Stein Dieter Stein – författare

This volume presents a selection from the papers given at the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. It offers a window on the current state of the art in historical linguistics: the papers cover a wide range of different languages, different language families, and different approaches to the study of linguistic change, ranging from optimality theory, theories of grammaticalization and the invisible hand, treatments of language contact and creolization to the linguistic consequences of political correctness. Among the languages under discussion are Akkadian, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Sranan, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Yiddish, and a variety of Romance and Native American languages.

The volume contains 13 specially written specialist articles on a wide range of subjects within the ambit of the history of the English language and prominent literary uses of it. In uniting linguistic and literary pursuits in a single volume, it follows the noble Neapolitan scholar’s research interests, as well as representing topics that figure prominently in any comprehensive university course in English. Subjects range from the rise of the present progressive in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle via issues in Medieval English, concepts of language inherent in the Early Modern English grammatical treatises and an evaluation of their value as evidence for the development of the language, the “new science” and language in the 17th century, on literary issues like the “implied director” in Macbeth, Sir Elyot’s Enigmatic “Image of Governance”, English history reflected in Ben Jonson to the history of text types and Jespersen’s reading of Saussure’s “Cours”. Apart from an introductory section with articles on Frank’s biography, his scientific activities and his impact on the field, the book contains work by Susan Fitzmaurice, Nicola Pantaleo, Gabriella Di Martino, Konrad Koerner, Stefano Manferlotti, Uwe Baumann, Anna Maria Palombi Cataldi, Rosanna Sornicola and Dieter Stein.

This volume brings together for the first time pragmatic, rhetorical, and literary perspectives on genre, mapping theoretical frontiers and initiating a long overdue conversation amongst these methodologies. The diverse approaches represented in this volume meet on common ground staked by Internet communication: an arena challenging to traditional ideas of genre which assume a conventional stability at odds with the unceasing innovations of online discourse. Drawing on and developing new ideas of genre, the research reported in this volume shows, on the contrary, that genre study is a powerful means of testing commonplaces about the Internet world and, in turn, that the Internet is a fertile field for theorising genre.