2020 collection (131 titles)

This book examines the linguistic and interactional mechanisms through which people bond or feel bonded with one another by analyzing situated discourse in Japanese contexts. The term “bonding” points to the sense of co-presence, belonging, and alignment with others as well as with the space of interaction. We analyze bonding as established, not only through the usage of language as a foregrounded code, but also through multi-layered contexts shared on the interactional, corporeal, and socio-cultural levels. The volume comprises twelve chapters examining the processes of bonding (and un-bonding) using situated discourse taken from rich ethnographic data including police suspect interrogations, Skype-mediated family conversations, theatrical rehearsals, storytelling, business email correspondence and advertisements. While the book focuses on processes of bonding in Japanese discourse, the concept of bonding can be applied universally in analyzing the co-creation of semiotic, pragmatic, and communal space in situated discourse.

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns (furniture, police force, clothing).

This collection contains a selection of recent work on people’s production of figurative language (metaphoric, ironic, metonymic, hyperbolic, ...) and similarly of figurative expression in visual media and artefact design. The articles illuminate issues such as why and under what circumstances people produce figurative expression and how it is moulded by their aims. By focusing on production, the intention is to help stimulate more academic research on it and redress historically lower levels of published work on generation than on understanding of figurative expression. The contributions stretch across various academic disciplines—mainly psychology, cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics, but with a representation also of philosophy and artificial intelligence—and across different types of endeavour—theoretical investigation and model building, experimental studies, and applications focussed work (for instance, figurative expression in product design and online support groups). There is also a wide-ranging introductory chapter that touches on areas outside the scope of the contributed articles and discusses difficult issues such as a complex interplay of production and understanding.

While translation history, literary translation, and periodical publications have been extensively analyzed within the fields of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and Communication Sciences, the relationship between these three topics remains underexplored. Literary Translation in Periodicals argues that there is a pressing need for an analytical focus on translation in periodicals, a collaborative network of researchers, and a transnational and interdisciplinary approach. The book pursues two goals: (1) to highlight the innovative theoretical and methodological issues intrinsic to analyzing literary translation in periodical publications on a small and large scale, and (2) to contribute to a developing field by providing several case studies on translation in periodicals over a wide range of areas and periods (Europe, Latin America, and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries) that go beyond the more traditional focus on national and European periodicals and translations. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, as well as hermeneutical and sociological approaches, this book reviews conceptual and methodological tools and proposes innovative techniques, such as social network analysis, big data, and large-scale analysis, for tracing the history and evolution of literary translation in periodical publications.

This book focuses exclusively on child bilinguals or children exposed to a second language in various learning contexts. Through the presentation of research on how children learn the sound systems or lexicon in two languages and via different routes, the book aims to paint a comprehensive picture of child bilingualism and second language learning. In addition, the book features contributions focused on theoretical overviews and methodological approaches. Researchers from diverse disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and speech-language pathology contributed to the book that thus represents an effort to integrate multiple views and perspectives. The book is useful for researchers, clinicians, and educators who work with children acquiring or learning a second language in different settings. It should also be of interest to university students studying bilingualism and/or second language acquisition or parents raising bilingual children.

How did Nordic culture become associated with the fuzzy brand “cool”, as by default? In Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History twenty-one scholars in collaboration question the seemingly natural fit between “Nordic” and “Cool” by investigating its variegated trajectories through literary history, from medieval legends to digital poetry. At the same time, the elasticity and polysemy of the word “cool” become a means to explore Nordic literary history afresh. It opens up a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches within a regional framework and reveals hitherto unseen links between familiar and less familiar tracks and sites. Following diverse paths of “Nordic cool” in respect to – among other things – nature, survival, love, whiteness, style, economics, heroism and colonialism, this book challenges all-too-recognisable narratives, and underlines the sheer knowledge potential of literary historical research.

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar.

On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions.

This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use.

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.

Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/

As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences.

These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.

Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.