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Full EBA collection (ca. 4,200 titles)
Collection Contents
1 - 20 of 4268 results
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Challenges in Corpus Linguistics
Editor(s): Mark Kaunisto and Marco SchilkMore LessThis book contributes to the discussion of challenges faced in different areas of corpus linguistics, namely the compilation, annotation, and analysis of linguistic corpora. In a field of growing corpus sizes and expanding possibilities of gathering data, some old issues persist, while at the same time new problems have emerged. As the compilation and study of language corpora gets increasingly sophisticated and complex, continuous attention on ways of dealing with the data in question and challenges in text selection and interpretation is needed. The contributions to this volume address problems relating to a variety of areas in corpus linguistic study, including corpus annotation, data variability, learner language, social media texts, and database utilization. The authors provide critical overviews and research-based analyses, discuss the nature of some of the common pitfalls, and offer solutions to existing problems.
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Children’s Peer Cultures in Dialogue
Author(s): Nicola NasiContemporary schools are enlivened by a multitude of children with rather disparate linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. These children spend most of their school hours in interaction with other children, engaging in multifarious activities (conflict, gossip, play, humor, task-related activities) that gradually come to constitute the local culture and social organization of their peer group. The book illustrates the multimodal and sequential organization of these mundane peer choreographies, describing the resources through which children co-ordinate their social actions in the complex linguistic and socio-material landscape of diverse classrooms. Moving beyond the focus on teacher-led socialization in previous literature, the analyses shed light on the relevance of everyday peer practices to the negotiation of children’s social roles and identities and to their overall developmental trajectories in the community. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and addresses scholars from different academic fields, including sociology, linguistics, anthropology, social and developmental psychology, and education.
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Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective
Editor(s): Adams Bodomo and Carola KoblitzMore LessLinguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language, culture, and identity across the globe.
An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi, Ruth Karachi Benson Oji, Liliane Hodieb, Zheng Yang, Zhifang Li, and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein, Wang Chutong, and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities, and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh, Muharrem Kaplan, and Tomás Espino Barrera.
Appealing to scholars, researchers, and students, this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field, offering fresh perspectives on language, culture, and identity.
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Perspectives on Input, Evidence, and Exposure in Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Lindsay HracsMore LessEmphasizing the necessity for theory-driven language acquisition research, the studies in this collection aim to formalize the kinds of information available to first and second language learners, as well as to shed light on how that information is used to solve a variety of learning problems. The volume pays homage to the scholarly contributions of Susanne E. Carroll, delving into the impact she has had on the field of language acquisition. The central themes of input, evidence, and exposure – found throughout Carroll’s work – are explored in this volume. The contributions cover a range of topics such as the emergence of linguistic theorizing in language acquisition research, the acquisition of grammatical gender, classroom language learning, learning on first exposure, asymmetries between developmental trajectories in first and second language acquisition, and the effects of grammatical complexity on language development.
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The Frequency–Grammar Interface
Author(s): Stefano RastelliSpeakers and learners, based on memory and experience, implicitly know that certain language elements naturally pair together. However, they also understand, through abstract and frequency-independent categories, why some combinations are possible and others are not. The frequency-grammar interface (FGI) bridges these two types of information in human cognition. Due to this interface, the sediment of statistical calculations over the order, distribution, and associations of items (the regularities) and the computation over the abstract principles that allow these items to join together (the rules) are brought together in a speaker’s competence, feeding into one another and eventually becoming superposed. In this volume, it is argued that a specific subset of both first and second language grammar (termed ‘combinatorial grammar’) is both innate and learned. While not derived from language usage, combinatorial grammar is continuously recalibrated by usage throughout a speaker’s life. In the domain of combinatorial grammar, both generative and usage-based theories are correct, each shedding light on just one component of the two that are necessary for any language to function: rules and regularities.
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Language Acquisition in Romance Languages
Editor(s): Vicenç TorrensMore LessThe research presented in this volume covers first language acquisition, second language acquisition, language heritage and language impairment. Papers in this collection use a variety of experimental methods, such as eye-tracking, elicitation tasks, production tasks administered off-line and untimed, transcriptions of spontaneous speech, production elicitation, Truth Value Judgement tasks, standardized tests and multiple choice tasks. The studies included in this book try to cover most of the methods used in first and second language acquisition in typical and atypical populations. This book will be useful for linguists, speech therapists, and psycholinguists working on first, second and impaired language acquisition.
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Missionary Grammars and Dictionaries of Chinese
Author(s): Otto ZwartjesThis monograph aims to shed light on the linguistic endeavors and educational practices employed by 17th century Spanish Dominicans in their efforts to understand and disseminate knowledge of the Chinese language during this historical period. Ample attention is dedicated to the evolution of Chinese grammars and dictionaries by these authors. Central to the monograph is the manuscript “Marsh 696”, which comprises a Chinese-Spanish dictionary and a fragmentary Spanish grammar of Mandarin Chinese, a hitherto unknown and unpublished anonymous and undated text entitled Arte de lengua mandarina. This text is probably a fragment of the earliest grammar written by a Westerner of Mandarin Chinese (completed in Manila in c.1641), previously presumed lost. It is presented here as a facsimile, a transcription of the Spanish text and an English translation alongside a detailed linguistic analysis. The historical framework outlined in this monograph spans from the predecessors of Francisco Díaz (1606–1646) around 1620, including the Jesuit linguistic production in mainland China and Early Manila Hokkien sources, to the era wherein Antonio Díaz (1667–1715) finalized his revised version of Francisco Díaz’s dictionary. The monograph scrutinizes these texts in relation to the linguistic contributions of Francisco Varo (1627–1687). Additionally, the monograph incorporates other unpublished texts that are significant for reconstructing the educational curriculum for teaching and learning Chinese by Dominican friars during this period.
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New Perspectives in Interactional Linguistic Research
Editor(s): Margret Selting and Dagmar Barth-WeingartenMore LessThis collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century, it has prospered internationally. Recently, however, new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research.
IL continues to study the details of talk in social interaction, with a focus on linguistic resources and structures of verbal and vocal interaction in bodily-visible interactional settings. Increasingly, though, it embraces methods supported by new technology and broadens its data and research questions to applications in teaching, therapy, etc.
The volume comprises three parts with 14 contributions: (1) Studying linguistic resources in social interaction; (2) Studying linguistic resources in embodied social interaction; and (3) Studying social interaction in institutional contexts and involving speakers with specific proficiencies.This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Structures in Discourse
Editor(s): Martin Gill, Aino Malmivirta and Brita WårvikMore LessThis volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics, exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms, from written to spoken to visual, in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis, to the macro-level structure of online interaction, all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types, the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies, highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.
Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies and digitally mediated communication.
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The COLT Observation Scheme
Author(s): Nina SpadaThis volume presents the second edition of the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) Observation Scheme. Since the book’s original publication, COLT has become well established as a research instrument in L2 teaching and learning. This new edition brings COLT into the 21st century by introducing digital versions of the scheme and describing how advances in technology have made the collection, coding, analysis, and synthesis of classroom data faster and more efficient. Enhancements include the availability of web-based platforms for the coding, sharing and storage of data, the application of artificial intelligence in the coding of classroom observation data, numeric coding systems, and ongoing work in the use of automatic speech recognition for faster transcription. The volume has a similar organizational structure to the original COLT book with the addition of a new chapter on Digital COLT (Part A), a new section on Numeric COLT (Part B), and an expanded final chapter that includes updated summaries reporting on the use of COLT for a wide range of research purposes in diverse L2 contexts. As with the first edition, the material is presented in a user-friendly manner with examples, illustrations and hands-on activities throughout. It is intended for both novice and experienced researchers investigating teaching and learning in L2 classrooms and in teacher education/reflective practice research.
The companion web site with interviews and a video tour can be found at: https://benjamins.com/sites/lllt.60
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The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger
Editor(s): Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao YeMore LessThis book addresses the problems and challenges of studying the discourse of "danger" cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, and proposes the cultural pragmatics of danger as a new field of inquiry. Detailed case studies of several linguacultures include Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, German, Japanese and Spanish. Focusing on global and local contexts surrounding “living in dangerous times”, this book showcases how the new model of cultural pragmatics can be used to illuminate cultural meanings in discourse. Unlike the universalist approaches to pragmatics, cultural pragmatics focuses on understanding the linguacultural logics of discourse, and in the case of “danger”, the multiple cultural logics around which the themes and domains of “danger” revolve. The approach makes use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) as its principal analytical tool, and concepts such as “cultural keywords” and “cultural scripts” figure prominently as bearers of culture-specific meanings.
The book will be of interest to students of pragmatics and discourse studies, researchers in cultural and cognitive semantics, anthropological linguistics, global humanities, political rhetoric and environmental studies, as well as linguists working in applied areas, such as risk and disaster studies, crisis and emergency communication.
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Transformative Reading
Author(s): Olivia FialhoTransformative Reading belongs to a growing tradition of studies investigating the functions of aesthetic experiences in our lives. Philosophers, literary theorists, and psychologists have suggested that aesthetic experiences implicate and develop our sense of ourselves. Literary texts, as one such experience, challenge readers and extend their imagination by means of complex or deviating plots. Reading literary narrative fiction helps readers develop imaginary selves in a safe way, enhancing their theory of mind. It might also contribute to the development of readers’ interpersonal competencies and foster pro-sociality, altruistic behaviour, and empathy. This book uses empirical research methods to focus on the processes of literary reading, revealing two pathways for the transformative powers of literature. It also reveals how an understanding of these pathways might be beneficial in educational settings – in schools, in the workplace, and in medical contexts.
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Using Tonal Data to Recover Japanese Language History
Author(s): Elisabeth M. de BoerEditor(s): J. Marshall UngerMore LessThis book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork, premodern texts, and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010, this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim, explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language, and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.
This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Variation in University Student Writing
Author(s): Larissa GoulartThis book provides a comprehensive description of the situational and linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing, considering both assignment type and discipline. Drawing on a corpus of more than 900 undergraduate student assignments from four disciplinary groups (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences), the book combines corpus-based analyses of linguistic features with analyses of communicative purposes and text characteristics. Variation in University Writing takes a new approach to register variation by grouping assignments by their communicative purpose (to argue, to explain, to compare, to describe, to narrate a personal event, to give a procedural recount, to give personal advice, and to propose), rather than register categories. A multidimensional analysis provides a detailed description of the linguistic patterns of undergraduate writing. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to teachers of writing, instructors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and researchers of university writing.
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(Non)referentiality in Conversation
Editor(s): Michael C. Ewing and Ritva LauryMore LessAlthough there is a large literature on referentiality, going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century, much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality, contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or as categories, and what distinguishes ‘referential’ from ‘nonreferential’, ‘specific’ from ‘nonspecific’, and ‘generic’ from ‘nongeneric’. Crucially, we ask whether these distinctions even matter to participants in conversation, and if they do, what the evidence for that would be. Contributors investigate these issues using data from conversational interaction in a variety of social contexts – including between close friends and family to more casual acquaintances, in service encounters, and between adults and children – and in a range of languages: English, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Japanese and Mandarin. Collectively, the chapters develop insights showing that reference is often fluid, dynamic, and indeterminate, that referential indeterminacy is typically unproblematic for participants, that shifts in referentiality tend to be tied to specific social goals, and that reference and referentiality emerge dialogically and interactionally.
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Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings
Editor(s): Bertus van Rooy and Haidee KotzeMore LessConstraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions, especially translation studies and world Englishes, leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored, both conceptually and empirically.
The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties, with a focus on written language, a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings, which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.
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Elementary Predicates and Related Categories
Author(s): Ludovico FrancoThis book offers a fresh perspective on how natural languages encode grammatical relations, by delving into the interplay between oblique cases, adpositions, serial verbs, and applicatives. This book reveals, through a series of case studies, the pervasive role of the 'inclusion' relator across diverse linguistic contexts. Departing from traditional views that obliques lack interpretive content, this work presents a unified conceptual framework of relations in grammar. Drawing on minimalist principles, the book posits a preeminence of the lexicon in syntactic projection, shedding light on the underlying ontology of language. By exploring cross-categorial variation and syncretism, it outlines an inventory of primitives shaping morpho-syntactic derivations.
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Exploring the Sociopragmatics of Online Humor
Author(s): Villy TsakonaThis monograph explores the diverse sociopragmatic functions and meanings of humorous discourse in various online contexts affecting its use. To this end, an analytical model is proposed which takes into consideration the aspects of context which are relevant to the production and reception of humor, and hence to its sociopragmatic analysis. The model is employed for addressing research questions such as the following: Why may an utterance/text be intended and perceived as humorous by some speakers and fail for others? How and why may speakers attempt to regulate language use through humor? Why and how may the same humorous utterance/text engender diverse and contradictory interpretations? How do speakers create social groups and project social identities through humor? How could the sociopragmatic analysis of humor form the basis for teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework?
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Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness
Author(s): Stefan Th. GriesThis book is an attempt to revisit the main specifically corpus-linguistic statistics/measures the field has been relying on for decades: frequency, dispersion, association, and keyness. The book first discusses the purpose of these measures and how they have been measured. Then, the book makes three main proposals: First, that many measures of dispersion, association, and keyness are too confounded with frequency and how to 'take frequency out of them' to obtain conceptually cleaner and more interpretable measures. Second, that many existing measures can be replaced by the simple information-theoretic measure of the Kullback-Leibler divergence and that it, too, can have frequency 'removed' from it. Third, that corpus linguistics should abandon the tradition of trying to describe its findings with a single number and adopt a tupleization approach instead, where we use several separate dimensions of information for description and interpretation. The book is written in an informal, hands-on style and comes with its own R package featuring functions, example data, and several thousand lines of code exemplifying all applications.
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Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond
Editor(s): Francesco Stella, Lucie Doležalová and Danuta ShanzerMore LessThe textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.
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