2020 collection (131 titles)

Amazonian Spanish: Language contact and evolution explores the unique origins, linguistic features, and geo-political situation of the Spanish that has emerged in the Amazon. While this region boasts much linguistic diversity, many of the indigenous languages found within its limits are now being replaced by Spanish. This situation of language expansion, contact, and bilingualism is reshaping the sociolinguistic landscape of the Amazon by creating a number of Spanish varieties with innovative linguistic features that require closer scholarly attention. The current book documents this situation in detail. The chapters in this volume include work on distinct geographical regions of the Amazon, with primary data collected using different methodologies and language contact situations. The scholars in this volume specialize in an array of fields, including anthropological linguistics, bilingualism, language contact, dialectology, and language acquisition. Their work represents both formal and functional approaches to linguistics.

This volume brings together a collection of original articles investigating state-of-the-art themes in morphology. The papers in the volume provide an in-depth analysis for spoken and sign languages within morphological word domain, morphosyntax and morphophonology. Bringing data from a variety of languages including Turkish, some understudied ones (e.g. Turkish Sign Language, Late Ottoman Turkish) and also endangered languages (e.g. Karachay-Balkar, Sauzini, Cappadocian, Aivaliot and Pharasiot Greek), the volume will be of special interest to a wide audience ranging from typologists to theoretical linguists and graduate students in linguistics and is expected to generate further research on the above mentioned languages, as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the themes explored in the volume.

The ‘NP’ is one of the least controversial grammatical units that linguists work with. The NP is often assumed to be universal, and appears to be robust cross-linguistically (compared to ‘VP’ or even ‘clause’) in that it can be manipulated in argument positions in constructed examples. Furthermore, for any given language, its internal structure (order and type of modifiers) tends to be relatively fixed. Surprisingly, however, the empirical basis for ‘NP’ has never been established. The chapters in this volume examine the NP in everyday interactions from diverse languages, including little-studied languages as well as better-researched ones, in a variety of interactional settings. Together, these chapters show that cross-linguistically, the category NP is not as robust as has been assumed: in the context of temporally unfolding human interaction, its structural status is constantly negotiated in terms of participants’ evolving social agendas.

The expression of temporal relations, notably through tense and aspect, is central in all processes of communication, but commonly perceived and described as a major hurdle for non-native speakers. While this topic has already received considerable attention in the SLA literature, it features less prominently in recent corpus-based studies of learner language. This volume intends to close this gap. It shows which additional insights into the area of tense and aspect in learner language can be gained using corpus data, addressing the following questions: In which ways do corpus-based studies complement work based on other methods?; How can a corpus-based approach inform theories on the acquisition of tense and aspect specifically, and of language acquisition in general?; Are results language-specific or can universal principles be established?; How pervasive are effects of mode/register within learner corpus data?; What role does native and non-native input play?; Which methodological challenges come to the fore when using corpus data instead of elicited data?; How can the notion of “target(-like)” performance be operationalized for corpus material?; Which implications do the findings from the learner corpora have for the teaching and learning of the target language?

Originally published as special issue of International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 4:2 (2018)

Incorporating both interview and workplace data, this book examines the discursive and social challenges that former refugees encounter as they navigate successes and failures in the New Zealand labour market. Over five chapters of microlevel discourse analysis – drawing on Bamberg & Georgakopoulou’s (2008) positioning, and interactional sociolinguistic literature – themes emerge of narrative, social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), linguistic agency, and wider capital-D Discourses (Gee, 1990) surrounding refugeehood. Of particular interest in this study is the inclusion of a longitudinal study of former refugees’ trajectories in the labour market, and the combination of both interview and authentic workplace interactional data, providing rich insight into the multiple and ongoing challenges new arrivals face in their negotiation of employability. This book will be of interest to those engaged in research around migration (particularly those focused on forced migration), employment, language and identity, and narrative identity.

What is the best way to analyze spontaneous spoken language? In their search for the basic units of spoken language the authors of this volume opt for a corpus-driven approach. They share a strong conviction that prosodic structure is essential for the study of spoken discourse and each bring their own theoretical and practical experience to the table. In the first part of the book they segment spoken material from a range of different languages (Russian, Hebrew, Central Pomo (an indigenous language from California), French, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese). In the second part of the book each author analyzes the same two spoken English samples, but looking at them from different perspectives, using different methods of analysis as reflected in their respective analyses in Part I. This approach allows for common tendencies of segmentation to emerge, both prosodic and segmental.

The importance of quality interpreting in legal and healthcare settings can never be stressed enough, when any mistake – no matter how small – can compromise the delivery of justice or put someone’s health at risk. This book addresses issues arising from interpreting in legal and healthcare settings by presenting cutting-edge research findings in interpreting and interpreter education in a number of countries around the world – including those which are relatively new to the field. It contains selected papers from a conference dedicated to such themes – the First International Conference on Legal and Healthcare Interpreting – as well as other invited papers related to the fields of legal and healthcare interpreting. This book is useful not only to scholars and educators, interpreters and translators working in legal or healthcare settings, but also to legal and healthcare professionals who work with interpreters in their day-to-day work, including judges, lawyers, police officers, doctors, midwives and nurses.

Shakespeare and Crisis: One hundred years of Italian narratives explores how Shakespeare intervened in the Italian socio-political and cultural scene between his third and fourth centenaries, at times which were manifestly perceived as ‘critical’. It asks which complex mythopoietic processes contributed to shaping regimes of reading Shakespeare in response to those times of crisis. Crises of national identity during the Great War and the Fascist regime, crises of history in the 1970s, and crises of representation in the second half of the twentieth century extending into the new millennium constitute the three main areas of a discussion that ultimately aims at probing into the role of literature at times of crisis. The volume situates itself at the juncture of European Shakespeare studies and studies of Shakespeare and Italy. It addresses essential questions about the position of literature in society, offering at different levels new insights for scholars, students, and the general reader.

Differential Object marking (DOM), a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons, has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children, but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world, in acquisition, and in language contact, variation, and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.

This book examines the diverse forms of conversational humor with the help of examples drawn from casual interactions among Russian speakers. It argues that neither an exclusively discourse-analytic perspective on the phenomenon nor an exclusively cognitive one can adequately account for conversational joking. Instead, the work advocates reconciling these two perspectives in order to describe such humor as a form of cognitive and communicative creativity, by means of which interlocutors convey additional meanings and imply further interpretive frames. Accordingly, in order to analyze cognition in interaction, it introduces a discourse-semantic framework which complements mental spaces and blending theory with ideas from discourse analysis. On the one hand, this enables both the emergent and interactive character and the surface features of conversational joking to be addressed. On the other, it incorporates into the analysis those normally backgrounded cognitive processes responsible for the additional meanings emerging from, and communicated by jocular utterances.