2017 collection (152 titles)

This volume presents an in-depth analysis of language variation in Jamaican radio newscasts and talk shows. It explores the interaction of global and local varieties of English with regard to newscasters’ and talk show hosts’ language use and listeners’ attitudes. The book illustrates the benefits of an integrated approach to mass media: the analysis takes into account radio talk and the perception of the audience, it is context-sensitive, paying close attention to variation within and between genres, and it combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to demonstrate the complexity of language in the media. The book contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of World Englishes in the 21st century and endonormative stabilization processes in linguistically heterogeneous postcolonial speech communities, and shows how mass media both challenge and reproduce sociolinguistic stratification. This volume will be relevant for researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, language attitudes, and language in the media.

Negation is one of the most discussed phenomena within linguistics, on all language levels though it never seems to be exhausted. This operator establishes complex sentence structures and constantly challenges – from a cognitive, syntactical, semantic and morphologic viewpoint – presuppositions on language internal relations as rational and logic. It therefore arouses interest through all fields within language sciences. From a pragmatic perspective, where negation is conceived a marked structure, using negation often produces meanings beyond the one of a reversed affirmation "it is not the case that X”. This book explores the various uses and pragmatic meanings of negation in authentic communication, in different text types and in different languages, predominately romance languages. The multilingual composition marries a macro-micro perspective where aspects of genre, sociocultural context, memory, rhetoric and argumentation interplay with the negative morpheme’s nature and embedded instructions. This broad approach makes this book a unique contribution to negation studies and to pragmatics in general. The book is important and enriching reading for scholars in all linguistic domains, but particularly for researchers in semantics, pragmatics, argumentation and, discourse analysis.

Contextualizing Pragma-Dialectics contains a selection of 18 article reporting on research conducted in the past decade in which the institutional context in which argumentative discourse takes place is systematically taken into account. Some articles provide relevant theoretical backgrounds, other articles make clear how the extended pragma-dialectical theory can be used to analyse and evaluate argumentative discourse in specific institutional contexts. Next to argumentative discourse in the legal domain and the medical context of health communication, a great deal of attention is paid to various argumentative practices in the political domain or dealing with specific social issues. A contribution on multimodal argumentation is also included. All contributing authors are actively engaged in the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS).

Free Indirect Style (FIS) is a linguistic technique that defies the logic of human subjectivity by enabling readers to directly observe the subjective experiences of third-person characters. This book consolidates the existing literary-linguistic scholarship on FIS into a theory that is based around one of its most important effects: consciousness representation. Modernist narratives exhibit intensified formal experimentation and a heightened concern with characters’ conscious experience, and this provides an ideal context for exploring FIS and its implications for character consciousness. This book focuses on three novels that are central to the Modernist canon: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It applies the revised theory of FIS in close semantic analyses of the language in these narratives and combines stylistics with literary criticism, linking interpretations with linguistic features in distinct manifestations of the style.

In recent years, an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power, or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics, biolinguistics, and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

Anti-racist Discourse on Muslims in the Australian Parliament examines anti-racist discourse in contemporary Australian politics, in particular, how politicians contest and challenge racism against a minority group that does not constitute a traditional ‘race’. Using critical discourse analysis, this book firstly deconstructs the racist, xenophobic and discriminatory arguments against Muslims. Secondly, it highlights the anti-racist counter-discourse to these arguments. Since blatantly racist statements are less common nowadays, the book focuses on manifestations of ‘culturalist racism’. It does this by investigating how talk about Muslims positions them as not Australian or as not belonging to Australia – the book takes such ‘discursive exclusion from the nation’ as one of the most widespread forms of ‘culturalist racism’ in Western liberal-democracies. In addition to contributing to the theoretical discussion on the relationship between Muslims, racism and anti-racism, the book expands on methods that apply critical discourse analysis and the discourse-historical approach by providing a practical guide to analysing anti-racist political discourses.

Over the last three decades, Brazilian Portuguese bare nominals have turned into a hot topic in the cross-linguistic study of nominal syntax and semantics. This contribution is the first comprehensive, book-length treatment of the issue, covering both the long-standing discussion about the adequate analysis of these forms as well as the establishment of a solid empirical basis for future research. The book goes further than previous accounts in also taking into consideration the phonetic-phonological dimension, showing the advantages of a more comprehensive account. The empirical section outlines an innovative approach in which different methods and data types are combined and focuses on the underresearched definite / specific / referential uses and interpretations of bare singulars. The book also addresses the traditional topics in the study of bare nominals – genericity, the mass/count distinction, NP-internal plural agreement, the NP/DP distinction, and syntax-semantics-phonology interface questions – in the light of the new findings.

This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces, providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences, continuities and discontinuities, outward hatred and the “politics of denial”, the use of collective symbols and construction of individual identities. Multiple genres are taken under scrutiny, including blogs, forums, internet websites and newspaper coverage, political speeches and debates, news reports and broadcast interactions, with a view to capturing the themes and pragma-rhetorical strategies within texts abundant with radical and hateful messages. In addition to examining discourse dynamics and the underlying logic of such texts, the contributors to this monograph explore the ideological motivations and the consequences they might have for social actions on both an individual and collective level.

Highly relevant in the contemporary world, divided by conflicts, power and resource struggles, right-wing extremism, and crusades against the imaginary Other, the book presents state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that should be of interest to specialists in pragmatics, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, as well as media and communication studies.

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3:1 (2015).

This book combines scholarship in pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophy to address the problem of violence in language. How do words wound? What is the relation between physical and linguistic violence? How do racial invectives, misogynous language, homophobic slurs, among other forms of hate speech, affect the body and make us vulnerable to conditions of injurability that language brings about? While investigating the limits that violence poses for everyday speech action, understanding, representation, and our shared frameworks of intelligibility, this collective volume theoretically bridges knowledge from canons in linguistic pragmatics, continental philosophy and linguistic/semiotic anthropology and the dialogic perspective of subjects who are located in the peripheries of South America and Europe. The scholarship gathered here intends to offer a perspective on the violence of words that is attentive to practices and sensibilities that do not always fit into hegemonic ideologies of self and language.

Focusing on objects, this book aims at contributing to the on-going inquiry into modelling structures with missing arguments. In addition to offering detailed discussion and analyses of a unique combination of three very different systems (English, Polish, and Hungarian), a larger goal here is to provide a framework for deriving cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the domain of object drop. Variation of this type is hypothesised to follow, first and foremost, from the association of heads in the extended nominal projection with phonemic features and from the system of interpretation of nominal expressions in a language. The book will be of interest to both theoretically- and descriptively-oriented researchers, since, even though its focus is theoretical, a detailed discussion of the empirical facts, including some novel findings drawn from corpus studies and grammaticality judgements, is also offered.