2019 collection (119 titles)

Surprise is treated as an affect in Aristotelian philosophy as well as in Cartesian philosophy. In experimental psychology, surprise is considered to be an emotion. In phenomenology, it is only addressed indirectly in phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas), with the important exception of Ricœur and Maldiney; it is reduced to a break in cognition by cognitivists (Dennett). Only recently was it broached in linguistics, with a focus on lexico-syntactic categories. As for the expression of surprise, it has been studied in connection with evidentiality in languages that encode surprise morphosyntactically. However, how surprise is encoded in languages that lack an evidential morphosyntactic system has been largely unexplored.

This book provides new insights into the dynamics of surprise based on a heuristic hypothesis tested against the investigation of time, language and emotion. It is intended to arouse the interest of a multidisciplinary audience keen on crossing the disciplinary borders of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and pragmatics.

The theoretical approaches adopted in this collection of articles rely on experiments and corpus data. They advance knowledge by building on robust empirical results coming from psychology, microphenomenology, linguistics and physiology.

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.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.

Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.

As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

Wine culture is a complex phenomenon of increasing importance in modern society, and it combines the joys of wine appreciation with the frustrations of trying to verbally communicate sensory impressions. While wine appreciation is traditionally characterized as joyously convivial in its social dimension, sensory impressions remain eminently private. This contrast explains why the language used to represent wine, or winespeak, is the object of increasing crossdisciplinary interest.

This book analyzes the many different forms / many of the different forms of representing wine in present-day society, with a special emphasis on winespeak, starting from the premise that such study demands a genre approach to the many different communities involved in the wine world: producers/ critics/ merchants/ consumers. By combining the methodologies of Cognitive Linguistics and discourse analysis, the authors analyze extensive real-life corpora of wine reviews and multimodal artifacts (labels, advertisements, documentaries) to reflect on the many inherent difficulties but also to highlight the rich and creative figurative strategies employed to compensate for the absence of a proper wine jargon of a more unambiguous nature.

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.

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet), the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs, the development of the Germanic word order, and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2,000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages, Proto-Germanic, was in intensive contact with Punic, a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data, supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.

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).

The volume presents sixteen chapters focused on lexicalization patterns used in color naming in a variety of languages. Although previous studies have dealt with categorization and perceptual salience of color terms, few studies have been consistently conducted in order to investigate phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic devices languages use to form color terms.

The aim of this volume is to approach color data from a relativist and typological perspective and to address some novel viewpoints in the research of color terms, such as: (a) the focus on language structure per se in the study of lexicalization data; (b) investigation of inter- and intra-language structural variation; (c) culture and language contact as reflected in language structure.

Topics of this book have a broad appeal to researchers working in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues, the period and the status of the discipline itself, as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis, syntax, semantics, morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts, such as year of publication, sex of the author, geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET, the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as the above-mentioned metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics, as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET), accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), purpose-designed software by IrLab, is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849