Search results for ""john benjamins publishing co""

The 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.

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This volume brings together a selection of revised papers, originally presented at ICHoLS IX (São Paulo/Campinas). The papers in the first section deal with studies ranging from the Latin model in post-Renaissance grammars to new scientific propositions at the turn of the 19th century; the second part carries articles devoted to a variety of topics in 19th and 20th century linguistics; and in the third section are united papers based on plenary presentations, ranging from ancient Greek reflections upon language to developments in Brazilian linguistics beginning with the implantation of structuralist work by Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) in the 1960s. In the concluding contribution, a survey of advances in the history of the language sciences is offered.

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Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural, generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers’ and non-native writers’ problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.

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Translation as a profession provides an in-depth analysis of the translating profession and the translation industry. The book starts with a presentation of the diversity of translations and an overview of the translation-localisation process. The second section describes the translation profession and the translators’ markets. The third section considers the process of ‘becoming’ a translator, from the moment people find out whether they have the required qualities to the moment when they set up shop or find a job, with special emphasis on how to find and hold on to clients, avoiding basic mistakes. The fourth section concentrates on the vital professional issues of costs, rates, deadlines, time to market, productivity, ethics, standards, qualification, certification, and professional recognition. The fifth section is devoted to the developments that have provoked ongoing changes in the profession and industry, such as ICT, and the impact of industrialisation, internationalisation, and globalisation. The final section is devoted to the major issues involved in translator training. A glossary is provided, together with a list of Websites for further browsing.

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The last decade has seen a growing body of research investigating various aspects of L2 learners’ performance of tasks. This book focuses on one task implementation variable: planning. It considers theories of how opportunities to plan a task affect performance and tests claims derived from these theories in a series of empirical studies. The book examines different types of planning (i.e. task rehearsal, pre-task planning and within-task planning), addressing both what learners do when they plan and the effects of the different types of planning on L2 production. The choice of planning as the variable for investigation in this book is motivated both by its importance for current theorizing about L2 acquisition (in particular with regard to cognitive theories that view acquisition in terms of information processing) and its utility to language teachers and language testers, for unlike many other constructs in SLA ‘planning’ lends itself to external manipulation. The study of planning, then, provides a suitable forum for demonstrating the interconnectedness of theory, research and pedagogy in SLA.

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English Sentence Constructions departs from a usage-based theoretical perspective in which all language units -- which we refer to as constructions -- have both a meaning and form, and context is all-important in determining the function and form of these constructions. As a starting-level module, English Sentence Constructions guides students of English or Language at tertiary level through different levels of analysis at the sentence, clause, phrase, and word level. The book starts with an explanation of different sentence types and structures (Chapters 1 and 2), zooms in on the verb phrase as the central component of any sentence (in Chapters 3 and 4), before zooming in even closer, discussing word classes (Chapter 5) and phrases (Chapter 6). The next two chapters explicate the intricacies of sentence constituents that function as clauses (Chapter 7) and aid students in integrating all chapters by discussing sentence analysis at all levels (Chapter 8). The last chapter (Chapter 9) shows how knowledge about sentence constructions can be applied to effective writing in English. English Sentence Constructions can be used in teacher-led modules, but the many exercises in each chapter, the clearly worked out answer keys, and a comprehensive glossary of terminology also make it suitable for self-study. For each chapter, there is an online test in which students can check their understanding.The exercises can be found on the book's companion website: https://doi.org/10.1075/z.240.website

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This textbook is designed for advanced (graduate and postgraduate) students, and will also be of interest to scholars. It blends a cognitive linguistic approach to language and language use with insights from contemporary pragmatics, the ultimate aim being to advance a unified model of cognitive pragmatics. Basic themes in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics are covered ranging from figurative language and thought, e.g. conceptual metaphor and metonymy, the role of inferencing in the construction of meaning, in particular, indirect speech acts, to the conceptual and functional motivation of morphosyntactic structure. Finally, the book offers many suggestions and ideas for student papers as well as larger research projects that promise to reveal new insights into conceptual structure, communicative function, and their influence on the grammatical structure of language.

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This volume explores how Diachronic Construction Grammar can shed new light on changes in a central and well-researched domain of grammar, namely modality. Its main goal is to show how constructional analyses can help us address some of the long-standing questions that have informed discussions of modal expressions and their development, and to illustrate the processes that are involved in these developments on the basis of data from languages such as English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, and Japanese. The studies in this volume are organized around three interrelated topics. The first of these concerns the organization of modal constructions in a network. A second focus area of the studies in this volume concerns the developmental pathways that modal constructions follow diachronically. The third topic that ties the contributions of this volume together is the contrast between constructionalization and constructional change.

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This book is unique in bringing together studies on instructed second language acquisition that focus on a common question: “What renders this research particularly relevant to classroom applications, and what are the advantages, challenges, and potential pitfalls of the methodology adopted?” The empirical studies feature experimental, quasi-experimental and observational research in settings ranging from the classroom to the laboratory and CALL contexts. All contributors were asked to discuss issues of cost, ethics, participant availability, experimental control, teacher collaboration, and student motivation, as well as the generalizability of findings to different kinds of educational contexts, languages, and structures.This volume should be of interest to graduate students in second language research, practicing teachers who want some guidance to navigate the sometimes overwhelming array of publications, and to researchers who are planning studies on instructed second language learning or teaching and are looking to make principled decisions on which of the existing methodologies to adopt.

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This book focuses exclusively on child bilinguals or children exposed to a second language in various learning contexts. Through the presentation of research on how children learn the sound systems or lexicon in two languages and via different routes, the book aims to paint a comprehensive picture of child bilingualism and second language learning. In addition, the book features contributions focused on theoretical overviews and methodological approaches. Researchers from diverse disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and speech-language pathology contributed to the book that thus represents an effort to integrate multiple views and perspectives. The book is useful for researchers, clinicians, and educators who work with children acquiring or learning a second language in different settings. It should also be of interest to university students studying bilingualism and/or second language acquisition or parents raising bilingual children.

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This book provides a comprehensive overview of pedagogical grammar research and explores its implications for the teaching of grammar in second language classrooms. Drawing on several research domains (e.g., corpus linguistics, task-based language teaching) and a number of theoretical orientations (e.g., cognitive, sociocultural), the book proposes a framework for pedagogical grammar which brings together three major areas of inquiry: (1) descriptions of grammar in use, (2) descriptions of grammar acquisition processes, and (3) investigations of the relative effectiveness of different approaches to L2 grammar instruction. The book balances research and theory with practical discussions of the decisions that teachers must make on a daily basis, offering guidance in such areas as materials development, data-driven learning, task design, and classroom assessment.

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Anti-racist Discourse on Muslims in the Australian Parliament examines anti-racist discourse in contemporary Australian politics, in particular, how politicians contest and challenge racism against a minority group that does not constitute a traditional ‘race’. Using critical discourse analysis, this book firstly deconstructs the racist, xenophobic and discriminatory arguments against Muslims. Secondly, it highlights the anti-racist counter-discourse to these arguments. Since blatantly racist statements are less common nowadays, the book focuses on manifestations of ‘culturalist racism’. It does this by investigating how talk about Muslims positions them as not Australian or as not belonging to Australia – the book takes such ‘discursive exclusion from the nation’ as one of the most widespread forms of ‘culturalist racism’ in Western liberal-democracies. In addition to contributing to the theoretical discussion on the relationship between Muslims, racism and anti-racism, the book expands on methods that apply critical discourse analysis and the discourse-historical approach by providing a practical guide to analysing anti-racist political discourses.

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This 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.As of February 2020, this e-book is Open Access CC BY-NC-ND, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

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Research into complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as basic dimensions of second language performance, proficiency and development has received increased attention in SLA. However, the larger picture in this field of research is often obscured by the breadth of scope, multiple objectives and lack of clarity as to how complexity, accuracy and fluency should be defined, operationalized and measured. The present volume showcases current research on CAF by bringing together eleven contributions from renowned international researchers in the field. These contributions not only add to the body of empirical knowledge about L2 use and L2 development by bringing new research findings to light but they also address fundamental theoretical and methodological issues by responding to questions about the nature, manifestation, development and assessment of CAF as multifaceted constructs. Collectively, the chapters in this book illustrate the converging and sometimes diverging approaches that different disciplines bring to CAF research.

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This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

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This book is a bridge to confident academic writing for advanced non-native English users. It emphasizes depth over breadth through mastery of core writing competencies and strategies which apply to most academic disciplines and genres. Tailored to students in EMI programs, the content was piloted and revised during a longitudinal writing study. The innovative approach prepares students to write for the academic community through the dual lenses of Art (developing a writer’s voice through choices in language, style, and topics) and Architecture (mastering norms of academic language, genre, and organization.) The user-friendly text maximizes time for writing practice and production by avoiding lengthy readings. Part 1 builds skills and confidence in writing by focusing on assignments that do not require research. Part 2 applies newly mastered principles, skills, and strategies to research-based writing. Students learn to incorporate thesis, research, and evidence into a process for academic writing by following the AWARE framework (Arranging to write, Writing, Assessing, Revising, and Editing.)

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This volume contains a reprint of the English translation (1843) by Sir George Webbe Dasent of Rask’s Anvising till Isländskan eller Nordiska Fornspråket (1818). This re-edition, with an added bio-bibliography of Rask, should enable the linguist of today to obtain a fairly rounded picture of this important 19th-century scholar who, together with Bopp and Grimm, has justly been ranked among the founding fathers of the comparative-historical study of Indo-European languages.Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787–1832) did not occupy himself with historical linguistics alone as a comparativist, but also with language as a system based on a notion of structure comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation (derivation and composition), and the idea of self-regulation. He formulated theoretical and practical premises for the composition of grammars, and in this he was far ahead of his time and in closer proximity to the linguistic concerns and problems of our era. From both theoretical and pedagogical points of view, Rask’s grammar of Icelandic remains a most remarkable work.

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This volume offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of applied research efforts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This region has not received due attention in the literature and this publication provides a much-needed contribution to the existing body of knowledge. The editor recruited a number of renowned scholars who either work in the MENA countries or have experience doing research in this region to contribute to this project. The selection of chapters ensured representation of applied linguistics efforts in North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf. The book looks into language research within social and educational MENA contexts. The final part of the book provides a forward-looking perspective about applied linguistics research and practices in the Middle East and North Africa. The book is primarily written for those interested in applied linguistics, particularly researchers, graduate students, and language professionals in the MNEA region.

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This book illustrates the use of ethnography as an analytical approach to investigate academic writing, and provides critical insights into how academic writing research can benefit from the use of ethnographic methods. Throughout its six theoretical and practice-oriented studies, together with the introductory chapter, foreword and afterword, ethnography-related concepts like thick description, deep theorizing, participatory research, research reflexivity or ethics are discussed against the affordances of ethnography for the study of academic writing. The book is key reading for scholars, researchers and instructors in the areas of applied linguistics, academic writing, academic literacies and genre studies. It will also be useful to those lecturers and postgraduate students working in English for Academic Purposes and disciplinary writing. The volume provides ethnographically-oriented researchers with clear pointers about how to incorporate the telling of the inside story into their traditional main role as observers.Winner of the 9th edition of the AELFE's Enrique Alcaraz Research Award

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This CD-rom and the accompanying handbook attack many of the most crucial difficulties encountered by both native and non-native English speakers when translating scientific and engineering material from German.The CD-rom is like a miniature encyclopaedia dealing with the fundamental conceptual basis of science, engineering and mathematics, with particular regard to terminology. It provides didactically organised dictionaries, thesauri and a wide range of microglossaries highlighting polysemy, homonymy, hyponymy, context, collocation, usage as well as grammatical, lexical and semantic considerations essential to accurate translation. It also supplies a wide variety of reference material and illustrations useful to self-taught professional technical translators, translator trainers at universities, and especially to student translators.All the main branches of industrial technology are examined, such as mechanical, electrical, electronic, chemical, nuclear engineering, and fundamental terminologies are provided for a broad range of important subfields: automotive engineering, plastics, computer systems, construction technology, aircraft, machine tools.The handbook provides a useful introduction to the CD-Rom, enabling readers proficient in two languages to acquire the basic skills necessary for technical translation by familiarity with fundamental engineering conceptions themselves.

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The globalisation of communication networks has increased the domains of translation and is challenging ever more the translator’s role. This volume is a collection of contributions from two different conferences (Misano, 1997 and Berlin, 1998). (Multi)Media translation, especially screen translation (TV, cinema, video), has made more explicit the complexities of any communication and has led us to take a fresh look at the translator’s strategies and behaviours.Several papers ponder the concepts of media and multimedia, the necessity of interdisciplinarity, the polysemiotic dimension of audiovisual media. Quite a few discuss the current transformations in audiovisual media policy. A great many deal with practices, mainly in subtitling but also in interpreting for TV and surtitling: what are the quality parameters and the conditions to meet audience’s expectations?Finally some show the cultural and linguistic implications of screen translation. Digitalisation is changing production and broadcasting and speeding up convergence between media, telecommunications and information and communication technology.Is (multi)media translation a new field of study or an umbrella framework for scholars from various disciplines? Is it a trick to overcome the absence of prestige in Translation Studies? Or is it just a buzz word which gives rise to confusion? These questions remain open: the 26 contributions are partial answers.

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As the legislative bodies of democratic nations, parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics, big data, parliamentary discourse, and historical linguistics in a truly interdisciplinary exploration at the vanguard of big data and corpus methods with the aim to investigate the intersection between linguistic and social change. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, the studies included in this volume range from a focus on explicitly linguistic phenomena to topics that contribute to our understanding of language and society more generally. It breaks new ground in its critical reflection on the conceptual and methodological challenges of using large corpora of parliamentary discourse to study both the specialised language of parliamentary speech and the societies that the parliaments in question represent and govern.

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Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories can be unified. Specifically, I address issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this book is to show that this is an unwarranted assumption. Based on a number of case studies on verb displacement phenomena in Cantonese, I attempt a unified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction in movement theories. These case studies converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bear

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The idea that reading literature changes the reader seems as old as literature itself. Through the ages philosophers, writers, and literary scholars have suggested it affects norms, empathic ability, self-concept, beliefs, etc. This book examines what we actually know about these effects. And it finds strong evidence for the old claims. However, it remains unclear what aspects of the reading experience are responsible for these effects. Applying methods of the social sciences to this particular problem of literary theory, this book presents a psychological explanation based upon the conception of literature as a moral laboratory. A series of experiments examines whether imagining oneself in the shoes of characters affects beliefs about what it must be like to be someone else, and whether it affects beliefs about consequences of behavior. The results have implications for the role literature could play in society, for instance, in an alternative for traditional moral education.

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This 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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Although the term implicitness is ubiquitous in the pragmatic scholarship, it has rarely constituted the focus of attention per se. This book aims to help crystallize the concept of implicitness by defining its linguistic boundaries, as well as specifying and exploring its different communicative manifestations. The contributions by leading specialists scrutinize the main conceptualizations, forms and occurrences of implicitness (such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, entailment, presupposition, etc.) at different levels of linguistic organization. The volume focuses on phrasal, sentential, and discursive phenomena, showcasing the richness and variety of implicit forms of communication, systematizing (where possible) the existing analytic perspectives, and identifying the most productive procedures for further exploration. Taken together, the chapters exhibit theoretical differences that hinder a consensus on the nature of implicitness, but they simultaneously reveal methodological points of contact and raise common questions, thereby signposting a future analytic agenda. The book will appeal to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars working within and across the disciplines of Pragmatics, Semantics, Language Philosophy, Discourse Analysis, and Communication Studies.

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This book represents the state of the art in cognitive stylistics a rapidly expanding field at the interface between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science. The twelve chapters combine linguistic analysis with insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics in order to arrive at innovative accounts of a range of literary and textual phenomena. The chapters cover a variety of literary texts, periods, and genres, including poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and plays. Some of the chapters provide new approaches to phenomena that have a long tradition in literary and linguistic studies (such as humour, characterisation, figurative language, and metre), others focus on phenomena that have not yet received adequate attention (such as split-selves phenomena, mind style, and spatial language). This book is relevant to students and scholars in a wide range of areas within linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.

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The volume presents perspectives in the theory of drama and theatre that are new for the following reasons: 1) the contributions reflect the international cooperation in developing drama and theatre as well as its theories; 2) this collection is the first attempt of presenting papers within the context of (Analytical) Theory of Science; 3) it is the first consistent set of papers starting from semiotics a s a meta-theory. The volume is divided into four sections: I Fundamental of Theatre Research, II Theory of Drama and Theatre, III Descriptive Theatre Research, IV Applied Theatre Research. The fifth and final section offers a selective bibliography of analytical approaches to drama and theatre.

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This book describes new methodological and technological approaches to corpus building and presents recent research based on the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. This is a large monitor corpus of contemporary Norwegian language, compiled through daily harvesting of web newspapers. The book gives an overview of the corpus and its system architecture, and presents tools used for tasks such as text harvesting, annotation, topic classification and extraction and frequency profiling of new words and phrases. Among the innovative technologies is Corpuscle, a corpus query engine and management system which is flexible enough to handle very large corpora in an efficient way. The individual research contributions based on the corpus explore different aspects of Norwegian, including the occurrence of anglicisms, neologisms and terminology, and the use of metonymy and metaphor in newspaper language. The book also describes an innovative method of applying correspondence analysis and implicational analysis to investigate interdependencies between morphosyntactic variants.

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This volume presents recent developments in the linguistics of humour. It depicts new theoretical proposals for capturing different humorous forms and phenomena central to humour research, thereby extending its scope. The 15 contributions critically survey and develop the existing interpretative models, or they postulate novel theoretical approaches to humour in order to better elucidate its workings. The collection of articles offers cutting-edge interdisciplinary explorations, encompassing various realms of linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and language philosophy), as well as drawing on findings from other fields, primarily: sociology, psychology and anthropology. Thanks to careful overviews of the relevant background literature, the papers will be of use to not only researchers and academics but also students. Albeit focused on theoretical developments, rather than case studies, the volume is illustrated with interesting research data, such as the discourse of television programmes and series, films and stand-up comedy, as well as jokes.

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At long last community interpreters are coming into their own as professionals in various parts of the world. At the same time, the complexity of their practice has been thrown into sharp relief. In this thought-provoking volume of selected papers from the third Critical Link conference held in 2001 (Montreal), we see a profession that is carving out a place for itself amid political adversity, economic constraints and a host of historical and cultural conditions. Community interpreters are learning to work better with governments, courts, police, psychologists, doctors, patients, refugees, violent offenders, and human rights missions in war-torn countries. From First Peoples to minority language speakers to former refugees and members of the Deaf community, interpreters are seeking out the training, legal protection and credentials they need. They are standing up to be counted in surveys, reaping the fruits of specialization and contributing to salient academic discussions on language, communication and translation studies.

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Contexts in Translating is designed to help translators understand the varieties of contexts and their importance for understanding a text and reproducing the meaning in another language. The contexts include the historical setting of writing a text, the cultural components that make a text unique, the types of audiences for which the translation is intended, and the most efficient and effective ways of producing a satisfactory representation of the source-language text. The structural levels of language are described, and the principal features of text organization are also explained. In addition, the main features of various books on translation are outlined, and a chapter on basic theories of translation is followed by a selective bibliography.

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The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate, - en, - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective, the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint, the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions, and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives, from a constructional perspective.

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This book provides a critical review of recent theories of semantics-syntax correspondences and makes new proposals for constraints on semantic structure relevant to syntax. Data from several languages are presented which suggest that semantic structure in root morphemes is subject to parametric variation which has effect across a variety of verb classes, including locatives, unaccusatives, and psych verbs.The implications for first and second language acquisition are discussed. In particular, it is suggested that different parametric settings may lead to a learnability problem if adult learners do not retain access to sensitivity to underlying semantic organization and morphological differences between languages provided by Universal Grammar.An experiment with Chinese-speaking learners of English is presented which shows that learners initially transfer L1 semantic organization to the L2, but are able to retreat from overgeneralisations and achieve native-like grammars in this area.Suggestions for further research in this rapidly developing area of theory and acquisition research are also made.

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The papers collected in this volume were first presented at the 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Bergamo, 2006). Alongside studies of syntax, morphology, lexis and semantics, published in two sister volumes, many innovative contributions focused on geo-historical variation in English. A carefully peer-reviewed selection, including two plenary lectures, appears here in print for the first time, bearing witness to the increasing scholarly interest in varieties of English other than so-called ‘standard’ English. In all the contributions, well-established methods of historical dialectology combine with new theoretical approaches, in an attempt to shed more light on phenomena that have hitherto remained unexplored, or have only just begun to be investigated. Perceptual dialectology is also taken into consideration, and state-of-the-art tools, such as electronic corpora and atlases, are employed consistently, ensuring the methodological homogeneity of the contributions.

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This textbook introduces the reader to the field of phonology, from allophones to faithfulness and exemplars. It assumes no prior knowledge of the field, and includes a brief review chapter on phonetics. It is written within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, but covers a wide range of historical and contemporary theories, from the Prague School to Optimality Theory. While many examples are based on American and British English, there are also discussions of some aspects of French and German colloquial speech and phonological analysis problems from many other languages around the world. In addition to the basics of phoneme theory, features, and morphophonemics there are chapters on casual speech, first and second language acquisition and historical change. A final chapter covers a number of issues in contemporary phonological theory, including some of the classic debates in Generative Phonology (rule ordering, abstractness, ‘derivationalism’) and proposals for usage-based phonologies.

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English Words Abroad summarizes the methods developed for the innovative multilingual Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach 2001, OUP) which combines data on English loanwords in sixteen European languages (four each for Germanic, Slavic, Romance and others). This summary allows us to quantify for the first time the extent of the lexical impact of loanwords on individual languages and cultures. The author discusses the elicitation of data from informants with a high linguistic awareness; criteria for inclusion; problems of integration on graphemic, phonological, morphological and semantic/stylistic levels; and speakers’ reactions (purism, language, legislation). He then explores the possibilities of applying these methods to dictionaries of gallicisms and germanisms. The book includes a survey of the most recent dictionaries of anglicisms in European languages.

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Motivation is a key aspect of second language learning. There is no doubt that abstract models are basic to gain theoretical insights into motivation; however, teachers and researchers demand comprehensible explanations for motivation that can help them to improve their everyday teaching and research. The aim of this book is to provide both theoretical insights and practical suggestions to improve motivation in the classroom. With this in mind, the book is divided into two sections: the first part includes innovative ideas regarding language learning motivation, whereas the second is focused on the relationship between different approaches to foreign language learning – such as EFL (English as a foreign language), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) or immersion – and motivation. Both sections have an emphasis on pedagogical implications that are rooted in both theoretical and empirical work.

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Children’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.

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Cross-linguistic research is a fruitful field of language inquiry that has benefited enormously from the use of corpora. As sources of linguistic data of various kinds and as tools for language processing, corpora have shaped the development of cross-linguistic research, enabling both language description and practical applications. This volume contains twelve studies that emphasize the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora in accurately exploring the structure and use of seven under-researched languages and language varieties. The first part emphasizes the role of corpus-based descriptive analyses at the lexicogrammatical and discursive levels, as a first step on the way towards concrete applications like translation or language teaching. The second part focuses on the role of parallel-corpus-based language processing techniques and applications that facilitate professional communication. This book will be of interest to scholars in contrastive linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis, language teaching, and natural language processing.

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Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narratives; the effects of digital anonymity and pseudonymity on narrative practices; the strategies through which virtual communities discursively work together to solidify and negotiate their sociocultural identities; the tensions between the affordances that characterize different online media and the communicative needs of users; the structures and modes in which virtual users construct and enact participatory practices in these environments; and the significance of different spatiotemporal dimensions in the encoding, sharing and appreciation of stories. More generally, the volume engages with some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that the growing presence of digital technologies and media poses to narrative analysis. Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017)

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This volume is about computers and translation. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer.The editor and main contributor, Harold Somers, is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 years’ experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, Somers is editor of one of the field’s premier journals, and has written extensively on the subject, including the field’s most widely quoted textbook on MT, now out of print and somewhat out of date.The current volume aims to provide an accessible yet not overwhelmingly technical book aimed primarily at translators and other users of CAT software.

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This book is the result of intensive and continued discussions about the social role of language and its conceptualisations in societies other than Northern (European-American) ones. Language as a means of expressing as well as evoking both interiority and community has been in the focus of these discussions, led among linguists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists, and leading to a collection of essays that provide studies that transcend previously considered approaches. Its contributions are in particular interested in understanding how the attitude of the individual towards societal processes and strategies of norming is negotiated emotionally, and how individual interests and attitudes can be articulated. Discourses on public spaces are in the focus, in order to analyse those strategies that are employed to articulate dissent (for example, in the sense of face-threatening acts). This raises a number of questions on the spatial and public situatedness of emotions and language: How is the public space dealt with and reflected in language as property, heritage, and as a part of ascribed identities? Which role do emotions play in this space? How is emotion employed there as part of place making in relation to identity constructions? What is the connection between emotion, performance and emblematic spaces and places? Which opportunities of the violation of norms and transgression do such public spaces offer to actors and speakers? These questions intend to address the communicative representation of core cultural processes and concepts.

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This volume is dedicated to applied linguistic research on multilingualism. The term “applied linguistics” is used in a broad sense and describes several examples of the cooperation between linguists and public service institutions or commercial companies. Furthermore, renowned scholars in the field discuss how applied linguistics may enhance communication in the workplace, in schools and in public service institutions. The areas of application presented in this volume include intercultural communication, language acquisition, language contact, and sociolinguistic variation. The aim is to highlight the importance of applied linguistic research concerning the deployment of multilingualism, and, furthermore, to stimulate the debate about it. With multilingualism in different social settings being its focus, this volume will appeal to scholars in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Pragmatics.

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The human mind is a marvelous device that effectively regulates mental activities and facilitates amendable cognitive behaviour across several domains such as attention, memory, and language processing. For multilinguals, the mind also represents and manages more than one language system—a mental exercise which may lead to cognitive benefits. Through an in-depth exploration of these issues, Cognitive Control and Consequences of Multilingualism presents original studies and new perspectives which are cutting-edge and feature traditional and innovative methodologies such as ERPs, fMRIs, eye-tracking, picture- and numeral naming, the Simon, flanker, and oculomotor Stroop tasks, among others. The studies in this book investigate prominent themes in multilingual language control for both comprehension and production and probe the notion of a cognitive advantage that may be a result of multilingualism. The growing number of researchers, practitioners, and students alike will find this volume to be an instrumental source of readings that illuminates how one mind accommodates and controls multiple languages and the consequences it has on human cognition in general.

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This collection carries the functionalist Columbia School of linguistics forward with contributions on linguistic theory, semiotics, phonology, grammar, lexicon, and anthropology. Columbia School linguistics views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its users, and considers contextual, pragmatic, physical, and psychological factors in its analyses. This volume builds upon three previous Columbia School anthologies and further explores issues raised in them, including fundamental theoretical and analytical questions. And it raises new issues that take Columbia School “beyond its origins.” The contributions illustrate both consistency since the school’s inception over thirty years ago and innovation spurred by groundbreaking analysis. The volume will be of interest to all functional linguists and historians of linguistics. Languages analyzed include Byelorussian, English, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Swahili.

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This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use.The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop

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