2019 collection (119 titles)

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.

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

What do people think of translation in the different historical, cultural and linguistic traditions of the world? How many uses has translation been put to? How distant from one another are the concepts of translation found in the different traditions? These are some of the questions A World Atlas of Translation addresses. Its twenty-one reports give us pictures taken from the inside, both from traditions that are well represented in the literature and from the many that (for now) are not.

But the Atlas is not content with documenting – no map is this innocent. In fact, the wealth of information collected and made accessible by its reporters can be useful to gauge the dispersion of translation concepts across traditions. As you read its reports, the Atlas will keep asking “How far apart do these concepts look to you?” Finally and more ambitiously, the reports can help us test the hypothesis that a cross-cultural notion of translation exists. In this respect, the Atlas is mostly a proof of concept. It hopes to encourage further fact-based research in quest of a robust and compelling unifying notion of translation.

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.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books.

This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

Negation and speculation detection is an emerging topic that has attracted the attention of many researchers, and there is clearly a lack of relevant textbooks and survey texts. This book aims to define negation and speculation from a natural language processing perspective, to explain the need for processing these phenomena, to summarise existing research on processing negation and speculation, to provide a list of resources and tools, and to speculate about future developments in this research area. An advantage of this book is that it will not only provide an overview of the state of the art in negation and speculation detection, but will also introduce newly developed data sets and scripts. It will be useful for students of natural language processing subjects who are interested in understanding this task in more depth and for researchers with an interest in these phenomena in order to improve performance in other natural language processing tasks.

In Strategic Maneuvering for Political Change, the author analyzes five political columns written before 2011 by Al Aswany, a prominent Egyptian novelist, using the lens of the extended pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. What these texts have in common is the use of narrative, fictional and semi-literary techniques to strategically maneuver in supporting the feasibility of political change. It is a contribution to explain how an anti-regime writer paved the way to the Arab Spring in Egypt, and thus goes against a common opinion that the Arab Spring in Egypt was fortuitous or a wholly social-media-based movement.



This monograph is an attempt to help argumentation theorists, linguists, analysts of narratives, and political scientists better understand and evaluate how fiction and narration can be effective means of persuasion in the domain of political communication. It therefore reconsiders the non-straightforward and artistic variants of the language of politics.

In the context of constantly increasing linguistic diversity in many parts of the world, opportunities and challenges arise for the acquisition of literacy skills. The successful development of literacy skills becomes a crucial prerequisite for educational attainment determining future career prospects of migrant students. Multilingual settings reveal the diversification of languages and scripts prompted in the context of migration. This monograph explores the phenomenon of biscriptuality and aims to provide an approach for investigating the development of biliteracy in the context of divergent scripts. This interdisciplinary mixed-methods study bridges intercultural education science, education research and applied linguistics for gaining a complex view on the role of biscriptuality in students’ biliteracy. It considers the extent of students’ biscriptual skills, specifies language dimensions in which the influence on biliteracy may occur, and differentiates between the effects of biscriptuality on the development of writing skills in two different genres, narrative and expository.

This book is a theoretically oriented, comparative study of noun phrases and their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties. This is the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the nominal structure in Uzbek, and compares it with corresponding structures in other article and article-less languages. Uzbek nominals represent a fertile ground to test the universality of the DP hypothesis and to make an insightful contribution to an ongoing debate about the functional architecture of the nominal domain in languages with and without articles. The study shows that the ordering of various nominal suffixes in Uzbek reflects a rich functional structure, involving not only DP but also KP. The work also discusses elements such as determiners, demonstratives, quantifiers and adjectives, and positioning of these elements within the nominal domain. This study is especially useful for researchers interested in theoretical linguistics, comparative syntax and typology.

The chapters in this collection, authored by renowned scholars, address a gap in the literature by focusing on the consequences that outsourcing, among other globalized economic practices, and remediation by new technologies have had on the service encounters genre (SE). From both a multilingual and a multidisciplinary perspective, this collection explores the development of technological applications and professional best practices as well as call centre interaction, e-commerce, and e-word of mouth. More specifically, the papers in this volume report on technology developed to support SEs and how this technology influences service providers and their allowable linguistic contributions. Further, this collection provides valuable insights on the language and strategic behaviour deployed in less researched kinds of SEs, gives special attention to how technology impacts the interface between the transactional and interactional goals of SEs, and thus has real world applications.