspects. This volume is a tribute to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It contains a selection of his papers written between 1945 and 1987. Contents Writing and phonetic transcription; Written language and printed language; The linguistic status of written utterances; The primacy of writing?; Segmentation of the flow of speech and written language; The stylistics of written language; Glossematics and written language; Paralinguistic sounds, written language and language development; Written language as a heterogenous system; The 1929 Praguian Theses, internal speech, and written language; Written language seen from the functionalist angle; On the problem of written language; The development of the written norm of English; Puristic tendencies in written language; Redundancy in written language with special regard to capitalization of graphemes; Spelling as an important linguistic concept; Pluridimensionality of written utterances and its consequences; Revaluations of redundant graphemes; Thoughts on some fifty years of research in written language.

"For the colonized person, objectivity is always directed against him" (Frantz Fanon). Colonized persons do not live on what we call (or used to call) the "colonies" alone. In general, objective reality, or the "facts of life", are very different depending on the kind of life you can afford. This goes for language as well; and it explains both the title of this book, and gives it its "raison d'être". It deals with power in language, and asks: Who is really in command when we use "our" language? And why does it make sense to talk about a language of power (or lack of it)? The powerful are the colonizers, the colonized are the powerless, in language as in geopolitics. Colonizers and colonized alike, however, are subject to the social and economic conditions prevailing in society and therefore, a thorough analysis of these conditions is a must for any socially-oriented theory of language use.

In "What is Meaning" (1903) the author elaborates on the fundamental tenets of her theory of sign, to which she gave the overall term ‘significs’. One of the main obstacles to an adequate theory of meaning, in Lady Welby’s opinion, is the unfounded assumption of fixed sign meaning. "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used – the circumstances, state of mind, reference, ‘universe of discourse’ belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey – the intention of the user. The Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing its importance, its appeal to us, its moment for us, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspect, its universal or at least social range."
This facsimile of the 1903 edition of "What is Meaning" is accompanied by an essay on "Significs as a Fundamental Science" by Achim Eschbach, and "A Concise History of Significs" by G. Mannoury.

This monograph deals with the ‘aboutness’ of language. First, the sense in which language ‘is about’ or ‘reflects’ both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a reflectionist or ‘Speculative Grammarian’ semantics and pragmatics. Second, the ‘Speculative Grammar’ idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language ‘is about’ the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third, the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts ‘are about’ their subjects, topics, and foci.

The present bibliography suggests that there has been a constant flow of publications which survey the discipline of linguistics in its various stages of development. It attempts to offer a comprehensive coverage of general accounts of the history of linguistic thought in the western world over the last 150 years.