2025 collection (published to date)

This volume pays homage to the legacy of William D. Keel and the significant impact of his research on German in contact settings from myriad perspectives and traditions. It includes structural and sociolinguistic studies focusing on varieties of German spoken throughout the world, including Midwestern varieties of Low German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Texas German, Zarzer German in Slove-nia, and the use of different varieties of Standard German in the second language classroom. The contributions span multiple domains of linguistic inquiry, such as phonology, morphosyntax, syntax, and second language acquisition. Collectively, they contribute to ongoing research on contact varie-ties of Germanic language and how they impact sociolinguistic and generative/theoretical theory as well as pedagogical choices involving varieties of German in instructed second language acquisition. The contributions thus are a fitting tribute to William D. Keel’s far-reaching legacy in research on bilingualism and, in particular, German-Sprachinseln throughout the world.

A prominent keyword of the 21st century humanities, the concept of transmedia describes, in essence, an age-old phenomenon: texts tend to spread in a fragmented fashion, in various media, and be appropriated and further developed by multiple agents. However, the concept of transmedia and the practices it describes have become especially foregrounded with the rise of the new digital technologies and the spread of globalization.

Transmedial practices more often than not span across languages and cultures; nevertheless, the ways in which transmediality intersects with translation is an aspect that has so far received limited attention in the respective academic fields.

The aim of this volume is to introduce the concept of transmedia to translation studies and to highlight the centrality of translation processes in transmedial phenomena. Both in its narrower sense as interlingual transfer and in its broader sense as intersemiotic transposition, translation is of paramount importance in the study of transmedia.

This volume, resulting from the fifth edition of the conference series Variation in Language Acquisition (ViLA), brings together research at the intersection of language acquisition and sociolinguistics. Work within the ViLA tradition explores how learners—from preschoolers to adult second-language users— produce, perceive, and evaluate socially meaningful language variation. Divided in two main parts, the contributions to this volume highlight a rich diversity of linguistic settings, methodological approaches, and learner profiles. Where Part I focuses on the acquisition of variation in children from age three to adolescence, Part II shifts the focus to the role of linguistic input and exposure in the acquisition process. Both parts showcase a broad methodological spectrum, from observational and experimental studies to qualitative and mixed-methods research. By deepening our understanding of the interplay between social context and linguistic development, the chapters in this volume both consolidate and inspire the growing research field of developmental sociolinguistics.

This volume presents works seeking to re-think the very nature and scope of figurativity, calling into attention some of the received tenets in accounts of figurativity, both as a holistic category and for individual types and families of figures, but also attempting to expand upon the current scope of figurative theorizing. The works presented here investigate a wider array of figures than the typically-studied tropes of metaphor, irony, and metonymy, and they address broad issues such as figurativity writ large (what figurativity actually is and does, including how embodied it is), multimodality, contiguity of figurative forms, and furthering our consideration of the ingredients of irony. It should appeal to any scholar interested in figurativity in all its expansive guises.

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English, using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs, and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways, from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit, and show how grammatical, prosodic, gestural, and postural resources, as well as gaze direction, are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk, and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT, this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.

Over the last decade, Construction Grammar has become increasingly popular in the study of language contact and multilingualism. Indeed, constructional approaches, including Diasystematic Construction Grammar, not only offer a useful theoretical framework for empirical studies, but also provide a fresh look at fundamental questions in contact linguistics. This volume continues the series of works on Constructions in Contact (the first two volumes were published in 2018 and 2021). It presents new research on the constructionist modelling of language contact phenomena, the impact of multilingualism on argument structure constructions and the role of phonological units in language contact. The volume thus combines classical areas of constructional research with innovative ones, demonstrating the broad applicability of Construction Grammar for contact linguistics.

This book is a panorama of contemporary quantitative linguistics, as developed over decades. It highlights the main topics of QL: statistical laws of language, taxonomy of linguistic phenomena, authorial attribution, quantitative analysis of syntax (e.g., dependency grammar), measurement of text difficulty, and other phenomena at the intersection of linguistics, literary studies, semiotics, and information science. It also reflects on the relevance of these time-honoured approaches in our new reality increasingly dominated by AI – both in terms of text material and methodology. Before our very eyes, computers are achieving human-level linguistic competence. The era of LLMs and the growing dominance of machine-generated text is becoming reality. The scale of these changes, initiated by the replacement of print with the digital universe, is enormous. Today, linguistics is closer than ever to mathematics and computer science, and thus quantitatively-oriented linguists are particularly well-suited to address questions about the boundary between humans and machines in scientific research.

This volume presents a collection of state-of-the-art studies that illustrate recent advances in the understanding of human language, grammar design and linguistic categories. The title of the volume aims at highlighting the mark that the work of Tim Stowell has had on the field of Linguistics since his dissertation, Origins of Phrase Structure, defended at the MIT in 1981. Stowell’s work established the principles that replaced individual phrase structure rules from previous generative models with general universal constraints, setting off the articulation of formal grammars on a new journey. The papers gathered here demonstrate how that principled approach runs in the field today. The empirical evidence discussed in the papers comes from 15 different languages, which makes the volume a point of reference for cross-linguistic analyses and testimony to the wealth of descriptive knowledge brought to the scientific community.

A wide array of linguistic generations contributed to this volume, ranging from legendary ones who established the field as we’ve known it, to some who have only recently received their doctorates. This plainly demonstrates the time spanning impact of Stowell’s work and the deep footprint he has left in the field and in our lives.