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Open Access Books (ca. 70 titles)
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69 results
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Children's Cultures after Childhood
Editor(s): Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-GonzálezMore LessChildren’s Cultures after Childhood introduces theoretical concepts from new materialist and posthumanist childhood studies into research on children’s literature, film, and media texts with attention to the entanglements of which they are part. Thirteen chapters by international contributors from diverse disciplinary fields (literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and childhood studies) offer a cross-section of empirical and theoretical approaches sharing an inspiration in the notion of “after childhoods”, proposed by Peter Kraftl, a children’s geographer, to conceptualize theoretical and methodological orientations in research on children’s lives and on past, present, and future childhoods. This interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature and culture studies, education, and childhood studies.
This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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Ditransitives in Germanic Languages
Editor(s): Eva Zehentner, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy CollemanMore LessThis volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family.
This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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The Sociophonetics of Dublin English
Author(s): Marion SchulteThe 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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Esperanto – Lingua Franca and Language Community
Author(s): Sabine Fiedler and Cyril Robert BroschThis book addresses a fascinating topic – a constructed language that has turned from a project into a fully-fledged language used by some of its speakers on a daily basis. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book provides rare and profound insights into the use of Esperanto in a large number of communicative areas. It studies the speakers’ use of code-switching, phraseology and metaphors, techniques they employ to enhance understanding, such as metacommunication and repair strategies, as well as their predilection for humour. The study also contributes to a comparison between the communication in Esperanto and in the language that is now predominantly used as a lingua franca – English – and allows conclusions to be drawn on the question of what a lingua franca is all about.
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Understanding L2 Proficiency
Editor(s): Eun Hee Jeon and Yo In'namiMore LessThis edited volume is a collection of theoretical and empirical overviews of second language (L2) proficiency based on four skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Each skill is reviewed in terms of how it has been conceptualized, measured, and studied over the years in relation to relevant (sub-) constructs of the language skill under discussion. This is followed by meta-analyses of correlation coefficients that examine the relationship between the L2 skill in question and its component variables. Unlike most meta-analyses that have a limited range of variables under investigation, our meta-analyses are much larger in scope to better clarify such relationships. By combining theoretical and empirical approaches, the book is helpful in deepening the understanding of how subcomponents or various variables are related to a particular L2 skill.
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From West to North Frisia
Editor(s): Alastair Walker, Eric Hoekstra, Goffe Jensma, Wendy Vanselow, Willem Visser and Christoph WinterMore LessThis volume contains 25 articles covering a wide array of subjects, reflecting the breadth of scholarship of one of today’s leading experts in the field of Frisian Studies. The articles, written mostly in English and German, encompass a temporal range from Old Frisian to Modern Frisian and a geographical range from West Frisian in the Netherlands to Sater and North Frisian in Germany, and include Low German. Some articles initiate new fields of enquiry, e.g. uncharted areas of dialectology, others give comprehensive reviews of certain domains, e.g. the provenance of Old Frisian law texts, while a third category focusses on specific topics ranging from phonology, grammar and etymology to aspects of Frisian literature and a medieval Frisian ballad.
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Pedagogical Realities of Implementing Task-Based Language Teaching
Author(s): Rosemary Erlam and Constanza TolosaThis book documents how teachers, working in school foreign language learning contexts and teaching beginner learners of languages other than English, learn about and use tasks. It first presents a pedagogically researched account of how teachers learn about, design and evaluate tasks, after being introduced to TBLT during an in-service programme. The authors then go into classrooms to explore ways in which teachers continue to use tasks, as part of their regular ongoing classroom language programmes, following their in-service education. The book documents how the teachers use tasks to open up opportunities for language learning for students and investigates how teachers understand and position tasks and TBLT as relevant and of value to their teaching contexts. The challenges that teachers face in incorporating TBLT into their practice are also explored. The book suggests how the use of the task as a pedagogic tool may contribute to ongoing understanding about TBLT.
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Urban Matters
Editor(s): Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg OberdorferMore LessThe city as a complex socio-cultural structure plays a central role, economically, administratively as well as culturally. Factors such as higher population density, a more expansive infrastructure, and larger social and cultural diversity compared to rural areas have a substantial impact on urban society and urban communication.
Focusing on the latter, the contributions to this volume discuss the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, and attitudes, but also spatial factors including mobility, urbanisation/counterurbanisation, and diffusion processes.
The collected articles provide an update of ‘first wave’ approaches of variationist sociolinguistics, but also establish a connection to ‘third wave’ research for readers from a broad range of fields, especially sociolinguistics, variationist linguistics, and dialectology. The book presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas and a wealth of new findings but also serves as a reference work, combining theoretical discussions with results from recent empirical studies.
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The Swedish FrameNet++
Editor(s): Dana Dannélls, Lars Borin and Karin Friberg HeppinMore 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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Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Editor(s): Anne Mucha, Jutta M. Hartmann and Beata TrawińskiMore LessControl, typically defined as a specific referential dependency between the null-subject of a non-finite embedded clause and a co-dependent of the matrix predicate, has been subject to extensive research in the last 50 years. While there is a broad consensus that a distinction between Obligatory Control (OC), Non-Obligatory Control (NOC) and No Control (NC) is useful and necessary to cover the range of relevant empirical phenomena, there is still less agreement regarding their proper analyses. In light of this ongoing discussion, the articles collected in this volume provide a cross-linguistic perspective on central questions in the study of control, with a focus on non-canonical control phenomena. This includes cases which show NOC or NC in complement clauses or OC in adjunct clauses, cases in which the controlled subject is not in an infinitival clause, or in which there is no unique controller in OC (i.e. partial control, split control, or other types of controllers). Based on empirical generalizations from a wide range of languages, this volume provides insights into cross-linguistic variation in the interplay of different components of control such as the properties of the constituent hosting the controlled subject, the syntactic and lexical properties of the matrix predicate as well as restrictions on the controller, thereby furthering our empirical and theoretical understanding of control in grammar.
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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII
Editor(s): Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco KnooihuizenMore LessThis volume contains a selection of papers from the 10th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), which was organized by the Fryske Akademy and held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands) in June 2019. The editors have selected thirteen papers on a wide range of language varieties, geographically ranging from Dutch-Frisian contact varieties in Leeuwarden to English in Sydney, Australia. The selection includes traditional quantitative and qualitative approaches to different types of linguistic variables, as well as state-of-the-art techniques for the analysis of speech sounds, new dialectometrical methods, covariation analysis, and a range of statistical methods. The papers are based on data from traditional sources such as sociolinguistic interviews, speech corpora and newspapers, but also on hip hop lyrics, historical private letters and administrative documents, as well as re-analyses of dialect atlas data and older dialect recordings. The reader will enjoy the vibrant diversity of language variation studies presented in this volume.
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East and West of The Pentacrest
Editor(s): Timothy Gupton and Elizabeth GielauMore LessThis book is a collection of contemporary essays and squibs exploring the mental representation of Spanish and other languages in the Romance family. Although largely formal in orientation, they incorporate experimental and corpus data to inform questions of synchronic and diachronic importance. As a whole, these contributions explore two areas of particular interest to linguistic theorizing. The first is linguistic interfaces with chapters on syntax-information structure, syntax-prosody, syntax-semantics, and lexicon-phonology. The second consists of explorations of noun phrases of all sizes—from clitics to nominalized clauses. The results and conclusions of these studies encourage researchers to continue to explore individual languages in particular in order to gain insight on human language in general. This edited volume in honor of Dr. Paula Kempchinsky is reflective of the diversity of approaches that inspired her teaching, research, and mentoring for over thirty years at the University of Iowa and beyond.
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Scientia Media
Author(s): Sven K. KnebelMolinismus 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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Grammatical and Sociolinguistic Aspects of Ethiopian Languages
Editor(s): Derib Ado, Almaz Wasse Gelagay and Janne Bondi JohannessenMore LessThe focus of this unique publication is on Ethiopian languages and linguistics. Not only major languages such as Amharic and Oromo receive attention, but also lesser studied ones like Sezo and Nuer are dealt with. The Gurage languages, that often present a descriptive and sociolinguistic puzzle to researchers, have received ample coverage. And for the first time in the history of Ethiopian linguistics, two chapters are dedicated to descriptive studies of Ethiopian Sign Language, as well as two studies on acoustic phonetics. Topics range over a wide spectrum of issues covering the lexicon, sociolinguistics, socio-cultural aspects and micro-linguistic studies on the phonology, morphology and syntax of Ethiopian languages.
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Literary Translation in Periodicals
Editor(s): Laura Fólica, Diana Roig-Sanz and Stefania CaristiaMore LessWhile translation history, literary translation, and periodical publications have been extensively analyzed within the fields of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and Communication Sciences, the relationship between these three topics remains underexplored. Literary Translation in Periodicals argues that there is a pressing need for an analytical focus on translation in periodicals, a collaborative network of researchers, and a transnational and interdisciplinary approach. The book pursues two goals: (1) to highlight the innovative theoretical and methodological issues intrinsic to analyzing literary translation in periodical publications on a small and large scale, and (2) to contribute to a developing field by providing several case studies on translation in periodicals over a wide range of areas and periods (Europe, Latin America, and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries) that go beyond the more traditional focus on national and European periodicals and translations. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, as well as hermeneutical and sociological approaches, this book reviews conceptual and methodological tools and proposes innovative techniques, such as social network analysis, big data, and large-scale analysis, for tracing the history and evolution of literary translation in periodical publications.
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How Metaphors Guide, Teach and Popularize Science
Editor(s): Anke Beger and Thomas H. SmithMore LessMetaphors are essential to scientists themselves and strongly influence science communication. Through careful analyses of metaphors actually used in science texts, recordings, and videos, this book explores the essential functions of conceptual metaphor in the conduct of science, teaching of science, and how scientific ideas are promoted and popularized. With an accessible introduction to theory and method this book prepares scientists, science teachers, and science writers to take advantage of recent shifts in metaphor theories and methods. Metaphor specialists will find theoretical issues explored in studies of bacteriology, cell reproduction, marine biology, physics, brain function and social psychology. We see the degree of conscious or intentional use of metaphor in shaping our conceptual systems and constraining inferences. Metaphor sources include social structure, embodied experience, abstract or mathematical formulations. The results are sometimes innovative hypotheses and robust conclusions; other times pedagogically useful, if inaccurate, stepping stones or, at worst, misleading fictions.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Approaches to Hungarian
Editor(s): Veronika Hegedűs and Irene VogelMore LessThis volume contains selected papers from the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (Budapest, 2017).The contributions address current issues in Hungarian linguistics, including comparisons with other languages (e.g., English, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish).
Specifically, the phonetics and phonology papers present experimental and corpus studies of /h/ voicing, the acoustics of Hungarian word stress, and vowel harmony in harmonically mixed stems. The papers on syntax and semantics discuss object agreement and its locality restrictions, equative markers in German and Hungarian diachronically and synchronically, anaphoric possessor strategies and definite article distribution, and the semantics of various aspectual adverbs. Experimental studies of information structure examine the linear placement of textually given topical constituents post-verbally, exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English and Hungarian, and contextual factors licensing Hungarian structural focus.
The broad range of topics ensures that this volume will interest scholars of Hungarian and theoretical linguists more generally.
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“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition
Author(s): Yanying LuThis book explores socio-cultural meanings of ‘self’ in the Chinese language through analysing a range of conversations among Chinese immigrants to Australia qualitatively on the topics of individuality, social relationships and collective identity. If language, culture and cognition are major roads, this book is the junction that unites them by arguing that selfhood occurs at their interface. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to unpack manifestations and perceptions of ‘self’ in the contemporary Chinese diaspora discourse from the perspectives of Sociolinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and the newly developed Cultural Linguistics. This book not only discusses empirical and theoretical issues on the conceptualisation and communication of social identity in a cross-cultural context, it also reveals how traditional and modern ideas in Chinese culture are interacting with those of other world cultures. Considering the power of language, enduring and emerging beliefs and stances that permeate these speakers’ views on their social being and outlooks on life impart their significance in cross-cultural communication and pragmatics.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Imagining the Peoples of Europe
Editor(s): Jan Zienkowski and Ruth BreezeMore LessThe political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Skyping the Family
Editor(s): Richard Harper, Rod Watson and Christian LicoppeMore 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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Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
Editor(s): Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A. Sanchez-Azanza and Daniel Adrover-RoigMore LessThis book presents a range of ongoing studies on atypical language development in Romance languages. Despite the steady increase in the number of studies on typical language development, there is still little research about atypical language development, especially in Romance languages. This book covers four main conditions causing atypical language development. Part I explores the linguistic and communicative characteristics of preterm children learning Romance languages. The focus of Part II centers on children with Specific Language Impairment. Hearing Loss in Part III is another relevant factor leading to atypical language development. The final part IV zeroes in on genetic syndromes coupled to cognitive impairment with special attention to language development. This book presents a much needed overview of the most recent findings in all relevant fields dealing with atypical language development in children speaking Romance languages.
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Migration and Media
Editor(s): Lorella Viola and Andreas MusolffMore LessThe socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Language Planning as Nation Building
Author(s): Gijsbert RuttenThe decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The linguistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers a unique example. After the rise of the ideology from the 1750s onwards, the new discourse of one language–one nation was swiftly transformed into concrete top-down policies aimed at the dissemination of the newly devised standard language across the entire population of the newly established Dutch nation-state. Thus, the Dutch case offers an exciting perspective on the concomitant rise of cultural nationalism, national language planning and standard language ideology.
This study offers a comprehensive yet detailed analysis of these phenomena by focussing on the ideology underpinning the new language policy, the institutionalisation of this ideology in metalinguistic discourse, the implementation of the policy in education, and the effects of the policy on actual language use.
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The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil
Editor(s): Laura Álvarez López, Perpétua Gonçalves and Juanito Ornelas de AvelarMore LessThe Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil is the first publication in English to offer studies on a whole set of varieties of Portuguese in Africa as well as Brazilian Portuguese. Authored by specialists on varieties of Portuguese in Africa and Brazil, the eleven chapters and the epilogue promote a dialogue between researchers interested in their genesis, sociohistories and linguistic properties. Most chapters directly address the idea of a continuum of Portuguese derived from parallel sociohistorical and linguistic factors in Africa and Brazil, due to the colonial expansion of the language to new multilingual settings. The volume contributes to the understanding of structural properties that are often shared by several varieties in this continuum, and describes the various situations and domains of language use as well as sociocultural contexts where they have emerged and where they are being used.
As of 26 July 2021, the ebook edition is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages
Author(s): R.D. FulkFulk’s Comparative Grammar offers an overview of and bibliographical guide to the study of the phonology and the inflectional morphology of the earliest Germanic languages, with particular attention to Gothic, Old Norse / Icelandic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German, along with some attention to the more sparsely attested languages. The sounds and inflections of the oldest Germanic languages are compared, with a view to reconstructing the forms they took in Proto-Germanic and comparing those reconstructed forms with what is known of the Indo-European protolanguage. Students will find the book an informative introduction and a bibliographically instructive point of departure for intensive research in the numerous issues that remain profoundly contested in early Germanic language history.
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Patterns of Change in 18th-century English
Editor(s): Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin and Tanja SäilyMore LessEighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal -s and the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal.
The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus, and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1800. Aggregate findings are balanced by analysing individuals and their varying participation in these processes. The final chapter places these results in a wider context and considers them in relation to past sociolinguistic work.
One of the major findings of the studies is that in most cases the overall pace of change was slow. Factors retarding change include speaker evaluation and repurposing outgoing features, in particular, for certain styles and registers.
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Persuasion in Public Discourse
Editor(s): Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun LuMore LessThis book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar, facework and rapport management, classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing, conceptual metaphor and blending, mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches, news reporting, and advertising, the book also studies texts that examine book reviews, medieval medical recipes, public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts, pragmaticians and cognitive linguists, this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists, semioticians, historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines.
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The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline
Editor(s): Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria HernándezMore LessThis volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human identity, each of which can be thought of as an aggregative abstraction with its own complexities: personal identity, group identity and collective identity. The contributions pay special attention to the interplay between the public and private dimensions of the interactions and audiences, as well as the potential impact of social and technical affordances of different communicative settings and online and offline modes of identity construction. The volume is aimed at all researchers concerned with the complex notion of identity, both in linguistics and in neighbouring disciplines.
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Constructicography
Editor(s): Benjamin Lyngfelt, Lars Borin, Kyoko Ohara and Tiago Timponi TorrentMore LessIn constructionist theory, a constructicon is an inventory of constructions making up the full set of linguistic units in a language. In applied practice, it is a set of construction descriptions – a “dictionary of constructions”. The development of constructicons in the latter sense typically means combining principles of both construction grammar and lexicography, and is probably best characterized as a blend between the two traditions. We call this blend constructicography.
The present volume is a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field of constructicography. After a general introduction follow six chapters presenting constructicon projects for English, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish, respectively, often in relation to a framenet of the language. In addition, there is a chapter addressing the interplay between linguistics and language technology in constructicon development, and a final chapter exploring the prospects for interlingual constructicography.
This is the first major publication devoted to constructicon development and it should be particularly relevant for those interested in construction grammar, frame semantics, lexicography, the relation between grammar and lexicon, or linguistically informed language technology.
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Arabic in Contact
Editor(s): Stefano Manfredi and Mauro ToscoMore LessThe present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who address a variety of topics related to contact-induced change, the emergence of contact languages, codeswitching, as well as language ideologies in contact situations. It offers insights from different theoretical approaches in connection with research fields such as descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and language acquisition. It provides the general linguistic public with an updated, cutting edge overview and appreciation of themes and problems in Arabic linguistics and sociolinguists alike.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Growing up on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea
Author(s): Barbara Senft and Gunter SenftThis 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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Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Editor(s): Martin Hummel and Salvador ValeraMore LessWithin the current discussion on grammatical interfaces, the word-classes of adjective and adverb are of particular interest because they appear to be separated or joined in manifold ways at the level of word-class or syntax, with morphology playing a prominent role, especially in Romance. The volume provides typological and theoretical insights into the common or different usage of adjectives and adverbs in Romance. Diachronic change is discussed alongside with synchronic variation and the representation in grammar. The discussion turns out to be controversial, calling into question traditional assumptions such as the dogma of the invariability and the categorial status of the adverb.
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Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Editor(s): Martine Robbeets and Alexander SavelyevMore LessWhy do some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume, their proposal is reassessed by linguists, investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut, Quechua, Aymara, Bantu, Indo-European, Transeurasian, Turkic, Japano-Koreanic, Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea, that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal, even if subsistence played a role in their expansion.
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The Dawn of Dutch
Author(s): Michiel de VaanThe Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1,000 years. Like the landscape, the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland, an early form of Frisian was spoken until, very roughly, 1100, and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years, but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology, in all its geographic and diachronic variation, and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end, the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.
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Language and Slavery
Author(s): Jacques ArendsEditor(s): Crit CremersMore LessThis posthumous work by Jacques Arends offers new insights into the emergence of the creole languages of Suriname including Sranantongo or Suriname Plantation Creole, Ndyuka, and Saramaccan, and the sociohistorical context in which they developed. Drawing on a wealth of sources including little known historical texts, the author points out the relevance of European settlements prior to colonization by the English in 1651 and concludes that the formation of the Surinamese creoles goes back further than generally assumed. He provides an all-encompassing sociolinguistic overview of the colony up to the mid-19th century and shows how ethnicity, language attitude, religion and location had an effect on which languages were spoken by whom. The author discusses creole data gleaned from the earliest sources and interprets the attested variation. The book is completed by annotated textual data, both oral and written and representing different genres and stages of the Surinamese creoles. It will be of interest to linguists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and anyone interested in Suriname.
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Imdeduya
Author(s): Gunter SenftThis volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea.
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Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches
Editor(s): Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. SippolaMore LessThis book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.
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A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse
Editor(s): Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez and Gloria Álvarez-BenitoMore 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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Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger
Editor(s): Luna Filipović and Martin PützMore LessThis peer-reviewed collection brings together the latest research on language endangerment and language rights. It creates a vibrant, interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the most pertinent and urgent topics central to vitality and equality of languages in today’s globalised world. The novelty of the volume lies in the multifaceted view on the variety of dangers that languages face today, such as extinction through dwindling speaker populations and lack of adequate preservation policies or inequality in different social contexts (e.g. access to justice, education and research resources). There are examples of both loss and survival, and discussion of multiple factors that condition these two different outcomes. We pose and answer difficult questions such as whether forced interventions in preventing loss are always warranted or indeed viable. The emerging shared perspective is that of hope to inspire action towards improving the position of different languages and their speakers through research of this kind.
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Developing, Modelling and Assessing Second Languages
Editor(s): Jörg-U. Keßler, Anke Lenzing and Mathias LiebnerMore LessThis edited volume brings together the work of a number of researchers working in the framework of Processability Theory (PT), a psycholinguistic theory of second language acquisition (SLA) (Pienemann 1998; 2005). The aim of the volume is two-fold: It engages with current issues in both theory development and theory application and focuses on theoretical developments within the framework of PT as well as issues related to second language teaching and assessment. In coordinating approaches to addressing both theoretical and applied aspects of SLA, this volume aims at bridging the gap between theory and practice. It also reflects the richness of debate within the field of PT-based research. The volume is intended for postgraduate students, SLA researchers as well as language teachers.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Language-Learner Computer Interactions
Editor(s): Catherine Caws and Marie-Josée HamelMore LessThis book focuses on learner-computer interactions (LCI) in second language learning environments drawing largely on sociocultural theories of language development. It brings together a rich and varied range of theoretical discussions and applications in order to illustrate the way in which LCI can enrich our comprehension of technology-mediated communication, hence enhancing learners’ digital literacy skills. The book is based on the premise that, in order to fully understand the nature of language and literacy development in digital spaces, researchers and practitioners in linguistics, sciences and engineering need to borrow from each others’ theoretical and practical toolkits. In light of this premise, themes include such aspects as educational ergonomics, affordances, complex systems learning, learner personas and corpora, while also describing such data collecting tools as video screen capture devices, eye-tracking or intelligent learning tutoring systems. The book should be of interest to applied linguists working in CALL, language educators and professionals working in education, as well as computer scientists and engineers wanting to expand their work into the analysis of human/learner interactions with technology communication devices with a view to improving or (re)developing learning and communication instruments.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Cognition, Language and Aging
Editor(s): Heather Harris WrightMore LessAge-related changes in cognitive and language functions have been extensively researched over the past half-century. The older adult represents a unique population for studying cognition and language because of the many challenges that are presented with investigating this population, including individual differences in education, life experiences, health issues, social identity, as well as gender. The purpose of this book is to provide an advanced text that considers these unique challenges and assembles in one source current information regarding (a) language in the aging population and (b) current theories accounting for age-related changes in language function. A thoughtful and comprehensive review of current research spanning different disciplines that study aging will achieve this purpose. Such disciplines include linguistics, psychology, sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, and communication sciences.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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New Insights in the History of Interpreting
Editor(s): Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri-JalónMore LessWho mediated intercultural exchanges in 9th-century East Asia or in early voyages to the Americas? Did the Soviets or the Americans invent simultaneous interpreting equipment? How did the US government train its first Chinese interpreters? Why is it that Taiwanese interpreters were executed for Japanese war crimes? Bringing together papers from an international symposium held at Rikkyo University in 2014 along with two select pieces, this volume pursues such questions in an eclectic exploration of the practice of interpreting, the recruitment of interpreters, and the challenges interpreters have faced in diplomacy, colonization, religion, war, and occupation. It also introduces innovative use of photography, artifacts, personal journals, and fiction as tools for the historical study of interpreters and interpreting. Targeted at practitioners, scholars, and students of interpreting, translation, and history, the new insights presented in the ten original articles aim to spark discussion and research on the vital roles interpreters have played in intercultural communication through history.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Afro-Peruvian Spanish
Author(s): Sandro SessaregoThe present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.
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Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
Editor(s): Janne Bondi Johannessen and Joseph C. SalmonsMore 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.
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Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea
Author(s): Gunter SenftThis volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.
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Writing(s) at the Crossroads
Editor(s): Georgeta CislaruMore LessThis volume aims at contributing to an interpretive approach to writing and its dynamics. It offers a general scope on the process-product interface by multiplying the points of view on both the process and the product and their links. The book presents new findings and perspectives in the study of language and writing, both theoretical and methodological (e.g. dual process models of writing, pragmatics of writing, linguistic analysis of psycholinguistic units such as bursts of production). It also presents new tools for a longitudinal approach to the writing steps, key-stroke logging with integrated linguistic modules, and textometric analysis of written texts. The volume is composed of five sections that highlight different approaches to writing from the viewpoint of multiple disciplines: Anthropology, Cognitive Psycholinguistics, Communication Studies, Didactics (Applied Linguistics), Discourse Analysis, Literacy, Sociolinguistics and Text Genetics. This book will be relevant for scholars and students interested in writing, text analysis, literacy, learning and teaching.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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The Habsburg Monarchy's Many-Languaged Soul
Author(s): Michaela WolfIn the years between 1848 and 1918, the Habsburg Empire was an intensely pluricultural space that brought together numerous “nationalities” under constantly changing – and contested – linguistic regimes. The multifaceted forms of translation and interpreting, marked by national struggles and extensive multilingualism, played a crucial role in constructing cultures within the Habsburg space. This book traces translation and interpreting practices in the Empire’s administration, courts and diplomatic service, and takes account of the “habitualized” translation carried out in everyday life. It then details the flows of translation among the Habsburg crownlands and between these and other European languages, with a special focus on Italian–German exchange. Applying a broad concept of “cultural translation” and working with sociological tools, the book addresses the mechanisms by which translation and interpreting constructs cultures, and delineates a model of the Habsburg Monarchy’s “pluricultural space of communication” that is also applicable to other multilingual settings.
Published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
The e-book edition of this title is available as Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND license.
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Elements of Structural Syntax
Author(s): Lucien TesnièreThis volume appears now finally in English, sixty years after the death of its author, Lucien Tesnière. It has been translated from the French original into German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and now at long last into English as well. The volume contains a comprehensive approach to the syntax of natural languages, an approach that is foundational for an entire stream in the modern study of syntax and grammar. This stream is known today as dependency grammar (DG). Drawing examples from dozens of languages, many of which he was proficient in, Tesnière presents insightful analyses of numerous phenomena of syntax. Among the highlights are the concepts of valency and head-initial vs. head-final languages. These concepts are now taken for granted by most modern theories of syntax, even by phrase structure grammars, which represent, in a sense, the opposite sort of approach to syntax from what Tesnière was advocating.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax
Editor(s): Kristine Bentzen, Henrik Rosenkvist and Janne Bondi JohannessenMore 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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Letters as Loot
Author(s): Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der WalThe study of letter writing is at the heart of the historical-sociolinguistic enterprise. Private letters, in particular, offer an unprecedented view on language history. This book presents an in-depth study of the language of letters focussing on a unique collection of Dutch private letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which comprises letters from the lower, middle and upper ranks, written by men as well as women.
The book discusses the key issues of formulaic language and the degree of orality of private letters, it questions the importance of letter-writing manuals, and reveals remarkable patterns of social, regional and gender variation in a wide range of linguistic features. Arguing for writing experience as an important factor in historical linguistics generally, the book offers numerous new perspectives on the history of Dutch.
The monograph is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, Germanic linguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.
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Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China
Editor(s): Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul ChiltonMore LessAfter three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and doing things, has become an indispensable instrument for the authority to manage a fluid, increasingly fragmented, but highly dynamic and yet fragile society. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences. In particular, the volume focuses on the interplay of politics and media. The book’s intended readership is academics and students of Chinese studies, language and discourse, and media and communication studies.
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The Linguistics of Newswriting
Author(s): Daniel PerrinThe Linguistics of Newswriting focuses on text production in journalistic media as both a socially relevant field of language use and as a strategic field of applied linguistics. The book discusses and paves the way for scientific projects in the emerging field of linguistics of newswriting. From empirical micro and theoretical macro perspectives, strategies and practices of research development and knowledge transformation are discussed. Thus, the book is addressed to researchers, teachers and coaches interested in the linguistics of professional writing in general and newswriting in particular. Together with the training materials provided on the internet www.news-writing.net, the book will also be useful to anyone who wants to become a more “discerning consumer" (Perry, 2005) or a more reflective producer of language in the media.
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Culinary Linguistics
Editor(s): Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius and Susanne LeyMore LessLanguage and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume on Culinary Linguistics contains an introduction to the study of food and an extensive overview of the literature focusing on its role in interplay with language. It is the only publication fathoming the field of food and food-related studies from a linguistic perspective. The research articles assembled here encompass a number of linguistic fields, ranging from historical and ethnographic approaches to literary studies, the teaching of English as a foreign language, psycholinguistics, and the study of computer-mediated communication, making this volume compulsory reading for anyone interested in genres of food discourse and the linguistic connection between food and culture.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Organic Creativity and the Physics Within
Author(s): Mea M.M. LowcreEditor(s): Johan F. HoornMore LessA group of international top scientists from a diversity of disciplines sat together for five days with artists, designers, and entrepreneurs to develop a trans-disciplinary theory of creativity. Organic Creativity and the Physics Within assumes that creativity is a quality of nature visible in physics as well as in psychology, its basis being combinatorics, coincidence, complementarity, and fractal emergence. The authors prompt a mechanism cutting through particle physics, perception, psychology, and culminating into playfulness. Organic Creativity and the Physics Within connects us to the universality of nature's creativeness.
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(In)Appropriate Online Behavior
Author(s): Jenny ArendholzThis descriptive and comprehensive study on the discursive struggle over interpersonal relations in online message boards is located at the fascinating interface of pragmatics and computer-mediated discourse – a research area which has so far not attracted much scientific interest. It sets out to shed light on the question how interpersonal relations are established, managed and negotiated in online message boards by giving a valid overview of the entire panoply of interpersonal relations (and their interrelations), including both positively and negatively marked behavior. With the first part of the book providing an in-depth discussion and refinement of the pivotal theoretical positions of both fields of research, students as well as professionals are (re-)acquainted with the subject at hand. Thus supplying a framework for the ensuing case study, the empirical part displays the results of the analysis of 50 threads (ca. 300,000 words) of a popular British message board.
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Post-Socialist Translation Practices
Author(s): Nike K. PokornThe book Post-Socialist Translation Practices explores how Communism and Socialism, through their hegemonic pressure, found expression in translation practice from the moment of Socialist revolution to the present day. Based on extensive archival research in the archives of the Communist Party and on the interviews with translators and editors of the period the book attempts to outline the typical and defining features of the Socialist translatorial behaviour by re-reading more than 200 translations of children's literature and juvenile fiction published in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Despite the variety of different forms of censorship that the translators in all Socialist states were subject to, the book argues that Socialist translation in different cultural and linguistic environments, especially where the Soviet model tried to impose itself, purged the translated texts of the same or similar elements, in particular of the religious presence. The book also traces how ideologically manipulated translations are still uncritically reprinted and widely circulated today.
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Moving Ourselves, Moving Others
Editor(s): Ad Foolen, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Timothy P. Racine and Jordan ZlatevMore LessThe close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role of (e)motion in this context has remained something of a blind spot. The present book rectifies this gap by gathering contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists and linguists working in the area. Framed by an introducing prologue and a summarizing epilogue (written by Colwyn Trevarthen, who brought the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity to a wider audience some 30 years ago) the volume elaborates a dynamical, active view of emotion, along with an affect-laden view of motion – and explores their significance for consciousness, intersubjectivity, and language. As such, it contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind science, transcending hitherto dominant computationalist and cognitivist approaches.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Connecting Grammaticalisation
Author(s): Jens Nørgård-Sørensen, Lars Heltoft and Lene SchøslerThis monograph presents a view on grammaticalisation radically different from standard views centering around the cline of grammaticality. Grammar is seen as a complex sign system, and, as a consequence, grammatical change always comprises semantic change. What unites morphology, topology (word order), constructional syntax and other grammatical subsystems is their paradigmatic organisation. The traditional concept of an inflexional paradigm is generalised as the structuring principle of grammar. Grammatical change involves paradigmatic restructuring, and in the process of grammatical change morphological, topological and constructional paradigms often connect to form complex paradigms. The book introduces the concept of connecting grammaticalisation to describe the formation, restructuring and dismantling of such complex paradigms. Drawing primarily on data from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, the book offers both a broad general discussion of theoretical issues (part one) and three case studies (part two).
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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The Tuma Underworld of Love
Author(s): Gunter SenftThe Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his articles "Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands" and "Myth in Primitive Psychology". There he also presented the Trobrianders' belief that a "baloma" can be reborn; he claimed that Trobrianders are unaware of the father's role as genitor. This volume presents a critical review of Malinowski's ethnography of Trobriand eschatology – finally settling the "virgin birth" controversy. It also documents the ritualized and highly poetic "wosi milamala" – the harvest festival songs. They are sung in an archaic variety of Kilivila called "biga baloma" – the baloma language. Malinowski briefly refers to these songs but does not mention that they codify many aspects of Trobriand eschatology. The songs are still sung at specific occasions; however, they are now moribund. With these songs Trobriand eschatology will vanish.
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Cyberpragmatics
Author(s): Francisco YusCyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It addresses a whole range of interactions that can be found on the Net: the web page, chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, 3D virtual worlds, blogs, videoconference, e-mail, Twitter, etc. Of special interest is the role of intentions and the quality of interpretations when these Internet-mediated interactions take place, which is often affected by the textual properties of the medium. The book also analyses the pragmatic implications of transferring offline discourses (e.g. printed paper, advertisements) to the screen-framed space of the Net. And although the main framework is cognitive pragmatics, the book also draws from other theories and models in order to build up a better picture of what really happens when people communicate on the Net. This book will interest analysts doing research on computer-mediated communication, university students and researchers undergoing post-graduate courses or writing a PhD thesis.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Integrating Gestures
Editor(s): Gale Stam and Mika IshinoMore LessGestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of gesture studies has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, communication, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, primatology, psychology, robotics, sociology and semiotics. This volume presents an overview of the depth and breadth of current research in gesture. Its focus is on the interdisciplinary nature of gesture. The twenty-six chapters included in the volume are divided into six sections or themes: the nature and functions of gesture, first language development and gesture, second language effects on gesture, gesture in the classroom and in problem solving, gesture aspects of discourse and interaction, and gestural analysis of music and dance.
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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“And he knew our language”
Author(s): Marcus TomalinThis ambitious and ground-breaking book examines the linguistic studies produced by missionaries based on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America (and particularly Haida Gwaii) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of unpublished archival materials, the author demonstrates that the missionaries were responsible for introducing many innovative and insightful grammatical analyses. Rather than merely adopting Graeco-Roman models, they drew extensively upon studies of non-European languages, and a careful exploration of their scripture translations reveal the origins of the Haida sociolect that emerged as a result of the missionary activity. The complex interactions between the missionaries and anthropologists are also discussed, and it is shown that the former sometimes anticipated linguistic analyses that are now incorrectly attributed to the latter. Since this book draws upon recent work in theoretical linguistics, religious history, translation studies, and anthropology, it emphasises the unavoidably interdisciplinary nature of Missionary Linguistics research.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Stylistic Use of Phraseological Units in Discourse
Author(s): Anita NaciscioneThis 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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Chomskyan (R)evolutions
Editor(s): Douglas A. KibbeeMore LessIt is not unusual for contemporary linguists to claim that “Modern Linguistics began in 1957” (with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. Some of the essays in Chomskyan (R)evolutions examine the sources, the nature and the extent of the theoretical changes Chomsky introduced in the 1950s. Other contributions explore the key concepts and disciplinary alliances that have evolved considerably over the past sixty years, such as the meanings given for “Universal Grammar”, the relationship of Chomskyan linguistics to other disciplines (Cognitive Science, Psychology, Evolutionary Biology), and the interactions between mainstream Chomskyan linguistics and other linguistic theories active in the late 20th century: Functionalism, Generative Semantics and Relational Grammar. The broad understanding of the recent history of linguistics points the way towards new directions and methods that linguistics can pursue in the future.
As of January 2020, this e-book is freely accessible, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Loan Phonology
Editor(s): Andrea Calabrese and W. Leo WetzelsMore LessFor many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language’s sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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Anthropology of Color
Editor(s): Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei and Don DedrickMore LessThe field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color.
Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.
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Challenging the Traditional Axioms
Author(s): Nike K. PokornTranslation into a non-mother tongue or inverse translation, especially of literary texts, has always been frowned upon within Translation Studies in Western cultures and regarded by literary scholars and linguists as an activity of dubious worth, doomed to fail. The study, which received an award from EST in 2001, sets out to challenge the established view and to critically question some of the axiomatic assumptions of Western theorists. Its challenge is supported by extensive empirical research involving reader response to translations of specific literary texts. The conclusion reached is that the quality of the translation, its fluency and acceptability in the target language environment depend primarily on the as yet undetermined individual abilities of the particular translator, his/her translation strategy and knowledge of the source and target cultures, and not on his/her mother tongue or the direction in which s/he is translating.
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English Language Learning and Technology
Author(s): Carol A. ChapelleThis book explores implications for applied linguistics of recent developments in technologies used in second language teaching and assessment, language analysis, and language use. Focusing primarily on English language learning, the book identifies significant areas of interplay between technology and applied linguistics, and it explores current perspectives on perennial questions such as how theory and research on second language acquisition can help to inform technology-based language learning practices, how the multifaceted learning accomplished through technology can be evaluated, and how theoretical perspectives can offer insight on data obtained from research on interaction with and through technology. The book illustrates how the interplay between technology and applied linguistics can amplify and expand applied linguists’ understanding of fundamental issues in the field. Through discussion of computer-assisted approaches for investigating second language learning tasks and assessment, it illustrates how technology can be used as a tool for applied linguistics research.
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