2024 collection (82 titles)

This volume collects research on language, cognition, and communication in multilingualism. Apart from theoretical concerns including grammatical description, language-specific analyses, and modeling of multilingualism, different fields of study and research interests center around three core themes: The Early Years (aspects of language acquisition and development, including vernaculars or minority languages, reading, writing, and cognition, and multilingual extensions), Issues in Everyday Life (the role of multilingualism in and for speech–language–communication difficulties, including diagnosis, provisions of services, and later language breakdown), and From the Past to the Future (aspects of multilingualism beyond acquisition, education, or pathology, with a focus on heritage languages and translanguaging). Specialists from each of these areas introduce state-of-the-art research, novel experimental studies, and/or quantitative as well as qualitative data bearing on ‘multifaceted multilingualism’. There is a broad spectrum for take-home messages, ranging from new theoretical analyses or approaches to assess multilingual speakers all the way to recommendations for policy-makers.

Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories can be unified. Specifically, I address issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this book is to show that this is an unwarranted assumption. Based on a number of case studies on verb displacement phenomena in Cantonese, I attempt a unified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction in movement theories. These case studies converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bears a minimal role in theorizing displacement phenomena in natural language. This volume represents a minimalist pursuit of a unified theory of movement.

The chapters in this volume study the construction, representation and negotiation of a variety of social roles through self- and other-reference markers or the discussion of reference as a tool for identification. The chapters uncover new insights both from a historical and present-day perspective and show how positioning the self and other varies, what kind of reference choices language users make and what follows from these choices. The data come from a variety of public texts, private encounters and questionnaires, and the methodologies range from macro to micro perspectives, including combinations of qualitative close-reading and quantitative corpus methods, and synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The findings enhance our understanding and use of reference practices in the context of global, institutional, political and multicultural, as well as media texts.

As a first attempt to date, this book addresses the notion of hypocrisy from a pragmatic perspective and devises a comprehensive model of verbal hypocrisy. The studies included adopt emic and etic approaches in order to contribute jointly towards an understanding of what appears to be a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Going beyond hypocrisy as a mere moral vice, this volume establishes its pragmatic space and confronts it with adjacent notions which, unlike hypocrisy, have been subject to pragmatic examination. The Pragmatics of Hypocrisy is of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, communication and media studies, as well as corpus linguistics, and by its transdisciplinary nature, to researchers in philosophy, sociology, and political science. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the interplay between language, culture and society, across varieties and registers of English.

Die Rezeption der Texte von Aristoteles in verschiedenen Welten hat zu Umformungen geführt, von denen manche noch heute als Meinung des Aristoteles selbst behauptet werden. Wenn es möglich ist, diese aus verschiedenen Welten herkommenden Umgestaltungen ausdrücklich zu machen, können sie methodisch ausgeschaltet werden. Beispiele solcher Sedimente der Rezeption betreffen zentrale Themen, beispielsweise, dass Aristoteles eine Substanz-Metaphysik entwickelt habe, aus welcher letztlich eine theologische Ausrichtung oder mindestens ein theologischer Höhepunkt folge. Dass dies eine der Wirkungen der durch verschiedene pseudo-aristotelische Texte bestimmten Rezeption ist, wird heute kaum mehr wahrgenommen, weil die moderne Lektüre des Corpus Aristotelicum schon entsprechend gesteuert ist.

Die vorliegende Studie versucht an Hand der Kommentare von Albertus Magnus und von Thomas von Aquin zu Metaphysik XII diese Wirkung der Rezeption zu belegen. Ein Nebenprodukt der Arbeit besteht in der Einsicht in den Paradigmenwechsel in der Theologie bei den zwei Genannten.

The reception of Aristotle’s texts in different worlds has led to transformations, some of which are still claimed today as the opinions of Aristotle himself. If it is possible to make these transformations coming from different worlds explicit, they can be methodically eliminated. Examples of such reception sediments concern central themes, for example that Aristotle developed a metaphysics of substance, from which a theological orientation or at least a theological climax ultimately follows. The fact that this is one of the effects of the reception determined by various pseudo-Aristotelian texts is hardly noticed today because the modern reading of the Corpus Aristotelicum is already steered accordingly.

The present study attempts to demonstrate this effect of reception using the commentaries of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics XII. A by-product of the work is the insight into the paradigm shift in theology among the two mentioned.

The ongoing migration ‘crisis’ in European countries (2015 to date) has fostered different stances and practices within European nation-states, ranging from xenophobia to solidarity. In this context, two contradictory discourses seem to coexist: the national racist discourse and the humanitarian, antiracist one. This volume brings together studies investigating diverse semiotic strategies through which liquid racism emerges, which consists of ambiguities and contradictory interpretations due to the fact that racist views infiltrate discourse intended as antiracist. The volume includes critical and pragmatic analyses of texts coming from various sources, such as news articles, parliamentary discourse, political cartoons, video clips, advertising campaigns based on personal stories, and jokes. It is an outcome of the research project “TRACE: Tracing Racism in Anti-raCist discoursE: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (HFRI-FM17-42, HFRI 2019-2022, Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation).

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference”, these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages, nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD, which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book, which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics, in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology, but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.

This book examines three controversial generalizations concerning wh-island effects in Chinese: argument and adjunct asymmetry, subject and object asymmetry, and D-linked and non-D-linked asymmetry. Experiments under the factorial definition of island effects reveal that: (1) both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to the wh-island, displaying no asymmetry; (2) subject wh-in-situ manifests a larger magnitude of island effects, whereas object wh-in-situ shows a smaller size due to the confounding of double name penalty, exhibiting a special pattern of asymmetry; (3) D-linked and non-D-linked who-in-situ evince no asymmetry, while D-linked and non-D-linked what-in-situ demonstrate a marginal asymmetry. Findings support the theory of covert wh-movement on the interpretation of Chinese wh-in-situ. The pattern of wh-island effects can be attributed to the violation of locality principles during wh-feature movement. This book is primarily tailored for researchers interested in the study of Chinese wh-questions and generative linguistics in the broad sense.

The book presents two fundamental theories that characterize the cultural-historical perspective in cognitive semantics: the Four-Level Theory of Cognitive Development (FLTCD) and the Sociocultural Theory of Lexical Complexes (STLC) as well as their application to the analysis of specific material. In particular, the book analyzes the sociocultural history of the MACHINE metaphor, specifically its use in the texts of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The practical embodiment of STLC is demonstrated through the analysis of lexical complexes such as otkryvat' ‘to open,’ kamen' ‘stone,’ and intelligencija ‘intelligentsia.’ In the final chapter of the monograph, FLTCD and STLC are used for the diachronic analysis of semantic change. The monograph will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and philosophers who consider language as a sociocultural phenomenon.

Research methodology plays a pivotal role in generating new knowledge in any academic discipline. Applied Linguistics (AL) researchers use a variety of research methodologies to address different research problems and research questions, given its interdisciplinary nature. Notwithstanding the plethora of research methodologies used by AL researchers, there are some methodologies that are used less frequently. The aim of this volume is to introduce and discuss these less frequently used methodologies. Each methodology is discussed in two chapters, a theoretical and a practical chapter. In the theoretical chapters, the theoretical foundations, methodological orientation, ethical issues, and critiques and responses are discussed. In the practical chapters, a showcase study is presented and discussed, including why the methodology was used, how it was implemented, the challenges the researchers faced, and the insights they gained. The volume contributes to the current methodological discussion in AL and provides early-career and seasoned researchers with the necessary discussion about these methodological orientations. Future AL researchers may use these methodologies to investigate research questions in their areas of interest. In addition, the volume can complement current methodological resources in postgraduate research methodology courses.