Open Access Books
Collection Contents
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Growing up on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea
More LessThis volume deals with the children's socialization on the Trobriands. After a survey of ethnographic studies on childhood, the book zooms in on indigenous ideas of conception and birth-giving, the children's early development, their integration into playgroups, their games and their education within their `own little community' until they reach the age of seven years. During this time children enjoy much autonomy and independence. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum. However, parents use subtle means to raise their children. Educational ideologies are manifest in narratives and in speeches addressed to children. They provide guidelines for their integration into the Trobrianders' "balanced society" which is characterized by cooperation and competition. It does not allow individual accumulation of wealth - surplus property gained has to be redistributed - but it values the fame acquired by individuals in competitive rituals. Fame is not regarded as threatening the balance of their society.
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A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse
More LessDoes gender condition politicians’ discourse strategies in parliament? This is the question we try to answer in A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament. This book, written by experts in the field of discourse analysis, covers key aspects of political discourse such as gender, identity and verbal and nonverbal strategies: intensification, enumerative series, non-literal quotations, pseudo-desemantisation, lexical colloquialisation, emotion, eye contact and time management. It provides a large number of examples from a balanced gender parliament, the Andalusian Parliament, and it focuses mainly on argumentation, since parliamentary discourse is above all argumentative. This book will prove invaluable to students and teachers in the field of discourse analysis, and more specifically of political discourse, and will also be very useful to politicians and anyone interested in communication strategies.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
More LessThis book presents new empirical findings about Germanic heritage varieties spoken in North America: Dutch, German, Pennsylvania Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, West Frisian and Yiddish, and varieties of English spoken both by heritage speakers and in communities after language shift. The volume focuses on three critical issues underlying the notion of ‘heritage language’: acquisition, attrition and change. The book offers theoretically-informed discussions of heritage language processes across phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and the lexicon, in addition to work on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and contact settings. With this, the volume also includes a variety of frameworks and approaches, synchronic and diachronic. Most European Germanic languages share some central linguistic features, such as V2, gender and agreement in the nominal system, and verb inflection. As minority languages faced with a majority language like English, similarities and differences emerge in patterns of variation and change in these heritage languages. These empirical findings shed new light on mechanisms and processes.
This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
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