Bücher der Reihe Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics

Social constructionists argue that our inner selves and our actions in the world are socially produced. Meta-realists, on the other hand, say that human consciousness is stratified, and not socially shaped at all levels. How do the human acts of creativity and resistance illuminate these different perspectives on human consciousness? This book explores theories of self and agency through a critical discourse analysis of the accounts of five British artists talking about their motivations, their creative processes and their experiences of the practices and institutions of visual art. Throughout the analysis the author considers how we voice dimensions of being that are ¿beyond¿ language, and how these words impact on our sense of self and actions. The concept of self realisation is at the centre of this book and is critically examined. The analysis also explores the construction of social identities through family relations and institutional art practices and the media. It shows how they can provide solidarity for those who risk breaking social norms, but at the same time build barriers of difference.

«Dariush Borbor has created an impressive lexicographical reference work with zeal and passion for over three decades, having collected the largest possible assemblage of alternatives for every single reduplicate. Linguists from many scientific fields must be grateful to him for his pioneering work.»(Adriano V. Rossi, Professor Emeritus of Iranian Philology, DAAM, University of Naples L¿Orientale and ISMEO, Rome)«The author has created a truly remarkable work on a very strange and little studied area of linguistics. The book contains a wealth of fascinating information and I can only congratulate him on the care and assiduity which he has devoted to it.»(Nicholas Sims-Williams, Professor Emeritus of Iranian and Central Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London)«I had an occasion to look again at your Dictionary of Reduplication. I realized once again how much useful work you have put into compiling it. Your bibliography is comprehensive and very useful. I should like to congratulate you on your assiduous effort to investigate so comprehensively a complex morphological aspect of the Middle Eastern Languages.»(¿ Ehsan Yarshater, Professor Emeritus, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University)The present dictionary is an analytical, comparative and etymological presentation of reduplication over a wide spectrum of languages. The range of featured languages ¿ Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish ¿ include three separate families connected only by geographical proximity, each with an extremely rich literary tradition. The dictionary covers multiple independent phenomena in several unrelated languages, the underlying idea being that their reduplications are all somehow connected, and that there exists a general «field» of reduplication. The book is not limited to a single field, but rather for several largely separate ones, such as linguistic relations, the theory of reduplication and etymology. Several other related or unrelated languages such as Icelandic, Japanese, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Hittite, etc. have been included for comparative purposes.The preliminary findings of this study indicate that reduplication in the languages under study, and in nearly all other languages, deal mostly with the fundamental, primary human requirements. Another strong proof of the «universality» of reduplicates are that they closely follow the same and similar formation, development and rule in most related and unrelated languages. In consequence of the universality of reduplication and its near identical development in all related or unrelated languages, it even legitimizes the creation of a grammar of reduplication in the future. A few of the essential features of this book include: a complete revision and updating of the semantics; a particular attention to the cognitive aspects; and, many etymologies that cannot be found elsewhere.

«This book takes theoretical linguistics by storm, moving our understanding of the passive construction onto a whole new level. Samirah Aljohani puts the adjectival passive under the empirical lexico-grammatical microscope, producing numbers which both dazzle and clarify. Inspired science from copious data presented in an accessible style ¿ absolutely brilliant!» (Dr Christopher Beedham, University of St Andrews, Scotland)¿Most analyses of the English passive (formed with be + V-ed) claim that there is a verbal passive and an adjectival passive. How can the same form express polar opposite meanings? This study of the adjectival passive reconciles the contradiction using Christopher Beedham¿s aspect analysis of the passive, in which the so-called actional passive (verbal passive) is said to express an action and its resultant state.¿In the study, the author presented approximately one thousand 2nd participles, mainly from transitive verbs, to three native speaker informants in putative noun phrases such as an accepted practice and putative clauses with un-, such as It is unaccepted, and asked the informants to say if they are grammatical, ungrammatical or borderline. She also interrogated her participles in the British National Corpus for their adjectival properties. In this way, she arrived at five adjective-like properties which a 2nd participle can have. Finally, she put her participles into eight groups, ranging from «0% state, 100% action» to «50% state, 50% action», depending on how many and which of the five adjective-like properties they can exhibit. The result is a new gradient scale of adjectival passives.

This book explores the nature of poetic reading using a creative approach to understanding Old Norse poetry. It considers lacunae in the history, criticism and scholarly translations of Old Norse poetry into English through a poetic enactment, an epic poem and its companion reader, demonstrating critical approaches to Old Norse poetry and poetics.The poetic enactment analyses the complex relationship between historical gap and creative reader, the importance of the comprehension of literary objects as ideal or immutable, and the poetic construction of readable texts with particular reference to skaldic images. The poetic demonstration of scholarly approaches also raises a number of questions about poetic process and the role of composers, readers and historical contexts in Old Norse poetry. Analysing narrative-movement, diction, grammar, legend, the aural, the visual, authenticity, meaning and poetic objects as scripts, the author offers a theory of actual and virtual reading.

With a comprehensive review of the relevant factors that first- and second-language morphological processing researchers need to take into consideration, including material- and procedure-related factors and participant differences, this book is a useful theoretical reference book for morphological processing researchers.

This edited volume investigates the role of digital communication in relation to linguistic diversity and language education in today's digitally networked world. The collection explores diverse digital venues in which language has different roles and functions, including education, politics, technology, media, and popular culture.

This book investigates language in a broad framework, taking into account anthropology, psychology and evolutionary biology. Using examples from oral communication in a number of languages, the author explores why language functions the way it does, why it is acquired the way it is, and why some aspects of language are universal.

Dutch is a peculiar language in that certain nouns have more than one gender. This first academic study of double gender nouns (DGNs) in the Dutch language investigates this anomaly. First assigned a lexicological classification, the DGNs are then analysed contextually by means of a corpus study. DGNs are shown to be part of a generalized restructuring of Dutch gender as a whole. No longer a fringe phenomenon in the Dutch gender system, this study shows them to be catalysts in the transition towards a (more) semantic system, a process that is much more advanced than commonly assumed.

This book presents the first detailed analysis of the mechanism of translating the Polish past tense into French. Grounded in the field of aspectual research, this study bridges the gap between theory and practice by presenting a set of equivalency rules for Polish past imperfective verb forms and French past tenses. Drawing on a wide selection of Polish literary texts and their translations into French, the author analyses the translation of Polish past imperfective verbs in factual contexts and their actual uses in narration. Using the semantic theory of aspect developed by Stanislaw Karolak, the author establishes rules of equivalency for imperfective uses in both languages as well as rules of equivalency between Polish past imperfective verbs and perfect tenses in French (passe compose, passe simple and plus-que-parfait). The translation rules developed in this study can be applied directly in translation practice as well as providing a resource for scholars of the French and Polish languages. Additionally, this book lays the foundation for future contrastive studies on aspect in languages from different language families.

Provides analysis of the relationship between Sylheti Bangladeshi migrants' language use and their understanding of the concept of 'mother language'. This title examines the socio-historic and socio-political background of the Bangla language and Bangla nationalism, and, the role of the mother tongue for speakers of regional language varieties.

The general aim of this book is to contribute to a better understanding of metonymy, using the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The book argues for a conceptual rather than purely linguistic basis for metonymy and explores distinctions between metonymy and other figurative language.

Following two major waves of immigration after World War II, the Bangladeshi community in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets is now one of the largest in the Bangladeshi diaspora, counting some 65,000 people. This is the first in-depth study of language and language-use within this Bangladeshi community. Based on a corpus of spontaneous speech data collected within the area, it provides the reader with an overview of the linguistic characteristics of ¿Bengali-English¿ as well as patterns of language-use. This book focuses on three areas: first, following the tradition of similar studies of the language of minority groups, an analysis of Bengali-English morphosyntax provides a detailed description of its morphosyntactic properties and the different developmental stages learners pass through. Second, a sociolinguistic analysis of the influence of social and psychological factors on the language and its speakers is presented. And last, based on quantitative survey data, and supported by qualitative data obtained through ethnographic interviews, the study evaluates the issues of identity and ethnolinguistic vitality within the Bangladeshi community.

This book combines a social constructionist view of academic writing with a pedagogical orientation seeking to explore the dialogic relationship between the culture of academic discourse communities and their rhetoric, and provide a comprehensive analysis of variation across disciplines, genres and national intellectual cultures. The analysis focuses on the rhetorical organisation of research genres and the resources that convey authors¿ epistemic and attitudinal stance. The findings form the basis for the design of socio-culturally oriented learning materials for the teaching of writing in the disciplines and the development of academic literacies.

Variations in speech melody (intonation) can be used to express different meanings (e.g. question vs. statement, friendliness). Yet, intonational information is hardly used in present-day linguistic models. When intonational information is used, it is mostly based on introspection rather than on empirical investigation; almost exclusively, a one-to-one relation between accent types and semantic function is assumed. This book focuses on an empirical investigation of thematic contrast in German. Thematic contrast has received considerable attention in semantics because sentences with contrastive themes can be used to imply propositions of various kinds without saying them explicitly. In this book, first an acoustic comparison between sentences produced in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts is described. Intonational realisation is quantified in terms of the height and position of tonal targets. The perceptual reality of different productions and the relevance of different acoustic cues are tested by means of rating experiments. Finally, the data are prosodically annotated by a group of linguists to explore the validity and explanatory power of different accent categories for contrastive and non-contrastive themes in German.

Can linguistic pragmatics be developed without the need to formulate rules, criteria or maxims? The author argues that rules as they have been conceived of within pragmatics, particularly speech act theory, are limiting and out of step with the linguistic science of recent decades. Using a hermeneutic approach to pragmatics, this book seeks to bring pragmatics closer to the cognitive paradigm that has transformed the other branches of the linguistic and communication sciences, with the help of developments in certain neighbouring disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and narratology. The elements that are opened up to pragmatics in this approach include some new conceptions of intentionality, intertextuality, communicative action and literary authorship, as well as the subjectivity of interpretation, which by its very nature ceaselessly transforms all forms of communication in its historical spiral.

This corpus-based study investigates the use of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose by analysing three versions of the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. This book provides a comprehensive look at nominalization in English translations of Chinese prose and encourages further study into nominalization in translation.

Intertextuality in reading - namely the way in which written texts refer to other texts - has recently attracted attention in the field of linguistics and related disciplines. This book offers a unique look at the operation of intertextuality in real-world texts and the role of readers' cognitive processes in responding to intertextuality. The first part of the book presents innovative research into how intertextuality operates within a corpus of authentic texts. It then draws on that analysis to propose a comprehensive framework by means of which types of intertextual reference in texts can be classified and explained. The second part provides a rare example of an empirical research study into readers' cognitive processes as they encounter intertextuality.

Discursive Constructions around Terrorism in the People's Daily (China) and The Sun (UK) before and after 9.11

Contrasting Meaning in Languages of the East and West

Addresses language learner autonomy, both as a theoretical construct and in relation to areas of application such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the European Language Portfolio (ELP), teacher training, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and minority language provision.

Describes the grammatical system of modality in Japanese in terms of the form-function relationship within the scope of a framework based on the European school of modality. This title deals with the modal system and its constituents in Japanese, accommodating all the grammatical means of modariti in the Nihongo bunpou (Japanese grammar system).