2020 collection (131 titles)

This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.

Death inhabits our collective imaginary, even though sometimes, like a squatter, it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study, which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This book deals with this phenomenon, and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course, the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive, and considers the subject from several standpoints, including linguistics, anthropology, history of medicine, and importantly, literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge, in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely, a polylogue.

The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches, such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die, and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods.

The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.

The analysis of language attitudes is important not only because attitudes can affect language maintenance and language change but also because such reflections and discussions can bring light to social, cultural, political and educational matters that require an interdisciplinary approach. This volume fills a crucial void in the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by introducing the latest production in the discipline of attitudes toward Spanish, Spanish sign language, Portuguese, Guarani and Papiamentu around the world, from South America and the Caribbean to the United States, Spain and Japan. The studies presented in this collection – a variety of sociolinguistic scenarios and methodological approaches – will make an important contribution to theoretical discussions on linguistic attitudes, specifically in the domains of language integration through education, language policy, and language maintenance. This book is intended for sociolinguists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities as well as graduate students enrolled in sociolinguistics courses.

This volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest, 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics, including comparisons with other languages (e.g., English, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish).

Specifically, the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing, the acoustics of Hungarian word stress, and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions, equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically, anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution, and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally, exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English and Hungarian, and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus.

The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.

The volume focuses on body part terms as the vehicle of embodied cognition and conceptualization. It explores the relationship between universal embodiment, language-specific cultural models and linguistic usage practices. The chapters of the volume add to the previous research in a novel way. The presentation of original data from previously undescribed languages spoken by small communities in Africa and South America allows to discover unknown aspects of embodiment and to propose new interpretations. Well-known languages are analyzed from a new perspective relying on the benefits of linguistic corpora. Contrastive and theoretically oriented studies help to pinpoint similarities and differences among languages, as well as tendencies in conceptualization patterns and semantic development of the lexis of body part terms. The volume contributes to the field of linguistics, but also to cognitive science, anthropology and cultural studies.

The objective of this book is to develop a force-recipient account of English resultatives. Within this approach the post-verbal NP is a recipient of a verbal force, whether it is a subcategorized object or not, and the verbal force being exerted onto the post-verbal NP is responsible for bringing about the change as specified by the result phrase. It is shown that many apparent puzzles posed by English resultatives are due to the complex interplay between the verb meaning and the constructional meaning, or between the verb meaning and the semantics of the result phrase. Thus the proposed account can provide answers to the question “Which resultatives are possible and which are not?” in a coherent way. Also, the proposed account reveals that English resultatives are not a monolithic phenomenon, and that some “resultatives” cited in the literature as such are not resultatives at all. This book is of interest not only to practitioners of Construction Grammar but also to everyone interested in English resultatives.

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.

What was a hero in Classical Antiquity? Why is it that their characteristics have transcended chronological and cultural barriers while they are still role models in our days? How have their features changed to be embodied by comic superheroes and film? How is their essence vulgarized and turned into a mass consumption product? What has happened with their literary and artistic representation along centuries of elitist Western culture?

This book aims at posing these and other questions about heroes, allowing us to open a cultural reflection over the role of the classical world in the present, its meaning in mass media, and the capacity of the Greek and Roman civilizations to dialogue with the modern world. This dialogue offers a glimpse into modern cultural necessities and tendencies which can be seen in several aspects, such as the hero’s vulnerability, the archetype’s banalization, the possibility to extend the heroic essence to individuals in search of identities – vital as well as gender or class identities. In some products (videogames, heavy metal music) our research enables a deeper understanding of the hero’s more obvious characteristics, such as their physical and moral strength.

All these tendencies – contemporary and consumable, contradictory with one another, yet vigorous above all – acquire visibility by means of a polyhedral vehicle which is rich in possibilities of rereading and reworking: the Greco-Roman hero. In such a virtual and postmodern world as the one we inhabit, it comes not without surprise that we still resort to an idea like the hero, which is as old as the West.

This book presents in revised form and as a single monograph three papers on a sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea. Originally published in 1980, for more than twenty years these papers remained the only report of a sign language from that part of the world. The detailed descriptive analyses that the author provided are still fresh today, and in some respects they anticipate insights into the nature of sign languages that were not further explored until much more recently. The monograph is accompanied by two essays: Sherman Wilcox comments on value and relevance of the author’s work in the light of much more recent work on the linguistics of sign languages. An essay by Lauren Reed and Alan Rumsey provides an up to date survey of what is now known about sign languages in Papua New Guinea. Information about sign languages in the Solomon Island is also included.