2020 collection (131 titles)

Heritage language bilingualism refers to contexts where a minority language spoken at home is (one of) the first native language(s) of an individual who grows up and typically becomes dominant in the societal majority language. Heritage language bilinguals often wind up with grammatical systems that differ in interesting ways from dominant-native speakers growing up where their heritage language is the majority one. Understanding the trajectories and outcomes of heritage language bilingual grammatical competence, performance, language usage patterns, identities and more related topics sits at the core of many research programs across a wide array of theoretical paradigms. The study of heritage language bilingualism has grown exponentially over the past two decades. This expansion in interest has seen, in parallel, extensions in methodologies applied, bridges built between closely related fields such as the study of language contact and linguistic attrition. As is typical in linguistics, not all languages are studied to the same degree. The present volume showcases what Turkish as a heritage language brings to bear for key questions in the study of heritage language bilingualism and beyond. In many ways, Turkish is an ideal language to be studied because of its large diaspora across the world, in particular Europe. The papers in this volume are diverse: from psycholinguistic, to ethnographic, to classroom-based studies featuring Turkish as a heritage language. Together they equal more than their subparts, leading to the conclusion that understudied heritage languages like Turkish provide missing pieces to the puzzle of understanding the variables that give rise to the continuum of outcomes characteristic of heritage language speakers.

Whereas it is now generally recognised that multilingualism is important for society, culture and the economy, the relevance of multilingualism for the world of science has still largely escaped attention. But science, too, is created and transmitted in and through communication. Today, the construction and transmission of knowledge is based on a growing monolingualism, with English as the lingua academica regarded as a condition of the universality of scientific knowledge. However, this idea is based on the illusion that languages are transparent and that the modes of communication are universal.

In this book, it is shown how multilingualism can open different perspectives and improve the quality of knowledge by offering an antidote to the squeezing out of different academic and scientific cultures. More precisely, it is shown how multilingual approaches highlight the mediating role of language and, in doing so, optimize conceptualization, communication and evaluation in science.

These findings are, for one thing, relevant to institutional language policies and, for another, open new lines of research taking scientific practices themselves as a field of investigation.

The current volume aspires to add to previous research on the connection between writing and language learning from a dual perspective: It seeks to reflect current progress in the domain as well as to foster future developments in theory and research. The theoretical postulations contained in Part I identify and expand in novel ways the diverse lenses through which the varied, multi-faceted dimensions of the connection between writing and language learning can be explored. The methodological reflections put forward in Part III signal theoretically-grounded and pedagogically-relevant paths along which future empirical work can grow. The empirical studies reported in Part II illuminate the myriad of individual, educational, and task-related variables that (may) mediate short-term and long-term language learning outcomes. These studies examine diverse forms of writing, performed in varied environments (including pen-and-paper and digital writing), conditions (writing individually and/or collaboratively), and instructional settings (academic settings – including secondary school and college level institutions – as well as out-of-school contexts).

Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili.



The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

Nowadays, the forms assumed by knowledge indicate an unhinging of traditional structures conceived on the model of discipline.

Consequently, what was once strictly disciplinary becomes interdisciplinary, what was homogeneous becomes heterogeneous and what was hierarchical becomes heterarchical.

When we look for a matrix of interdisciplinarity, that is to say, a primary basis or an essential dimension of all the complex phenomena we are surrounded by, we see the need to break with the disciplinary self-restraint in which, often completely inadvertently, many of us lock ourselves up, remaining anchored to our own competences, ignoring what goes beyond our own sphere of reference.

However, interdisciplinarity is still a vague concept and a much demanding practice. It presupposes the continuous search for convergent theoretical perspectives and methodologies, and the definition of common spaces and languages, as well as a true dialogical and open mind of several scholars.

From ethics to science, from communication to medicine, from climate change to human evolution the volume Controversies and Interdisciplinarity offers a series of original insights beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model.

Indirectness has been a key concept in pragmatic research for over four decades, however the notion as a technical term does not have an agreed-upon definition and remains vague and ambiguous. In this collection, indirectness is examined as a way of communicating meaning that is inferred from textual, contextual and intertextual meaning units. Emphasis is placed on the way in which indirectness serves the representation of diverse voices in the text, and this is examined through three main prisms: (1) the inferential view focuses on textual and contextual cues from which pragmatic indirect meanings might be inferred; (2) the dialogic-intertextual view focuses on dialogic and intertextual cues according to which different voices (social, ideological, literary etc.) are identified in the text; and (3) the functional view focuses on the pragmatic-rhetorical functions fulfilled by indirectness of both kinds.

The present volume presents research on language processing and language disorders. Topics range across typical language processing, child developmental language disorders, adult neurodegenerative disorders and neurological bases of typical or impaired brains. The chapters cover a number of linguistic phenomena, including relative clauses, empty categories, determiner phrases and inflectional morphology. Work in this collection uses a variety of experimental methods, both online and offline, such as eye tracking, reaction times, Event Related Potentials, picture selection, sentence elicitation and picture matching tasks. This book will be useful for linguists, speech therapists, and psycholinguists working on the processing of morphosyntax.

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.

This study focuses on the language around sexuality and discourses about sex, labeled by the authors as metasex, from a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike many existing studies on sexting that predominantly take into account the linguistic practices of teenagers often located in the Global North, this book offers a more holistic approach by discussing Southern concepts of body parts, their conceptualization and mediatization (“dick pics”), the interconnectedness of food and sex and its sensualization (“foodporn”) as well as processes of social cohesion around sex, sociability and conviviality (“bonding”). Based on an anthropological linguistic perspective, the authors analyze metasex practices from Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, the Mediterranean, and numerous other contexts. Africanist Agnes Brühwiler’s afterword on sex (talk) in Tanzania rounds off the various fresh insights this study offers.