2019 collection (119 titles)

If, as we believe, the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity, enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory, then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.

The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and, as a consequence, has made the ancient, intrinsic diversity of all languages visible, at least to the extent that this is still possible.

Nowadays, then, the old linguistic diversity of dialects, of parlances, of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these, of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way, the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

The books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure, expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality, both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research, highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually, rather than how it can be identified, described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism, neuroscience, linguistics and sociology, this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach, presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.

As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, and scholars in Chinese Linguistics, this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages, the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages, computational and semantic aspects of resumption, the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials, system repairing strategies at interfaces, the v-copy construction in Chinese, the scope of disjunction, interactions between focus, negation and event quantification, null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis, child language acquisition of nominal structure, word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, theoretical linguistics, and language acquisition, as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena whose formal manifestation and underlying licensing conditions represent the convergence of two or more areas of the grammar, an area of investigation particularly invigorated in recent generative research by developments such as phase theory (cf. Chomsky 2001; 2008) and the cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999). In this respect, the dialects of Italy are no exception, in that they present comparative Romance linguists and theoretical linguists alike with many valuable opportunities to study the linguistic interfaces, as highlighted by the many case studies presented in this volume which provide a series of original insights into how different components of the linguistic system – syntactic, phonetic, phonological, morphological, semantic and pragmatic – do not necessarily operate in isolation but, rather, interact to license phenomena whose nature and distribution can only be fully understood in terms of the formal mapping between the interfaces.