Martin PUTZ - Böcker

This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.

This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.

Joshua Fishman is perhaps best known and loved for his pioneering and enduring work in language loyalty and reversing language shift. This volume brings together a selection of his recent writings on these topics and some of his personal perspectives on the field of sociolinguistics, along with an interview dialogue with the editors in which Fishman reflects on his lifetime’s work

No detailed description available for "Discrimination through Language in Africa?".

No detailed description available for "The Construal of Space in Language and Thought".

As a usage-based language theory, cognitive linguistics is predestined to have an impact on applied research in such areas as language in society, ideology, language acquisition, language pedagogy.The present volumes are a first systematic attempt to carve out pathways from the links between language and cognition to the fields of language acquisition and language pedagogy and to deal with them in one coherent framework: applied cognitive linguistics.

As a usage-based language theory, cognitive linguistics is predestined to have an impact on applied research in such areas as language in society, ideology, language acquisition, language pedagogy.The present volumes are a first systematic attempt to carve out pathways from the links between language and cognition to the fields of language acquisition and language pedagogy and to deal with them in one coherent framework: applied cognitive linguistics.

The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse.In line with the well-known volume Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Holland and Quinn (1987), the volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics has further explored the idea that we think about social reality in terms of models - 'cognitive/cultural models' or 'folk theories'. As in cultural models, the present volume demonstrates that the technical apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume wants to pursue is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.

The present volume grew out of the 30th International LAUD Symposium, held on April 19–22, 2004 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The conference, "Empowerment through Language", was centrally concerned with the concept of power and/or empowerment as observed in the status and use of language(s) and their speakers in bilingual and multilingual communities. The book discusses the theoretical issues inherent in the relation between language and power, the empowerment strategies involved in language policy and language planning situations, and the issue of language endangerment in Africa, i.e., the fate of minority languages and their speakers and the sociopolitical factors perpetuating their exclusion from access to knowledge and skills.The volume constitutes a collection of papers by prominent linguists from many countries who explore the exciting interdisciplinary area of language, power, and linguistic empowerment. Broadly speaking, the papers focus on the theoretical and sociolinguistic problems related to the role of power in language policy and language planning situations in multilingual settings, language choices, code switches, and associated topics. Thus, the aim of the volume is to open up language policy and language planning issues as observed in multilingual contexts (nations, institutions, other settings, and domains) to the wider community of critical sociolinguistics by concentrating on the relationship between language and power. More particularly, it offers a decidedly sociolinguistic perspective to the study of language and power, which likewise has been tackled from other perspectives in the areas of sociology and political science. This interdisciplinary relationship is important both for linguistics and for the sociology of language. In this way, the book is an important contribution to general linguistics, sociolinguistics, minority issues in multilingual settings as well as the social sciences.In honor of his upcoming 80th birthday (2006) , Fishman's colleagues and former students are preparing five volumes by him or about him, this being one of them.

The present volume is a collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts. The subdiscipline of pragmatics is seen from a multilingual and multicultural perspective thus contributing to an emerging field of study, i.e. intercultural pragmatics which can be made fruitful to second language teaching/learning and contrastive analysis. The book is an important contribution to general linguistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, second language acquisition, as well as minority issues in multilingual settings.

This study presents a new approach to tense-aspect teaching from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. Its aims are twofold: first, to provide a coherent account of the English tense-aspect system. To this end, a synthesis of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar theory and Fauconnier’s Mental Space approach will be put forward. Second, to test the applicability and effectiveness of CL-informed learning materials in the language classroom. For that purpose, an empirical analysis was conducted involving German students of English at an upper-intermediate level. The study therefore addresses linguists and language teachers alike.

This volume grew out of the 36th International LAUD Symposium, which was held in March 2014 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. There is general consensus among language experts that slightly more than half of today’s 7,000 languages are under severe threat of extinction even within fifty to one hundred years. The 13 papers contained in this volume explore the dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why this matters, and what can be done and achieved to document and support endangered languages especially in the context of an ever increasing globalized world. The issue of vanishing languages is discussed from a variety of methodologies and perspectives: sociolinguistics, language ecology, language contact, language policy/planning, attitudes and linguistic inequalities.

This book deals with the expression of emotions in Igala – a Nigerian minority language with about two million speakers – from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The author investigates the network of the Igala language of emotions using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework as developed by Anna Wierzbicka and her collaborators. The claims of adequacy of NSM in its present form for the analysis of emotion concepts universally will be challenged. This is due to the way emotions are conceptualized in the Igala language and due to the absence of certain semantic primes which are considered necessary for the analysis of emotions.Therefore, this study presents a testing ground for further development of the framework as well as a peek into research in African languages.

While the relatively recent notion of ‘deliberate’ metaphors – metaphors that supposedly play a special role in communication – is contested among researchers, the debate lacks empirical grounding. This book presents the first large-scale study of forms and functions of deliberate metaphors in authentic spoken academic discourse. The author’s comprehensive qualitative analyses of 23 US-American college lectures from four different disciplines demonstrate that deliberate metaphors occur in various forms and fulfill important communicative functions. While these findings may indicate the value of deliberate metaphors, the author’s critical discussions of both identification and application of deliberate metaphors in authentic discourse also point out issues with the very concept of ‘deliberate’ metaphor.

For decades, the focus of Metaphor Studies laid on Conceptual Metaphor and its role in the human conceptual system. This study, however, focuses on metaphor in communication. Its aim is to shed light on how commenters in online debates discuss EU-related topics via Scenario Negotiation, expressing and negotiating their points of view via Metaphorical Scenarios. The study offers a review of current metaphor theory and practical approaches and proposes an Integrated Model of Scenario Negotiation. The results are based on context-sensitive, qualitative analysis of data which stem from a corpus of online debates from the Guardian’s Comment is free section. The discussion illustrates the genre-specific conceptual-communicative functions of Scenario Negotiation in naturally occurring discourse.

This volume contributes to the fields of World Englishes, English Language Teaching and Second Language Acquisition, assessing the English(es) spoken in post-Independence Namibia beyond variety status. Based on questionnaires and corpus analysis, the author analyzes morphosyntactical structures, language use and attitudes towards English(es) in comparison to home languages. She gives new insights into the structure of spoken language and potential varieties of English in particular. Focus is put on a geographical area that only recently attracted increasing attention in the field of World Englishes. The author’s work can be regarded as an attempt to bridge several aspects of the frequently discussed «paradigm gap» between World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition studies.