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2017 collection (152 titles)
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Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Editor(s): Martin Hummel and Salvador ValeraMore LessWithin the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.
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Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Editor(s): Martine Robbeets and Alexander SavelyevMore LessWhy do some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume, their proposal is reassessed by linguists, investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut, Quechua, Aymara, Bantu, Indo-European, Transeurasian, Turkic, Japano-Koreanic, Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea, that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal, even if subsistence played a role in their expansion.
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Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia)
Editor(s): Armin Schwegler, Bryan Kirschen and Graciela MagliaMore LessLocated near Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, Palenque is a former Afro-Hispanic maroon community that has recently attracted much national and international attention. The authors of this collection examine Palenque’s linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins from interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives. Extensive in situ fieldwork and long-term familiarity with the Palenquero community form the basis of the seven essays, all of which are enriched by data from archival and other scholarly works. In this book, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and specialists in cultural and visual studies thereby enter into mutually enriching dialogues about the origins and nature of Palenque’s unique Lengua (local creole) and culture. This rich tapestry of ideas is decidedly international, as its authors are members of academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia) is an updated translation of Palenque, Colombia: Oralidad, identidad y resistencia, 2012.
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Argumentation in the Newsroom
Author(s): Marta ZampaThe news we see daily is selected from among alternatives by journalists. Argumentation in the Newsroom uses ethnographic data from Swiss television and print newsrooms to shed light on how journalists make decisions regarding the selection and presentation of news items in their daily professional practice. The evidence illustrates that, contrary to the standard view, journalistic decisions are not limited to the influence of standardized production patterns, instinct, or editors’ orders. Rather, in their attempt to produce the best news possible, journalists carefully ponder and discuss their choices, utilizing full-fledged critical discussions at all stages of the newsmaking process. By employing the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion in conjunction with the Argumentum Model of Topics, this study provides a detailed reconstruction of how journalists make use of argumentative reasoning, basing their decisions on a complex set of material premises and on recurrent procedural premises.
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Bilingualism
Editor(s): Maya Libben, Mira Goral and Gary LibbenMore LessIn the world today, bilingualism is more common than monolingualism. Thus, the default mental lexicon may in fact be the bilingual lexicon. More than ever, social and technological innovation have created a situation in which lexical knowledge may change dramatically throughout an individual’s lifetime. This book offers a new perspective for the understanding of these phenomena and their consequences for the representation of words in the mind and brain. Contributing authors are leaders in the field who provide a re-analysis of key assumptions and a re-focusing of research. They bring new insights and new findings that advance the understanding of both bilingualism and the mental lexicon. This volume serves to generate new directions and advances in bilingualism research.
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Cameroon Pidgin English
Author(s): Miriam Ayafor and Melanie GreenCameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is an English-lexified Atlantic expanded pidgin/creole spoken in some form by an estimated 50% of Cameroon’s population, primarily in the anglophone west regions, but also in urban centres throughout the country. Primarily a spoken language, CPE enjoys a vigorous oral presence in Cameroon, and the linguistic examples illustrating this description are drawn from a spoken corpus consisting of a range of text types, including oral narratives, radio broadcasts and spontaneous conversation. The authors’ typologically-framed investigation of the features of the language, from its phonetics, phonology and lexicon to its syntax and discourse structure, allows the reader a clear view of the linguistic character of CPE, offering a comprehensive description of the language that will be of interest to creolists as well as linguists interested in African languages, contact linguistics and comparative linguistics.
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Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingualism
Editor(s): Elma Blom, Leonie Cornips and Jeannette SchaefferMore LessThis book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated, and the use of new methodologies. Moreover, the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research, considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such, it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists, psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.
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Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy
Editor(s): Eliane Segers and Paul van den BroekMore LessResearch on the development on written language and literacy is inherently multidisciplinary. In this book, leading researchers studying brain, cognition and behavior, come together in revealing how children develop written language and literacy, why they may experience difficulties, and which interventions may help those who struggle. Each chapter provides an overview of a specific area of expertise, focusing on typical and atypical development, providing steps for future research, and discussing practical implications of the work. The book covers areas of bilingualism, dyslexia, reading comprehension, learning to read, atypical populations, intervention, and new media. Thus, the book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of affairs in this field of research. The various book chapters have been written by researchers who all have collaborated at some point in their careers with Ludo Verhoeven, whose research sets the example for the importance of crossing disciplinary borders to research to take the next, important steps. The combination of the research in this book sets the stage for future research that connects various fields, and hopes to inspire anyone interested in the development of written language and literacy.
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Discourse and Identity Formation
Author(s): Lamya Alkooheji and Chitra SinhaThe book explores eleven debates held at the Bahraini Council of Representatives (or the Parliament) over 2007-2010 to comprehend how parliamentary discourse contributes towards identity formation within Bahraini society. Within the framework of critical discourse studies, the book traces the ideological struggle over power in the linguistic content of legislative discourse through a range of discursive strategies and devices.
The authors contend that the discursive choices across the political spectrum in the legislative debates reflected strong sectarian characteristics which contained in it the seeds of political unrest of 2011, the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of Bahrain. Parliamentary rhetoric and its resonance in the public sphere, the authors argue, revealed the underlying contradictions in Bahraini society. The book highlights the significance of legislative discourse as a platform of social cohesion, and its instability being symptomatic of contradictions within society.
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Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Editor(s): Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita AuerMore LessThis volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations, hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources, and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch, Finnish and different varieties of English and are based on data spanning from the fifteenth century to the present day. Paying tribute to Terttu Nevalainen’s pioneering work, the book highlights the wide range and complexity of the field of historical sociolinguistics and presents achievements and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. The book is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and digital humanities to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.
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Irony in Language Use and Communication
Editor(s): Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. ColstonMore LessThe volume provides original research and analyses of the multi-faceted conceptual and verbal process(es) of irony. Key topics explored include interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of irony. Collectively, the papers examine irony from psychology, embodiment studies, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, the connection and impact of irony on culture and (media) communication, different approaches to verbal irony and others—ultimately attempting to model the mechanisms underlying ironic forms and the psycholinguistic motivations for their investigation. The comprehensive treatment of these issues is fundamental for future research on irony and related phenomena, particularly on questions of its usage, the diversity and/or unity of irony and ultimately the interrelationships between figurative thought and language.
This title is in pledging for Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023
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Language Acquisition in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings
Author(s): Verena MöllerLanguage Acquisition in CLIL and Non-CLIL Settings builds a bridge between Second Language Acquisition and Learner Corpus Research (LCR) methodologies to take the evaluation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to a new level. The study innovates in two main ways. First, it is based on a highly diversified L2 database which includes learner corpus data as well as experimental data from the same learners. These linguistic components of the database are complemented with extensive information on learner variables, including cognitive and affective factors, which are rarely studied in LCR. Second, the study relies on multifactorial statistical analyses to assess the effectiveness of CLIL itself as well as the impact of the selectivity inherent in the CLIL system, which has frequently been ignored. The linguistic focus of the study is the English passive, which is investigated in CLIL and non-CLIL teaching materials, and subsequently related to learner output.
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Mapping Genres, Mapping Culture
Editor(s): Elizabeth A. Thomson, Motoki Sano and Helen de Silva JoyceMore LessThe purpose of this book is to contribute to our understanding of genre and genre variation in the Japanese language in order to bring to consciousness the nature of Japanese culture and the presuppositions, norms and values found within Japanese society. This type of knowledge enables interventions and agency, as knowing how language works within a culture makes it possible to consciously accept it or to influence and shape it into the future. The various chapters seek to explore social contexts and the norms, values and practices of Japanese culture through the language choices in analysed texts in literature, education, the workplace and in print-based media. These genres collectively form part of the cultural fabric of Japan. The book represents a first step in documenting a selected set of Japanese genres from a social semiotic perspective. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields, such as Japanese descriptive linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics and applied linguistics. It should also appeal to teachers and learners of Japanese and to media commentators, students of literature, cultural studies and journalism.
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Mots de liaison et d'intégration
Editor(s): Thierry Ponchon, Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot and Annie BertinMore LessLes unités linguistiques ayant pour fonction (paradoxale) de signifier une relation entre d’autres unités de discours, suscitent, depuis l’Antiquité, un intérêt toujours renouvelé. Défi pour le grammairien, dont ils subvertissent les « parties du discours », ces « mots-outils », que l’on peut prendre pour des « mots vides », obligent le linguiste à interroger les rapports entre syntaxe et sémantique, logique et linguistique, système et discours, signe et implicite.
Les onze études réunies dans ce livre s’attachent à décrire les processus de fonctionnement de morphèmes appartenant à des langues diverses (allemand, français, italien, latin, vietnamien), qui marquent une relation de liaison ou d’intégration. Ces études de cas détaillées, menées selon différents cadres théoriques (typologie, cognitivisme, psycho-mécanique, grammaire fractale, linguistique de l’énonciation, argumentation dans la langue, linguistique textuelle), du point de vue synchronique ou diachronique, mettent en valeur le caractère premier de la variation dans les systèmes linguistiques.
Un chapitre introductif pose les repères terminologiques, historiques et théoriques pour l’étude de catégories de signes linguistiques – prépositions, conjonctions, connecteurs –, marqués par la transcatégorialité et la polyfonctionalité.
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Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres
Editor(s): Assimakis Tseronis and Charles ForcevilleMore LessThis collection advances the study of context-dependent characteristics of argumentative discourse by examining a variety of media genres in which text and image (and other semiotic modes) combine to create meaning. The chapters have been written by an international group of senior and junior scholars researching multimodal argumentation in the last two decades. In each chapter, a specific approach to argumentation and rhetoric is combined with insights from visual studies, metaphor theory, scientific visualization, cognitive science, semiotics, conversation analysis, or (documentary) film theory in order to explain how multimodal genres function argumentatively and rhetorically. Together the chapters present a state-of-the-art in the analysis of multimodal argumentation in such diverse genres as print advertisements, news photographs, scientific illustrations, political cartoons, documentaries, film trailers, political TV advertisements, public debates, and political speeches. The volume will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in argumentation studies, rhetoric, and multimodal communication.
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Multimodal Metaphor and Metonymy in Advertising
Author(s): Paula Pérez SobrinoMetaphor and metonymy appeal to us because they evoke mental images in unique but still recognisable ways. The potential for figurative thought exists in everyone, and it pervades our everyday social interactions. In particular, advertising offers countless opportunities to explore the way in which people think creatively through metaphor and metonymy. The thorough analysis of a corpus of 210 authentic printed advertisements shows the central role of multimodal metaphor, metonymy, and their patterns of interaction, at the heart of advertising campaigns. This book is the first in-depth research monograph to bring together qualitative and quantitative evidence of metaphor-metonymy combinations in real multimodal discourse. It combines detailed case study analyses with corpus-based analysis and psycholinguistic enquiry to provide the reader with a prismatic approach to the topic of figurative language in multimodal advertising. Besides its theoretical contribution to the field of multimodal figurative language, this monograph has a wide number of practical applications due to its focus on advertising and the communicative impact of creative messages on consumers. This book will pave the way for further qualitative and quantitative research on the ways in which figurative language shapes multimodal discourse, and how it relates to our everyday creative thinking.
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Nominal Compound Acquisition
Editor(s): Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-SchochMore LessThis book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified, ranging from languages rich in compounds, such as German, Saami, Estonian and Finnish, to languages poor in compounds, such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech, like Russian, Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers, supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition, allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.
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Nordic Literature
Editor(s): Steven P. Sondrup, Mark B. Sandberg, Thomas A. DuBois and Dan RinggaardMore LessNordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.
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Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX
Editor(s): Hamid OualiMore LessThis volume features a set of selected peer-reviewed articles, which represent research by some very prominent scholars and some promising researchers in the field. The articles cover a wide range of areas in Arabic linguistics, namely Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Language Acquisition. They also feature research on a number of Arabic dialects namely Egyptian Arabic, Emirati Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, and Syrian Arabic. Some of the contributions engage prominent issues that relate to current development in the Arabic speaking world. For example Reem Bassiouney’s paper is a significant contribution in that regard. Other contributions, such as the ones by Stuart Davis, Abdel-khalig Ali, Lababidi & Park, Ntelitheos & Idrissi, present innovative studies in Arabic Morphology, Phonetics, Phonology, and Language Acquisition respectively. How Arabic can serve as a testing ground for some theoretical constructs and approaches is exemplified by Peter Hallman, Phil Crone, and Youssef Haddad’s contributions in the area of Syntax and its interface with other fields.
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Representing the Other in European Media Discourses
Editor(s): Jan Chovanec and Katarzyna Molek-KozakowskaMore LessThis book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.
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Romeo and Juliet in European Culture
Editor(s): Juan F. Cerdá, Dirk Delabastita and Keith GregorMore LessWith its roots deep in ancient narrative and in various reworkings from the late medieval and early modern period, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has left a lasting trace on modern European culture. This volume aims to chart the main outlines of this reception process in the broadest sense by considering not only critical-scholarly responses but also translations, adaptations, performances and various material and digital interventions which have, from the standpoint of their specific local contexts, contributed significantly to the consolidation of Romeo and Juliet as an integral part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Moving freely across Europe’s geography and history, and reflecting an awareness of political and cultural backgrounds, the volume suggests that Shakespeare’s tragedy of youthful love has never ceased to impose itself on us as a way of articulating connections between the local and the European and the global in cases where love and hatred get in each other’s way. The book is concluded by a selective timeline of the play’s different materialisations.
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Language Variation on Jamaican Radio
Author(s): Michael WestphalThis 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.
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The Dawn of Dutch
Author(s): Michiel de VaanThe Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1,000 years. Like the landscape, the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland, an early form of Frisian was spoken until, very roughly, 1100, and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years, but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology, in all its geographic and diachronic variation, and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end, the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.
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The Pragmatics of Negation
Editor(s): Malin RoitmanMore LessNegation 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.
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Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact
Editor(s): Bettelou Los and Pieter de HaanMore LessThe case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.
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Contextualizing Pragma-Dialectics
Editor(s): Frans H. van Eemeren and Wu PengMore LessContextualizing 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).
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Expanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach
Editor(s): Laura Gurzynski-WeissMore LessExpanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach: Investigating learners, instructors, and other interlocutors demonstrates why investigating the individual differences of all interlocutors with whom learners interact – including peer and heritage learners, instructors, researchers, and native speakers – is critical to understanding how second and foreign languages are taught and learned. Through state-of-the-art syntheses detailing what is known about learners and instructors, and novel empirical studies highlighting new avenues of inquiry, the volume articulates the most pressing needs for individual difference research. The book concludes with a scoping review, which reveals the many interlocutors still yet to be empirically considered and outlines next steps for this research. Uniquely combining linguistic theory, research synthesis, and empirical study, this book encourages students and established scholars alike to expand their conceptualization of individual differences. By demonstrating the importance of considering the individual differences of all interlocutors, the studies are also highly relevant to those teaching second and foreign languages in diverse contexts.
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Free Indirect Style in Modernism
Author(s): Eric RundquistFree 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.
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Sonic Signatures
Editor(s): Geoff Lindsey and Andrew NevinsMore LessSonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains, including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language, and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents, the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns, while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.
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Beyond Markedness in Formal Phonology
Editor(s): Bridget D. SamuelsMore LessIn 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.
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Syntax
Author(s): Elly van GelderenUsing a concise and clear style, this book highlights insights from current syntactic theory and minimalism. Chapter 1 starts with the general idea behind generative grammar and should be read from a big picture perspective. Because the book expects no prior syntactic background, its next two chapters are on lexical and grammatical categories and on basic phrase structure rules. After these introductory chapters, the book covers the clausal spine, the VP, TP, and CP in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively. For the VP, it emphasizes lexical aspect, theta-roles, and the VP-shell; for the TP and CP, it uses a cartographic approach and juxtaposes that to free adjunction. Chapter 7 covers the DP and Chapter 8 discusses the importance of features. Chapter 9 returns to some of the issues raised in Chapter 1 and summarizes the approach. It includes keywords, frequent summaries, exercises, and suggested answers to the exercises. Cartoons and frequent corpus examples enliven the text.
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Anti-racist Discourse on Muslims in the Australian Parliament
Author(s): Jennifer E. ChengAnti-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.
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Argumentation across Communities of Practice
Editor(s): Cornelia Ilie and Giuliana GarzoneMore LessFeaturing multidisciplinary and transcultural investigations, this volume showcases state-of-the-art scholarship about the impact of argumentation-based discourses and field-specific argumentation practices in a wide range of communities of practice belonging to the media, social, legal and political spheres. The investigations make use of integrative, wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and empirical research methodologies with a focus on argumentation strategies in real-life environments, both private and public, and in constantly growing virtual environments.
This book brings together linguists, argumentation scholars, philosophers and communication specialists who convincingly show how interpersonal and/or intergroup interactions shape, challenge or change the argumentative practices of users, what argumentation skills and strategies become critical and consequential, how argumentative discourse contexts may stimulate or prevent critical reflection and debate, and what are the wider implications at personal, institutional and societal levels. Reaching beyond the boundaries of linguistics and argumentation sciences, this book should be a valuable resource for researchers as well as practitioners in the fields of pragmatic linguistics, argumentation studies, rhetoric, discourse analysis, political sciences and media studies.
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Bare Nominals in Brazilian Portuguese
Author(s): Albert WallOver 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.
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Complexity Theory and Language Development
Editor(s): Lourdes Ortega and ZhaoHong HanMore LessThis volume is both a state-of-the-art display of current thinking on second language development as a complex system. It is also a tribute to Diane Larsen-Freeman for her decades of intellectual leadership in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. The chapters therein range from theoretical expositions to methodological analyses, pedagogical proposals, and conceptual frameworks for future research. In a balanced and in-depth manner, the authors provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of second language development, with a wealth of insights that promise to break the status-quo of current research and take it to exciting new territory. The book will appeal to both seasoned and novice researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, bilingualism, cognitive psychology, and education, as well as to practitioners in second or foreign language teaching of any language.
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Contemporary Discourses of Hate and Radicalism across Space and Genres
Editor(s): Monika KopytowskaMore LessThis 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).
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Cross-linguistic Correspondences
Editor(s): Thomas Egan and Hildegunn DirdalMore LessContrastive Linguistics is an expanding field, as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs, collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume, which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages, shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish, Lithuanian, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore, they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar, not only within the same language, but also across languages. Finally, several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics, namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis, genre, corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.
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Language and Violence
Editor(s): Daniel SilvaMore LessThis 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.
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Narrative Absorption
Editor(s): Frank Hakemulder, Moniek M. Kuijpers, Ed S. Tan, Katalin Bálint and Miruna M. DoicaruMore LessNarrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments, of being totally absorbed in a book, a movie, or computer game. Typically we do not have any idea about how we ended up in such a state. Nor do we fully realize how we might have changed as we return for the fictional worlds we have visited. The feeling of being absorbed is one of the most illusive and transient feelings, but also one that motivates audiences to spend considerable amounts of time in narrative worlds, and one that is central to our understanding of the effects of narratives on beliefs and behavior. Key specialists inform the reader of this book about the nature of the peculiar state of consciousness during episodes of absorption, the perception of absorption in history, the role of absorption in meaningful experiences with narratives, the relation with related phenomena such as suspense and identification, issues of measurement, and the practical implications, for instance in education-entertainment.
Various fields have worked separately on topics of absorption, albeit using different terminology and methods, but having reached a high level of development and complexity in understanding absorption. Now is the time to bring them together. This volume will be a point of reference for years to come.
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On the Syntax of Missing Objects
Author(s): Marta RudaFocusing 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.
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Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles
Editor(s): Chiara Fedriani and Andrea SansóMore LessThis book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.
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Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure
Author(s): Viviana MasiaThe book tackles the sociobiological bases of Information Structure (IS) inquiring both its evidential and neurobiological underpinnings in human communication. Its purpose is to delve into the epistemic and neurocognitive rationales behind the realization of informational hierarchies in a sentence. The book zooms in on an interplay, that between IS and evidentiality, that has never been explored in IS studies and seeks to recast IS phenomena in an epistemological perspective. The neurocognitive approaches discussed propose neurophysiological investigations on IS processing, both with ERP and ERS vs. ERD measurements. In its overall structure and general purposes, the book is conceived for interested scholars working in the fields of linguistics, neuropragmatics, experimental psychology, philosophy of language and cognitive sciences in general, and it adds some further contribution to ongoing psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experimental research on the processing of topic-focus and presupposition-assertion dichotomies.
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Studies on Variation in Portuguese
Editor(s): Pilar Barbosa, Maria da Conceição de Paiva and Celeste RodriguesMore LessStudies on Variation in Portuguese offers a collection of studies on a range of variable phenomena attested within and across varieties of Portuguese. The volume starts out with an overview of current issues in the study of intralinguistic variation and is divided in two parts. Part 1 is dedicated to research on variation within national varieties (Brazilian and European). Here, a multidimensional analysis that combines both the geographic and the social dimensions of variation emerges as a way to identify possible regional specificities and the directionality of some of the variants. Part 2 collects studies that compare the behavior of a particular linguistic variable across different varieties. The variable phenomena discussed concern several levels of grammar and are framed within different conceptions of variation, thus promoting confrontation of theoretical and methodological alternatives. Overall, the volume constitutes a significant contribution to the essential question of how to model variation at different levels.
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The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle
Author(s): Ana TomincThis book discusses transformations in the construction of culinary taste, lifestyle and class through cookbook language style in post-socialist Slovenia. Using a critical discourse studies approach it demonstrates how the representation of culinary advice in standard and celebrity cookbooks has changed in recent decades as a result of general social transformations such as postmodernity and globalization. It argues that compared to the standard cookbooks, where nutritionist ideology is at the forefront, the celebrity cookbooks reflect the conversational, hybrid nature of the genre, through which they promote global foodie discourse, while at the same time localizing the global trends to the Slovene context.
The book lays at the intersection of discourse analysis, sociology, food, cultural, communication and media studies and (post-) socialism and should be of interest to those interested in celebrities, food media, socialism and post-socialism, cookbooks, globalization and discourse change.
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The Stylistics of Landscapes, the Landscapes of Stylistics
Editor(s): John Douthwaite, Daniela Francesca Virdis and Elisabetta ZurruMore LessIn treating the topic of the landscapes of stylistics, this book provides a series of chapters which deal not only with physical landscapes but also with social, mental, historical portraits of places, people and society. The chapters demonstrate that all texts project a worldview, even when the content appears to be only a physical description of the external world. The implication is that texts attempt to produce specific effects on the reader determined by the author’s worldview. Contents and effects, (namely mental and emotional states, behaviours), are thus inseparable. Identifying those effects and how they are produced is an eminently cognitive operation. The chapters analyse a variety of linguistic devices and cognitive mechanisms employed in producing the text and accounting for the effects achieved. Though the majority of the chapters have a cognitive basis, a wide range of methodologies are employed, including ecostylistics, offering cutting-edge theoretical approaches teamed up with close reading. A further crucial feature of this collection is the selection of non-canonical texts, ranging from lesser-known texts in English to significant works in languages other than English, all of which are characterised by important social themes, thus emphasising the importance of critical appreciation as a means of self-empowerment.
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Translation of Autobiography
Author(s): Susan XU YunThis book presents an interdisciplinary study that straddles four academic fields, namely, autobiography, stylistics, narratology and translation studies. It shows that foregrounding is manifested in the language of autobiography, alerting readers to an authorial tone with certain ideological affiliations. In refuting the presumed conflation between the author, narrator and character in autobiography, the study emphasizes readers’ role in constructing an implied author. The issues of implied translator, assumed translation and rewriting are explored through a comparative analysis of the English and Chinese autobiographies by Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. The analysis identifies different foregrounding practices and attributes these differences to an implied translator. Further evidence derived from narrative-communicative situations in the two autobiographies underscores divergent personae of the implied authors. The study aims to establish a deeper understanding of how translation and rewriting have a far-reaching impact on the self- and world-making functions of autobiography. This book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics, literature, translation and political science.
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Uralic Essive and the Expression of Impermanent State
Editor(s): Casper de GrootMore LessThis volume is the first book length study into the essive, a relatively unknown case marker like English ‘as (a child)’. It focuses on the distribution of the essive in contemporary Uralic languages with special attention to the opposition between permanent and impermanent state. The volume presents large sets of new data and insights into the use of the essive in nineteen Uralic languages on the basis of a typological linguistic questionnaire. The typological variation is discussed within the linguistic domains of non-verbal main predication, secondary predication, complementation, and manner, temporal, and circumstantial adverbial phrases. The descriptions and analyses are presented in such a way that they are accessible to linguists in general, descriptive and theoretical linguists, and specialists in Uralic and/or linguistic typology. The data and approach offer many starting points for further investigations within but also outside the Uralic language family.
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L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600)
Editor(s): Eva KushnerMore LessLa nouvelle culture (1480-1520) vient compléter la sous-série Renaissance de l’ « Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes », ce qui ne nuit en rien à sa vocation unique; car les quarante années, son objet, englobent un extraordinaire ensemble de développements culturels répondant au passé, tout en créant des visions nouvelles avec l’appui d’une multiplicité d’institutions, la réutilisation savante des langues anciennes, la prise en compte de pays nouvellement découverts. Dans tous les domaines de l’esprit: arts, sciences, visions du monde règne la soif de la découverte. Mais ce n’est pas au mépris du passé, au contraire; car la nouvelle culture se nourrit des réalisations et des leçons du passé. Elle est attentive à l’appel du présent tout en reconnaissant ses liens historiques que ce soit dans le domaine politique, poétique, esthétique, scripturaire, et de la pensée religieuse. Même entre opposants tels que Luther et Érasme s’institue un « colloque continu » animé par une aspiration commune à la vérité spirituelle et à un mode de vie politique et civique au sein duquel le passé nourrit et transforme le présent. Au cours des quarante années attribuées au volume présent, la Renaissance est opérante dans nombre de régions, pays, strates sociales, arts de vivre. Cette multiplicité d’instantanés invite le lectorat à percevoir en quoi les années 1480-1520 sont au cœur même du phénomène nommé Renaissance.
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Advances in Swearing Research
Editor(s): Kristy Beers Fägersten and Karyn StapletonMore LessAny behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new’ arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.
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Consciousness and Object
Author(s): Riccardo ManzottiWhat is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural.
This groundbreaking hypothesis is supported by recent empirical findings in both perception and neuroscience, and is herein tested against a series of objections of both conceptual and empirical nature: the traditional mind-brain identity arguments from illusion, hallucinations, dreams, and mental imagery. The theory is then compared with existing externalist approaches including disjunctivism, realism, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind. Can experience and objects be one and the same?
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Cultural Keywords in Discourse
Editor(s): Carsten Levisen and Sophia WatersMore LessCultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse.
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.
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Cultural Linguistics
Author(s): Farzad SharifianThis ground-breaking book marks a milestone in the history of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics, a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. The most authoritative book in the field to date, it outlines the theoretical and analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics, elaborating on its key theoretical/analytical notions of cultural cognition, cultural schema, cultural category, and cultural metaphor. In addition, it brings to light a wide array of cultural conceptualisations drawn from many different languages and language varieties. The book reveals how the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics can produce in-depth and insightful investigations into the cultural grounding of language in several domains and subdisciplines, including embodiment, emotion, religion, World Englishes, pragmatics, intercultural communication, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), and political discourse analysis. By presenting a comprehensive survey of recent research in Cultural Linguistics, this book demonstrates the relevance of the cultural conceptualisations encoded in language to all aspects of human life, from the very conceptualisations of life and death, to conceptualisations of emotion, body, humour, religion, gender, kinship, ageing, marriage, and politics. This book, in short, is a must-have reference work for scholars and students interested in Cultural Linguistics.
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Lexical Polycategoriality
Editor(s): Valentina Vapnarsky and Edy VenezianoMore LessThis book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology.
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Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek
Editor(s): Camille Denizot and Olga SpevakMore LessPragmatics forms nowadays an integral part of the description not only of modern languages but also of ancient languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. This book explores various pragmatic phenomena in these two languages, which are accessible through corpora consisting of a broad range of text types. It comprises empirical synchronic studies that deal with three main topics: (i) speech acts and pragmatic markers, (ii) word order, and (iii) discourse markers and particles. The specificity of this book consists in the discussion and application of various methodological approaches. It provides new insights into the pragmatic phenomena encountered, compares, where possible, the results of the investigation of the two languages, and draws conclusions of a more general nature. The volume will be of interest to linguists working on pragmatics in general and to scholars of Latin and Ancient Greek in particular.
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Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings
Editor(s): José A. León and Inmaculada EscuderoMore LessText comprehension is a critical area of psychological and educational research, and has particular relevance to educational context. The general aim of this international volume Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings is to encourage excellence in research and to bring together teachers, students, researchers and other professionals from different disciplines (e.g. psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, education, information technology, and communication), as well as all those members of the general public who have an interest in the study of reading. The specific objectives of the different chapters in this volume are to analyze existing methods of studying the various aspects of reading comprehension, disseminate results already obtained by research groups working in the field and debate current and future trends in the study of reading.
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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11
Editor(s): Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-CorominasMore LessThis collection brings together current research on a range of phenomena in French, Spanish, Occitan and Italian, that will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance and general linguistics. The volume includes 12 peer-reviewed articles, first presented at the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), divided into three sections on syntax-semantics, morphosyntax, and bilingualism and language acquisition.
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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12
Editor(s): Ruth E.V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Sonia M. L. CyrinoMore LessThe current volume contains a selection from papers presented at the 45th meeting of the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 45), which took place from May 6 to 9, 2015 at the University of Campinas, Brazil. A volume of selected papers, such as this one, will ultimately be successful contingent upon the success of the event itself, which proved a strong commitment to theoretical and empirical rigor to the studies in Romance linguistics. All the chapters in this volume are high-quality papers on the state-of-the-art in linguistic research into Romance languages. The studies offer a variety of topics on the syntax, phonology, semantics-pragmatics, L2 acquisition and contact situations of Romance languages (Peninsular and American Spanish; European, Brazilian and African Portuguese; French; Italian), Romance dialects (Borgomanerese) and Romance-based creoles (Palenquero).
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Teaching Dialogue Interpreting
Editor(s): Letizia Cirillo and Natacha NiemantsMore LessTeaching Dialogue Interpreting is one of the very few book-length contributions that cross the research-to-training boundary in dialogue interpreting. The volume is innovative in at least three ways. First, it brings together experts working in areas as diverse as business interpreting, court interpreting, medical interpreting, and interpreting for the media, who represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. Second, it addresses instructors and course designers in higher education, but may also be used for refresher courses and/or retraining of in-service interpreters and bilingual staff. Third, and most important, it provides a set of resources, which, while research driven, are also readily usable in the classroom – either together or separately – depending on specific training needs and/or research interests. The collection thus makes a significant contribution in curriculum design for interpreter education.
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Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation
Editor(s): Cecilia Alvstad, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen and Kristiina Taivalkoski-ShilovMore LessThe notion of voice has been used in a number of ways within Translation Studies. Against the backdrop of these different uses, this book looks at the voices of translators, authors, publishers, editors and readers both in the translations themselves and in the texts that surround these translations. The various authors go on a hunt for translational agents’ voice imprints in a variety of textual and contextual material, such as literary and non-literary translations, book reviews, newspaper articles, academic texts and e-mails. While all stick to the principle of studying text and context together, the different contributions also demonstrate how specific textual and contextual circumstances require adapted methodological solutions, ending up in a collection that takes steps in a joint direction but that is at the same time complex and pluralistic.
The book is intended for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and other disciplines within Language and Literature.
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Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation
Editor(s): Gunther De Vogelaer and Matthias KaterbowMore LessThe study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.
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Exploring Intensification
Editor(s): Maria Napoli and Miriam RavettoMore LessThis book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.
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Verb Valency Changes
Editor(s): Albert Álvarez González and Ia NavarroMore LessThis volume surveys a variety of verb valency change phenomena among diverse languages and from diverse theoretical viewpoints. It offers typological studies comparing languages in topics like applicative polysemy, complex predicate formation and locative alternation, but also works describing the different valency-changing operations in specific languages including West Circassian, Huasteca Nahuatl, Tlachichilco Tepehua and Seri, and works dealing with specific valency change constructions, such as tla- constructions in Nahuatl, resultatives in Yaqui, antipassives in Mocoví, and labile verbs in Arabic. This book aims to put this variety of backdrops in perspective and to clarify the notion and mechanisms of verb valency change. Both scholars and expert readers will get in these works a better understanding of the different verb valency changing operations and of the typological aspects involved in this phenomenon, together with a better grasp of how argument realization and verb morphology are connected in some languages.
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Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context
Author(s): Alexandra D'ArcyLike is a ubiquitous feature of English with a deep history in the language, exhibiting regular and constrained variable grammars over time. This volume explores the various contexts of like, each of which contributes to the reality of contemporary vernaculars: its historical context, its developmental context, its social context, and its ideological context. The final chapter examines the ways in which these contexts overlap and inform current understanding of acquisition, structure, change, and embedding. The volume also features an extensive appendix, containing numerous examples of like in its pragmatic functions from a range of English corpora, both diachronic and synchronic. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of English historical linguistics, grammaticalization, language variation and change, discourse-pragmatics and the interface of these fields with formal linguistic theory.
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Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism
Author(s): Giacomo TurbantiThe philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise, self-contained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom's imposing theoretical apparatus, the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism, till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom's work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism.
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Translation in Transition
Editor(s): Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Bartolomé Mesa-LaoMore LessTranslation practice and workflows have witnessed significant changes during the last decade. New market demands to handle digital content as well as technological advances are leading this transition. The development and integration of machine translation systems have given post-editing practices a reason to be in the context of professional translation services. Translators may still work from a source text, but more often than not they are presented with already translated text involving different degrees of translation automation. This scenario radically changes the cognitive demands of translation.
Technological development has inevitably influenced the translation research agenda as well. It has provided new means of penetrating deeper into the cognitive processes that make translation possible and has endorsed new concepts and theories to understand the translation process. Computational analysis of eye movements and keystroke behaviour provides us with new insights into translational reading, processes of literality, effects of directionality, similarities between inter- and intralingual translation, as well as the effects of post-editing on cognitive processes and on the quality of the final outcome.
All of these themes are explored in-depth in the articles in this volume which presents new and valuable insights to anyone interested in what is currently happening in empirical, process-oriented translation research.
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Dimensions of Iconicity
Editor(s): Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer and Christina LjungbergMore LessThis volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example, the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.
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The Substance and Value of Italian Si
Author(s): Joseph DavisThis book offers an original treatment of the Italian clitic si. Sharply separating encoded grammar from inference in discourse, it proposes a unitary meaning for si, including impersonals, passives, and reflexives. Si signals third-person participancy but makes no distinctions of number, gender, or case role. The analysis advances the Columbia School framework by relying on just these straightforward oppositions, attributing variety of interpretation largely to language use rather than to grammar. The analysis places si within a network of oppositions involving all the other clitics. Data come primarily from twentieth-century and more recent published and on-line literature. The book will be of interest to functional linguists, students of reflexivity, and scholars of the Italian language.
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Focus on Additivity
Editor(s): Anna-Maria De Cesare and Cecilia AndornoMore LessThe present volume is centered on the notional domain of additivity. Many linguistic phenomena are based on additivity (i.e. are incremental) and additive relations are a mechanism that underlies a wide array of text types. Specifically, the present volume is centered on the class of function words which have been labeled, among many others, Additive Focusing Modifiers (FMs). The chapters gathered in this volume deal with the syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic properties of Additive FMs and new lines of research on these items are pursued, including (i) the historical development of Additive FMs and the use of these forms in older stages of the European languages; (ii) the pragmatic and sociolinguistic properties of Additive FMs, in particular of the functions they play in discourse and their distribution in different language varieties; (iii) the processing of Additive FMs by adults, in particular by relying on reading experiments involving eye tracking and self-paced reading; (iv) the use of Additive FMs in language contact situations and (v) the acquisition of Additive FMs by different learner groups.
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Approaches to Hungarian
Editor(s): Harry van der Hulst and Anikó LiptákMore LessThis volume contains a selection of papers from the 12th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Leiden, 2015). The contributions cover a wide range of topics and their significance in generative theorizing.
The papers about morphosyntax focus on the formation of comparative clauses, the behavior of particle verbs, scope taking in deverbal nominal constructions, measure constructions, classifier constructions, the mass/count distinction as well as focus and quantifier scope.
The papers about phonology investigate coexisting patterns of variation in vowel harmony, the representational account of vowel harmony and the nature of heteromorphemic vowel sequences.
While the focus of the volume is on Hungarian, comparison is made with several other languages, such as English, German and Portuguese among others.
The broad range of topics discussed in this volume will appeal both to scholars working on Hungarian and to a general audience of generative linguists.
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Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Editor(s): Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma TaavitsainenMore LessThe history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like sports reports, advertisements and comic strips to a variety of news practices. All contributions view news discourse in a specific historical period or across time and relate language features to their sociohistorical contexts and changing ideologies. The varying needs and expectations of the newspaper producers, writers and readers, and even news agents, are taken into account. The articles use interdisciplinary study methods and move at interfaces between sociolinguistics, journalism, semiotics, literary theory, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociology.
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Imperative Turns at Talk
Editor(s): Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara and Elizabeth Couper-KuhlenMore LessIn middle-class Anglo-speaking circles imperatives are considered impolite forms that command another to do something; etiquette manuals recommend avoiding them. The papers in this collection de-construct such lay beliefs. Through the empirical examination of everyday and institutional interaction across a range of languages, they show that imperatives are routinely used for constructing turns that further sociality in interactional situations. Moreover, they show that for understanding the use of an imperatively formatted turn, its specific design (whether it contains, e.g., an overt subject, object, modal particles, or diminutives), and its sequential and temporal positioning in verbal and embodied activities are crucial. The fact that the same type of imperative turn is appropriate under the same circumstances across linguistically diverse cultures suggests that there are common aspects of imperative turn design and common pragmatic dimensions of situations warranting their use. The volume provides new insights into the resources and processes involved when social actors try to get another to do something.
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L3 Syntactic Transfer
Editor(s): Tanja Angelovska and Angela HahnMore LessThis book fills an existing gap in the field of third language acquisition (L3A) by bringing together theoretical, empirical, and practical accounts that contribute to informed teaching practices in multilingual classrooms. The volume is organised into three sections that focus on prominent syntactic transfer models in the field of L3A and together provide insights into the interplay of the influences of prior languages in L3 syntax and how we can enrich the practical field of instructed L3 acquisition. Part I includes original papers dealing with new developments of existing theoretical models on syntactic transfer in L3A and Part II consists of empirical studies testing existing models from different perspectives (formal, lexico-functional, and neurocognitive). Following these two sections, Part III discusses how theory can inform practices for L3 learning and teaching. This concise compilation brings to light innovations, not only in terms of theoretical refinements and practical implementations, but also in offering an impressive range of language combinations. This book is intended to act as a unique resource for scholars, applied linguists, language educators, both novices and experts alike, in and beyond the field of L3A.
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Lexical Priming
Editor(s): Michael Pace-Sigge and Katie J. PattersonMore LessPublished in 2005, Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming – A new theory of words and language introduced a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. In the ten years that have passed, the theory has since gained traction in the field of corpus-linguistics. This volume brings together some of the most important contributions to the theory, in areas such as language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, stylistics as well as the design of language learning software. Crucially, this book introduces aspects of the language that have so far been given less focus in lexical priming, such as spoken language, figurative language, forced primings, priming as predictor of genre, and historical primings. The volume also focuses on applying the lexical priming theory to languages other than English including Mandarin Chinese and Finnish.
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Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature
Editor(s): Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-MeibauerMore LessMaps and Mapping in Children’s Literature is the first comprehensive study that investigates the representation of maps in children’s books as well as the impact of mapping on the depiction of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes in children’s literature. The chapters in this volume pursue a comparative approach as they represent a wide spectrum of diverse genres and national children’s literatures by examining a wealth of children’s books from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The theoretical and methodological approaches range from literary studies, developmental psychology, maps and geography literacy, ecocriticism, historical contextualization with both new historicist and political-historical leanings, and intermediality to materialist cartographies, cultural studies, island studies, and genre studies. By this, this volume aims at embedding children’s literature in a broader field of literary and cultural studies, thus situating children’s literature research within a general context of literary theory.
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Motion and Space across Languages
Editor(s): Iraide Ibarretxe-AntuñanoMore LessThis volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.
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Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation
Editor(s): Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie PictonMore LessThe aim of the present volume is to provide a present-day take on variation in terminology by looking forward and examining what leading scholars in the field are working on and where they are taking research in the field today.
This reader is built around three themes arranged according to complementary points of view to stimulate thought on the subject of variation as it is approached today. The first theme, “The social dimension of variation”, includes three contributions dealing with variation across different categories of speakers. This reflects not only the expert/layperson dichotomy but also other more original polarities as the emotional dimension and the issue of diastratic variation across LSPs. The second part of this reader puts forward different tools and methods to identify, describe and manage term variation. The third theme of this reader questions semantics of term variation through the topics of concept saturation, multidimensionality and metaphor.
Variation, through this picture of current studies, proves to be the touchstone for the understanding of the major issues of terminology research today. The included papers draw on research in terminology carried out in different language communities - Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch in particular - thereby opening up a window on much of the research carried out in these cultural areas.
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Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun HuangMore LessThis book focuses on important methodological and theoretical issues in Chinese and Japanese L1 and L2 acquisition. All contributions discuss experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT), on three syntactic and semantic domains, binding, scope interaction, and wh- and logical expressions. The issues in these grammatical domains are particularly well suited for TVJT studies as the task allows for the testing of particular interpretations among alternative representations and reveals children’s and adults’ understandings of these constructions. The book is a tribute to Stephen Crain’s contribution to the field of Chinese and Japanese language acquisition within the framework of Generative Grammar. It is a state-of-the-art collection that offers a picture of cutting-edge research on children’s and adult’s Chinese and Japanese acquisition. Readers will find the book a rich source of ideas and the starting point of new projects.
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Theories of Reading Development
Editor(s): Kate Cain, Donald L. Compton and Rauno K. ParrilaMore LessThe use of printed words to capture language is one of the most remarkable inventions of humankind, and learning to read them is one of the most remarkable achievements of individuals. In recent decades, how we learn to read and understand printed text has been studied intensely in genetics, education, psychology, and cognitive science, and both the volume of research papers and breadth of the topics they examine have increased exponentially.
Theories of Reading Development collects within a single volume state-of-the-art descriptions of important theories of reading development and disabilities. The included chapters focus on multiple aspects of reading development and are written by leading experts in the field. Each chapter is an independent theoretical review of the topic to which the authors have made a significant contribution and can be enjoyed on its own, or in relation to others in the book.
The volume is written for professionals, graduate students, and researchers in education, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. It can be used either as a core or as a supplementary text in senior undergraduate and graduate education and psychology courses focusing on reading development.
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Moving Bodies in Interaction – Interacting Bodies in Motion
Editor(s): Christian Meyer and Ulrich v. WedelstaedtMore LessThis volume presents a new perspective on socially coordinated embodied activity. It brings together scholars from linguistics, interactional sociology, neuropsychology and brain research. It assembles empirical studies of the interaction in sports that draw on recent developments in ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the sociology of practice, interactional linguistics, and cognitive studies. Thinking beyond the individual body, the chapters investigate microscopically the materiality and reflexivity of skilled bodies in motion in different sports ranging from individuals jointly rock-climbing and distance-running to team sports such as rugby and basketball.
Combining theoretical elements from phenomenology and cognitive studies, the volume emphasizes the temporal extension and merging of bodies towards an acting plural body and the situated embeddedness of dynamically interacting bodies in an environment that encompasses organized spaces, objects or other bodies. It thus offers a number of case studies in advanced research in embodied interaction that coalesce in a comprehensive picture of the ways human bodies merge in joint action.
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Prototypical Argumentative Patterns
Editor(s): Frans H. van EemerenMore LessPrototypical Argumentative Patterns reports about a research project started at the University of Amsterdam in 2012. In this project distinctive argumentative patterns have been identified in argumentative discourse in the political, the legal and the medical domain. These patterns consist of constellations of argumentative moves in which, in order to deal with a particular kind of difference of opinion, in defence of a particular type of standpoint, a particular argument scheme or combination of argument schemes is used in a particular kind of argumentation structure. The composition of these prototypical argumentative patterns can be explained by referring to the institutional characteristics of the communicative activity types in which they occur. By exploring the relationship between argumentative discourse and the institutional context, Frans van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, Corina Andone, Eveline Feteris and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans have provided a new and illuminating perspective on the context-dependency of argumentative discourse.
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Space in Diachrony
Editor(s): Silvia Luraghi, Tatiana Nikitina and Chiara ZanchiMore LessSpace is a fundamental dimension of human life and is pervasive in human experience. Research on space has highlighted the possible asymmetrical nature of spatial relations. Differences in the encoding of goals and sources of motion are a case in point, and cross-linguistic coding tendencies show that path is less frequently flagged by a dedicated case than goal, source/origin, and (static) location (locative). Interestingly, such asymmetries may correlate with certain types of landmark, as in the case of toponyms or of animate entities. Even though these issues have been focused upon both in typological and psycholinguistic research, they remain largely open. The papers in this collection aim to show that a diachronic approach may shed light on the way in which asymmetries in the space domain come about over time, thus contributing to the clarification of synchronically puzzling facts.
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Aspects of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation
Author(s): Krisztina KárolyThis book deals with the (re)production of cohesion and coherence in translation. Building on the theories and methods of Translation Studies and Discourse Analysis it answers some basic, still much debated questions related to translational discourse production. Such a question is whether it is possible to analyse the (re)production of coherence, and if yes, how? Can the models devised for the study of English original (not translated) and independent texts (unlike translations and their sources) be applied for the analysis of translation? How do cohesive, rhetorical and generic structure “behave” in translation? How do particular components of coherence relate to translation universals? The volume proposes a complex translational discourse analysis model and presents findings that bring new insights primarily for the study of news translation, translation strategies and translation universals. It is recommended for translation researchers, discourse analysts, practicing translators, as well as professionals and students involved in translator training.
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Growing Old with Two Languages
Editor(s): Ellen Bialystok and Margot D. SullivanMore LessThis collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of great interest. One such experience is lifelong bilingualism. Moreover, research into the cognitive effects of bilingualism has increased dramatically in the past decade, making it an exciting area of study. This volume combines these issues and presents the most recent research and thinking into the effects of bilingualism on cognitive decline in aging. The contributors are all leading scholars in their field. The result is a state-of-the art collection on the effect of bilingualism on cognition in older populations for both healthy aging and aging with dementia. The papers will be of interest to researchers, students, and health professionals.
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Term Variation in Specialised Corpora
Author(s): Béatrice DailleThis book addresses term variation which has been a very important topic in terminology, computational terminology and natural language processing for up to twenty years. This book presents the first complete inventory of term variants and the linguistic procedures that lead to their formation. It also takes into account issues raised by multilingual applications and presents ways to detect variants in five different languages: French, English, German, Spanish and Russian.
The book provides insights into the following issues: What is a variant? What are the main linguistic mechanisms involved in the transformation of base terms into variants? How can variants be automatically detected in texts? Should variation be taken into account in natural language processing applications?
This book is targeted at terminologists and linguists interested in term variation as well as researchers in natural language processing and computer science that must handle term variants in different kinds of applications.
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Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts
Editor(s): Esperanza Morales-López and Alan FloydMore LessConflicts are inherent to human society, but most of them do not concern us directly as participants or eyewitnesses. How we see social conflicts depends on how they are presented to us.
This volume gathers together writings by contemporary specialists in different fields, from different backgrounds, cultures and locations, but united by a common thread: the conviction that history and current affairs are constructed and presented, not according to the facts themselves, but according to media, culture, politics, gender, religion and other factors.
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Greece in Crisis
Editor(s): Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis GoutsosMore LessSince its onset, the Greek crisis has given rise to an abundance of relevant text and talk. This volume offers an insider’s view of the discursive manifestations of the crisis, focusing on discourses in the Greek language and by Greek social actors. The contributions investigate the diverse ways in which the crisis has been communicated to the public by domestic policymakers or debated by elite, non-elite and resistant participants. Crisis discourses are also examined in the light of the rise of neo-nationalism and the extreme Right in both Greece and Cyprus. All contributions seek to meaningfully combine critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives for a better understanding of the Greek crisis as a socio-economic episode and as a discourse construct. Discourse-driven quantification and corpus-driven quantification complement each other in the critical examination of textual data as diverse as official government communications, party leader speeches, newspaper articles, public assembly resolutions, song lyrics, social media commentary and terrorist proclamations.
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Language and Slavery
Author(s): Jacques ArendsEditor(s): Crit CremersMore LessThis posthumous work by Jacques Arends offers new insights into the emergence of the creole languages of Suriname including Sranantongo or Suriname Plantation Creole, Ndyuka, and Saramaccan, and the sociohistorical context in which they developed. Drawing on a wealth of sources including little known historical texts, the author points out the relevance of European settlements prior to colonization by the English in 1651 and concludes that the formation of the Surinamese creoles goes back further than generally assumed. He provides an all-encompassing sociolinguistic overview of the colony up to the mid-19th century and shows how ethnicity, language attitude, religion and location had an effect on which languages were spoken by whom. The author discusses creole data gleaned from the earliest sources and interprets the attested variation. The book is completed by annotated textual data, both oral and written and representing different genres and stages of the Surinamese creoles. It will be of interest to linguists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and anyone interested in Suriname.
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Applied Linguistics in the Middle East and North Africa
Editor(s): Atta GebrilMore LessThis volume offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of applied research efforts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This region has not received due attention in the literature and this publication provides a much-needed contribution to the existing body of knowledge. The editor recruited a number of renowned scholars who either work in the MENA countries or have experience doing research in this region to contribute to this project. The selection of chapters ensured representation of applied linguistics efforts in North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf. The book looks into language research within social and educational MENA contexts. The final part of the book provides a forward-looking perspective about applied linguistics research and practices in the Middle East and North Africa. The book is primarily written for those interested in applied linguistics, particularly researchers, graduate students, and language professionals in the MNEA region.
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Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies
Editor(s): Jeremy Munday and Meifang ZhangMore LessDiscourse analytic approaches are central to translator training and translation analysis, but have been somewhat overlooked in recent translation studies. This volume sets out to rectify this marginalization. It considers the evolution of the use of discourse analysis in translation studies, presents current research from ten leading figures in the field and provides pointers for the future. Topics range from close textual analysis of cohesion, thematic structure and the interpersonal function to the effects of global English and the discourses of cyberspace. The inherent link between discourse and the construction of power is evident in many contributions that analyse institutional power and the linguistic resources which mark translator/interpreter positioning. An array of scenarios and languages are covered, including Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Korean and Spanish. Originally published as a special issue of Target 27:3 (2015).
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Expressing and Describing Surprise
Editor(s): Agnès Celle and Laure LansariMore LessAmong emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on language. This cross-disciplinary volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and language by bringing together nine contributions on surprise from different backgrounds – psychology, human-agent interaction, linguistics. Using different methods at different levels of analysis, all contributors concur in defining surprise as a cognitive operation and as a component of emotion rather than as a pure emotion. Surprise results from expectations not being met and is therefore related to epistemicity. Linguistically, there does not exist an unequivocal marker of surprise. Surprise may be either described by surprise lexemes, which are often associated with figurative language, or it may be expressed by grammatical and syntactic constructions. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 (2015)
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Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development
Editor(s): F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı ÖzyürekMore LessLanguage development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe.
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Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian
Editor(s): Höskuldur Thráinsson, Caroline Heycock, Hjalmar P. Petersen and Zakaris Svabo HansenMore LessThis book presents the latest research on the syntax of the “Insular Scandinavian” languages (Faroese and Icelandic), with contributions from thirteen experts, and a significant introductory chapter by the four editors. The topics covered include some that have figured extensively in recent literature on Scandinavian syntax and its implications for syntactic theory: case, agreement, embedded clause word order, stylistic fronting, and the nature of “expletive” constructions. The volume is conceived around the topic of variation, both within and between the two languages studied—as well as more generally—and stands out for the wealth of new empirical detail from both Faroese and Icelandic, relating to each of the topics and theoretical issues discussed. Each chapter is written in a way to make it accessible to a wide audience within linguistics; the book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in the syntax of the Germanic languages.
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Constructing Families of Constructions
Editor(s): Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Alba Luzondo Oyón and Paula Pérez SobrinoMore LessWithin Construction Grammar, this volume moves away from a compartmentalized view of constructions with the aim of providing a more holistic description of grammar. Thus, the book brings together analyses that look at constructional families within the “constructicon” of such languages as English, Spanish, German, Polish, Croatian, and Hungarian. Part 1 focuses on how different analytical perspectives may be applied to comparable and/or connected constructions with a view to enhancing our understanding of their similarities, differences, and relations. Part 2 contributes to the state of the art in Construction Grammar in three ways: (i) by reconciling aspects of various constructionist analyses; (ii) by determining to what extent competing constructionist perspectives can offer more adequate approaches to specific analytical needs; and (iii) by challenging central assumptions within Construction Grammar. This book is expected to encourage further research into the anatomy of constructional families and their interrelations in all domains of constructional organization.
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How Grammar Links Concepts
Author(s): Friedrich UngererThe proposed framework of concept linking combines insights of construction grammar with those of traditional functional descriptions to explain particularly challenging but often neglected areas of English grammar such as negation, modality, adverbials and non-finite constructions. To reach this goal the idea of a unified network of constructions is replaced by the triad of verb-mediated constructions, attribution and scope-based perspectivizing, each of them understood as a syntactically effective concept-linking mechanism in its own right, but involved in interfaces with the other mechanisms.
In addition, concept linking supplies a novel approach to early child language. It casts fresh light on widely accepted descriptions of early two-word utterances and verb islands in usage-based models of language acquisition and encourages a new view of children’s ‘mistakes’.
Intended readership: Constructionist and cognitive linguists; linguists and psychologists interested in language acquisition; teachers and students of English grammar and grammar in general.
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Language Variation - European Perspectives VI
Editor(s): Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat SiebenhaarMore LessLanguage Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variation”), Martin Haspelmath and Susanne Maria Michaelis (“Analytic and synthetic: Typological change in varieties of European languages”) and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (“Dynamics, variation and the brain“). In addition, the editors have selected 11 papers which exemplify the breadth of research on European languages. The contributions to this volume encompass languages as varied as Swedish, Greek, Galician, Dutch, German, Swedish, English (including English-lexified contact varieties), French, Spanish, Croatian, Luxembourgish and Romani. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives and particularly the combination of different methods attests to the scope of research currently being conducted on language variation and change in European languages.
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Imdeduya
Author(s): Gunter SenftThis volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.
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Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas
Editor(s): Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp AngermeyerMore LessLanguage Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas brings together the original research of nineteen leading scholars on language contact and pidgin/creole genesis. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the role of historical, cultural and demographic factors in language contact situations. John Victor Singler’s body of work, a model of what such a research paradigm should look like, strikes a careful balance between sociohistorical and linguistic analysis. The case studies in this volume present investigations into the sociohistorical matrix of language contact and critical insights into the sociolinguistic consequences of language contact within Africa and the African Diaspora. Additionally, they contribute to ongoing debates about pidgin/creole genesis and language contact by examining and comparing analyses and linguistic outcomes of particular sociohistorical and cultural contexts, and considering less-studied factors such as speaker agency and identity in the emergence, nativization, and stabilization of contact varieties.
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Boundaries, Phases and Interfaces
Editor(s): Olga Fernández-Soriano, Elena Castroviejo and Isabel Pérez-JiménezMore LessThis book approaches the concept of boundary, central in linguistic theory, and the related notion of phase from the perspective of the interaction between syntax and its interfaces. A primary notion is that phases are the appropriate domains to explain most interface linguistic phenomena and that the study of (narrow) interfaces helps to understand conditions on the internal structure of the Language Faculty. The first part of this volume is dedicated to introducing the notion of boundary, cycle and phase, and also the current debates regarding internal interfaces, in particular, the syntax-phonology, syntax-semantics, syntax-discourse, syntax-morphology and syntax-lexicon interfaces, in order to show how the notion of boundary/phase is related to (or even determines) most of their characteristics. The four sections of the second part deal with (morpho)phonology/ syntax and the role or boundaries/phases; the syntax-discourse and syntax-semantics interface; and the lexicon-syntax interface, while the notion of boundary/phase cross-cuts the main topics addressed.
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Choosing a Grammar
Author(s): Isaac GouldThis book investigates the role that ambiguous evidence can play in the acquisition of syntax. To illustrate this, the book introduces a probabilistic learning model for syntactic parameters that learns a grammar of best fit to the learner’s evidence. The model is then applied to a range of cross-linguistic case studies – in Swiss German, Korean, and English – involving child errors, grammatical variability, and implicit negative evidence. Building on earlier work on language modeling, this book is unique for its focus on ambiguous evidence and its careful attention to the effects of parameters interacting with each other. This allows for a novel and principled account of several acquisition puzzles. With its inter-disciplinary approach, this book will be of broad interest to syntacticians, language acquisitionists, and cognitive scientists of language.
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Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics
Editor(s): Istvan Kecskes and Stavros AssimakopoulosMore LessHaving been established as a field in its own right for the last decade, intercultural pragmatics is increasingly being recognized as an important area of research among scholars working in pragmatics. The present volume is a collection of selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication – admittedly the biggest venue for researchers in the area, and comprises contributions that report on recent research that deals with or can directly inform work in intercultural pragmatics. Given the breadth of research areas that are
represented herein, ranging from lingua franca and business communication to the study of cultural perceptions, translation and pragmatic development, this volume is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of intercultural pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the sociocultural turn in the study of pragmatics.
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