2019 collection (119 titles)

Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity, and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so, he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel, tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States, England, France, and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature, through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations, Cruz shows how, in Puig’s hands, the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts, films, discourses, and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.

This collection aims to provide answers regarding what the most recent trends are in research in literary reading. Based on that premise, it contains a rigorously selected and varied roster of investigations that focus on presenting and attempting to interpret and understand the most recent literary trends or tendencies, as well as the reasons for the propensities they create among the masses of young and adult readers. This selection of texts in English, Catalan and Spanish will give the reading specialist an idea of where today’s trends are headed, and how they point towards the formation of a new paradigm in matters of literature.

Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness is the first systematic study that offers a socio-pragmatic perspective on humorous practices such as teasing, mockery and taking the piss and their relation to (im)politeness. Analysing data from corpora, reality television and interviews in Australian and British cultural contexts, this book contributes to cross-cultural and intercultural research on humour and its role in social interaction. Although, in both contexts, jocular verbal practices are highly valued and a positive response – the ‘preferred reaction’ – can be expected, the conceptualisation of what is seen as humorous can vary, especially in terms of what ‘goes too far’. By examining how attempts at humour can occasion offence, presenting a distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ perceptions of jocularity and looking at how language users evaluate jocular behaviours in interaction, this study shows how humour and (im)politeness are co-constructed and negotiated in discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in pragmatics, conversational humour, (im)politeness, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, television studies and interaction in English-speaking contexts.

Construction grammar enjoys great popularity among empirical linguists, typologists, psycholinguists, and language educators, because it puts meaning and function of language at the forefront of linguistic analysis. This book shows that construction grammar gives us also a powerful new way to conceive and implement operational parsing and production systems, which could be used as a basic component of a wide range of Artificial Intelligence applications, such as dialog systems, language tutoring applications, or translation assistants. The book focuses on a particular formalism, Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), that has emerged recently as a solid platform for writing and testing grammars from a constructional point of view. It introduces the basics of FCG and illustrates its use through a number of case studies all centering around the verb phrase. The case studies consider the verb phrase in different languages (Dutch, English, Spanish, Russian) and examine different challenging linguistic phenomena, ranging from word order flexibility, language change, and language acquisition, to the complex semantics of the verb phrase, particularly for aspect. The book is intended for those who want a first contact with FCG and see how different non-trivial analyses of language phenomena can be expressed. It is also an excellent first step for those who want to explore FCG to build language applications.

Originally published as special issue of Constructions and Frames 9:2 (2017).

This volume features a discourse empirical orientation from diverse perspectives and various methodologies, in which narratives, interviews, surveys, and large-scale databases or self-created written and spoken corpora are employed and analyzed to gain a better understanding of new developments and changes in Chinese language and discourse. Authors employ updated approaches from a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, to describe the structure of Chinese language and discourse and to examine its critical issues, many focusing on globalization-induced language developments and changes. With an empirically-based discourse/socio-cultural approach, this collection makes valuable contributions to research on Chinese language and discourse and serves as a sound reference for Chinese researchers and educators in diverse fields such as Chinese language and discourse, Chinese linguistics and language education, Chinese multiculturalism, and more.

Causation and reasoning are different but related types of relationships. Both causal relations and reasoning processes may be expressed with one and the same connective word in some languages: English speakers use because and Japanese speakers use kara. How then are causation and reasoning processes related to and different from each other? How do we construe and encode them? How is because different from other conjunctions with similar meanings?

To account for these and related empirical questions, this book presents an integrated analysis in accordance with the original principles of Construction Grammar. In particular, the book shows that the analysis proposed is compatible with our general knowledge about causation and reasoning and that it is valid for English and Japanese. The proposed analysis is also comprehensively applicable to a variety of related phenomena, ranging from the just because X doesn’t mean Y construction to the innovative and less known because X construction.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.