Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

What actually happens in counselling interactions? How does counselling bring about change?

How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?

By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.

This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.

Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative, Artificial Intelligence, and media studies — studies, models, and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers, providing perspectives from computational linguistics, agent research, psychology, ethology, art, and media theory. It describes artificial agents with narratively structured behavior, agents that take part in stories and tours, systems that automatically generate stories, dramas, and documentaries, and systems that support people telling their own stories. It looks at how people use stories, the features of narrative that play a role in how people understand the world, and how human narrative ability may have evolved. It addresses meta-issues in NI: the history of the field, the stories AI researchers tell about their research, and the effects those stories have on the things they discover. (Series B)

This volume, based on the first two, identifies the verbal and nonverbal personal and environmental components of narrative and dramaturgic texts and the cinema — recreated in the first through the ‘reading act’ according to gaze mechanism and punctuation — and traces the coding-decoding processes of the characters’ semiotic-communicative itinerary between writer-creator and reader-recreator. In our total experience of a play or film we depend on the sensory and intellectual relationships between performers, audience and the environment of both, in a temporal dimension starting on the way to the theater and ending as one comes out. Two chapters discuss the speaking face and body of the characters and the explicit and implicit (at times ‘unstageable’) paralanguage, kinesics and quasiparalinguistic and extrasomatic and environmental sounds in the novel, the theater and the cinema, and the functions of personal and environmental silences. Another shows the functions, limitations and problems of punctuation systems in the creative-recreative processes and how a few new symbols and modifications would avoid some ambiguities. The stylistic, communicative and technical functions of nonverbal repertoires in the literary text are then identified as enriching critical analysis and offering new perspectives in translation. Finally, ‘literary anthropology’ (developed by the author in the 1970s) is is presented as an interdisciplinary area based on synchronic and diachronic analyses of the literatures of the different cultures as a source of anthropological and ethnological data. Nearly 1200 quotes from 170 authors and 291 works are added to those in the first two volumes.

In a progressive and systematic approach to communication, and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time, identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our ‘speaking face’, to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as ‘verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics’, which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech, and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of ‘nonverbal categories’ for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and, based on all the previous material, his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters, which suggests many applications in different fields, such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

This formidable selection of papers reflects the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic underpinnings of the interface between language and education. Following an introduction that positions the field of educational linguistics historically and conceptually, the volume presents 15 contributions by leading scholars that cover the four areas most central to the field:

- Language teaching, language learning and literacy (Widdowson, Bialistok, Cohen & Allison);

- Language testing (Bachman, Davies, and Shohamy);

- Multilingualism, minority languages and language planning (Bratt-Paulston, Fishman, Lambert, Amara, de Bot & van Els);

- Language policy (Clyne, Tucker, Donato & Murday, McNamara & Lo Bianco, and Hornberger).

New Perspectives and Issues in Educational Language Policy is published in honour of Bernard Dov Spolsky and reflects his impact on applied linguistics in general and educational linguistics in particular. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for future research in the field of educational linguistics.

Clahsen geht es in seinem neuen Buch um eine prazise empirische Theorie des kindlichen Spracherwerbs. Er argumentiert fur einige zentrale Bestandteile einer solchen Theorie, die groîenteils im Kontext linguistischer Theoriebildung stehen. Fur diesen Zweck werden vergleichende Spracherwerbsuntersuchungen durchgefuhrt. Mittelpunkt der Untersuchungen ist der Grammatikerwerb des Deutschen unter verschiedenartigen Bedingungen. In Teil I werden die wichtigsten Phasen des normalen Erstspracherwerbs rekonstruiert, in Teil II wird dieser mit den Ausfallen beim gestorten Spracherwerb konfrontiert, und in einem abschliessenden Exkurs werden die Besonderheiten des naturlichen Zweitspracherwerbs von Erwachsenen dargestellt und dem kindlichen Erstspracherwerb gegenubergestellt.