Open Access Books (ca. 80 titles)
Collection Contents
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The Sociophonetics of Dublin English
More LessThe Sociophonetics of Dublin English shows how social inequalities and language are connected by the stances speakers take in interaction. It is based on an instrumental phonetic analysis of recorded interviews and broadcasting data and a detailed qualitative account of the same data as well as the socio-cultural context in Ireland. The analysis not only considers macro-social categories but also pragmatic norms and situational, more fluid aspects of communication. Contemporary social meanings and associated phonetic realisations are described and explained as the result of diachronic developments. Since the independence of Ireland local pronunciations have been re-evaluated and realisations connected with the former coloniser have fallen out of use even in formal and powerful domains. This investigation thus highlights the importance of diachronic data to understand contemporary sociolinguistic variation.
This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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The Swedish FrameNet++
More LessLarge computational lexicons are central NLP resources. Swedish FrameNet++ aims to be a versatile full-scale lexical resource for NLP containing many kinds of linguistic information. Although focused on Swedish, this ongoing effort, which includes building a new Swedish framenet and recycling existing lexicons, has offered valuable insights into general aspects of lexical-resource building for NLP, which are discussed in this book: computational and linguistic problems of lexical semantics and lexical typology, the nature of lexical items (words and multiword expressions), achieving interoperability among heterogeneous lexical content, NLP methods for extending and interlinking existing lexicons, and deploying the new resource in practical NLP applications. This book is targeted at everyone with an interest in lexicography, computational lexicography, lexical typology, lexical semantics, linguistics, computational linguistics and related fields. We believe it should be of particular interest to those who are or have been involved in language resource creation, development and evaluation.
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Scientia Media
More LessMolinismus ist heute ein Kapitel Philosophie. Das Thema dieses Buchs ist jedoch nicht die Renaissance der Scientia Media-Hypothese in der modernen angloamerikanischen Religionsphilosophie, sondern ihre scholastische Ausgestaltung in dem auf Molina folgenden Jahrhundert: Ohne den Kalkül mit den möglichen Welten z.B. kein Leibniz mit seinem Optimismus. Die vorliegende Studie bahnt sich den Weg durch die Gnadenstreitigkeiten zur Metaphysik des Faktenwissens. Hier zeigt sich die Grundlagenkrise des Molinismus.
Das molinistische Faktum hat drei Merkmale: Es ist kontingent, es ist Teil einer möglichen Welt, es ist vom Allwissenden notwendig gewußt. Traditionell beruht die Lehre von Gottes Faktenwissen auf dem Dogma vom Vorsprung der göttlichen Willensaktivität. Dieses Dogma ist durch die Scientia Media-Hypothese erschüttert. Worauf beruht es aber dann, daß Gott A vorherweiß, nicht nonA?
Der Streit der Schulrichtungen wird zusätzlich durch eine lateinische Textedition illustriert. Von dem Jesuiten Luke Wadding (1593-1651), dem Autor dieses schwierigen Texts, ist bisher nur bekannt, daß er der Lehrer des Scientia Media-Historikers Gabriel de Henao gewesen ist.
Molinism, formerly an invective, is nowadays a topic of philosophy. This book, however, does not deal with the modern renaissance of Middle Knowledge, rather, it explores its proliferation during the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus shifts from reviewing current trends in Church History to rehearsing the metaphysics that backed up Middle Knowledge.
Fact, in Molinism, is threefold: It could have been otherwise, it belongs to some possible world, it is necessarily known by the Omniscient. Whereas the classical account of God’s foreknowledge rests on its being postvolitional, the Molinist qualification of this account denies that it applies to the counterfactuals. On what else then does it prevolitionally depend that God knows for sure something to happen rather than not to happen?
The Salmantine Treatise on God’s foreknowledge edited here provides some additional piece of evidence of a deep Molinist disagreement. Though the manuscript was ready for print in 1653, this business failed and the manuscript fell into oblivion along with its author. The Jesuit Luke Wadding (1593-1651) belongs to a number of men from Waterford who at a time, when intolerance forced Catholics into large scale emigration, hopefully turned towards Spain. He must not be confounded with his famous namesake, the Franciscan friar, who was his cousin.
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Skyping the Family
More LessThis collection is one of the first in-depth studies of video calling in family and domestic life. It explores the reasons that people themselves provide to explain their video calling, investigates how these reasons make that calling accountable and how, in turn, these reasons come to be things talked about in the calls themselves. The research shows how video calling is part of the currency of contemporary family affection: such calls are not just about keeping in touch, they are a way of loving too; and they are sometimes a way of fighting as well. 'Skyping' or 'Facetiming' might be frequent and can seem mundane – just a question of routine – but what they entail is a measure of important things to families. This makes this collection of interest to anyone concerned with family life and the evolving ways in which technology has a role in it.
Originally published as a special issue of Pragmatics 27:3 (2017).
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Semantic Structure in English
More LessSyntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual structure; since we can express our conceptual thought in many different linguistic ways, we cannot equate conceptual and semantic structures.
The research reported in this book shows semantic structure to be in part hierarchic, fitting the syntax in which it is expressed, and partly a network, fitting the nature of the mind, from which it springs. It is complex enough to provide for the emotive and imaginative dimensions of language, and for shifts of standard meanings in context, and the “rules” that control them.
Showing the full structure of English semantics requires attention to many currently topical issues, and since the underlying theory is fresh, there are fresh implications for them. The most important of those issues is information structure, which is given full treatment, showing its overall structure, and its relation to semantics and the whole grammar of English.
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Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax
More LessÖvdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.
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Stylistic Use of Phraseological Units in Discourse
More LessThis interdisciplinary study presents the cutting-edge state of theoretical and applied research in the fascinating field of phraseology. The author elaborates key terminology and theoretical concepts of phraseology, while challenging some prevailing assumptions. Exploration of phraseological meaning across sentence boundaries is supported by ample textual illustrations of stylistic use ranging from Old English to Modern English. The book contains innovative research in the discourse-level features of phraseological units from a cognitive perspective, along with creative use of phraseological metaphor, metonymy and allusion, multimodal discourse included. The author argues for applied stylistics as a distinct area and the need to raise stylistic awareness among teachers and learners, translators, lexicographers and advertisers. The book offers an extensive glossary of key terms and a comprehensive bibliography. Stylistic Use of Phraseological Units in Discourse is a skilfully revised and extensively expanded new edition of the author’s previously published 'Phraseological Units in Discourse: Towards Applied Stylistics' (2001).
As of March 2017, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. It is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license.
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