2017 collection (152 titles)

Why 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.

The 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.

Cameroon 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.

Research 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.

This 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.

Language 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.

Les 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.

Metaphor 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.

Nordic 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.

This 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

This 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.

This 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.

La 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.

What 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?