Wiltrud Mihatsch - Böcker

Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

This collection is dedicated to the study of names for humans, which can be attributed a special position in the lexicon. They occur in great numbers and display an extraordinary semantic complexity. The contributions gathered in this volume are mainly concerned with questions of semantics, modality and agency pertaining to names for humans.

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

This collection is dedicated to the study of names for humans, which can be attributed a special position in the lexicon. They occur in great numbers and display an extraordinary semantic complexity. The contributions gathered in this volume are mainly concerned with questions of semantics, modality and agency pertaining to names for humans.

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

Dieses Lehrbuch führt aus einer komparatistischen Perspektive in die linguistische Beschreibung und Analyse des Deutschen, Englischen, Französischen, Italienischen und Spanischen ein. Die charakteristischen Lauteigenschaften, Flexionsmerkmale und Wortbildungsprozesse sowie der diesen Sprachen eigene Satzbau werden vorgestellt. Eigene Kapitel widmen sich den historischen Entwicklungen dieser Sprachen sowie den sozial und geographisch geprägten Varietäten, so dass eine umfassende Darstellung dieser fünf Sprachen, ihrer Strukturen, ihres Gebrauchs und ihrer historischen Entwicklung entsteht. Zwei Kapitel zur Semantik und Pragmatik, die universelle Aspekte der Bedeutungsanalyse bzw. der Prinzipien des Sprachgebrauchs erläutern, runden das Bild ab. – Im zweifarbigen Layout mit Definitionen, Vertiefungen und Übungsaufgaben.Goethe formulierte: „Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen“. Prägnanter kann man den Nutzen einer komparatistischen Darstellung nicht formulieren. Um die Besonderheiten des Deutschen klar zu erkennen, ist die Gegenüberstellung mit der dominanten Weltsprache Englisch sowie den romanischen Sprachen Französisch, Italienisch und Spanisch von großem Nutzen. Für Studierende des Englischen und romanischer Sprachen erlaubt die komparatistische Perspektive einen besonders reflektierten Zugang zur Linguistik der studierten Fremdsprache.