John Benjamins Publishing Co – förlag

This volume is a collection of articles dealing with the linguistic category of possession and its expression in languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia (Uralic, Turkic, Indo-European and Caucasian), with a few excursions into other parts of the world. Some papers engage in typological comparisons, both within and beyond the borders of individual language families focusing on issues of motivation; meaning and forms used in expressing possession; typology of belong constructions; marking possession in possessor chains; non-canonical possessives and their relation to the category of familiarity; metaphoric shifts of possessive semantics. Others focus on possession in individual languages, offering new precious pieces of information on the linguistic expression of possession in lesser known languages, some of which are endangered and even unwritten. The volume will be of interest to both general linguists and typologists as well as to experts/students of the individual languages or language families analyzed in the papers.

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.

The study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are being applied in the areas of clinical and educational settings. It also marks the career and contributions of one of the greatest scholars in the field of deafness: Bencie Woll. As the field of deafness goes through rapid and profound changes, we hope that this volume captures the latest perspectives regarding the impacts of these changes for our understanding of child development. The volume will be of essential interest to language development researchers as well as teachers and clinical researchers.

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.

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.

This book is a bridge to confident academic writing for students who use English as an Additional Language (EAL). By emphasizing writing as a thinking process, the textbook develops the skills writers need to work effectively with AI tools. The Art of Writing teaches students how to synthesize ideas and present them in their own voice. The Architecture of Writing teaches students to master varied essay structures as a gateway to writing in their disciplines. Writing concepts are introduced through easy-to-follow explanations and reinforced with short, frequent writing assignments and practical exercises. The chapters include guided practice in writing strategies and frequent reflections that build students’ confidence in writing English for Academic Purposes (EAP).The AWARE framework guides students to think critically through five stages of academic writing: Arranging to Write, Writing, Assessing, Revising, and Editing. AWARE teaches students to recognize and address common problems associated with AI use in writing: Arranging to Write provides a context for generating effective AI prompts; Assessing teaches strategies for critically examining traditional and AI sources; Revising helps students avoid plagiarism through practicing citation strategies and expressing ideas in their own words.

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.

In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

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

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.

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

Le parole di una lingua non sono mai isolate ma si usano in combinazione e non con qualunque parola ma solo con alcune. Per parlare bene bisogna usare le combinazioni appropriate. In italiano si dice un tozzo di pane per indicare un pezzo di pane, ma si dice anche un tozzo di carne? E una discussione si solleva? O si solleva un’obiezione? Una discussione si affronta, ma un’obiezione? In italiano non si dice fare un appuntamento con qualcuno ma fissare o prendere un appuntamento. Ogni lingua preferisce combinazioni diverse e quindi è facile sbagliare quando si parla una lingua straniera. A volte però anche il parlante nativo sbaglia o non è sicuro. Questo dizionario ricostruisce l’ambiente linguistico di circa 3.000 entrate per aiutare ogni parlante a comunicare in italiano. È destinato al parlante straniero che ha una conoscenza avanzata della lingua italiana ma anche al parlante nativo che è in cerca della parola giusta. Un dizionario che si distingue dai normali dizionari monolingui e bilingui perché indica sistematicamente le combinazioni lessicali (circa 90.000), molto spesso spiegandole e/o accompagnandole con esempi per chiarirne l’uso.—Words are never used in isolation but in combination and not with any word but only with certain specific words. To use a language properly the appropriate combinations must be used. In Italian a piece of bread is a tozzo di pane, but is that the case for meat? Is a tozzo di carne an appropriate combination? If you want to make an appointment with somebody you should not say (as in English) fare un appuntamento but fissare un appuntamento. An Italian affronta una discussione (enters or tackles a discussion), but is it possible for him to say affrontare un’obiezione (to enter or tackle an objection)? Yes it is, as this dictionary shows. So every language has its own preferences in word combinations, misleading a non-native learner into making mistakes influenced by his own language.This dictionary reconstructs the frame to which 3,000 Italian entries belong and aims to help non-Italian speakers with an advanced linguistic competence to find the appropriate word combinations for communicating in Italian. Moreover, this dictionary can also be useful for native speakers who want to improve their lexical choices in writing and speaking Italian. The dictionary, contrary to ordinary monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, systematically lists word combinations (almost 90,000), explaining and/or exemplifying them.Also available: Dizionario Combinatorio Italiano, a more extensive, 2-volume hardcover edition with 6,500 entries listing over 200,000 word combinations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation), between vowels (monophthongization), or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters, the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data, and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach, as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic, this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology, and to phonologists in general, and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.

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

This book pioneers a tridimensional approach to (dis)fluency, evaluating fluency across three different dimensions, mainly speech, gesture, and interaction. Drawing from an extensive video dataset covering different languages and speech genres in French and English, the present research goes beyond traditional production-oriented models of so-called ‘disfluency’ phenomena, and aims to unravel the complexities of human multimodal production and interactive processes. Designed for linguists, communication scholars, and researchers, this work resonates with the latest trends in different fields (Second Language Acquisition, Interactional Linguistics, and Gesture studies). It introduces a fresh perspective on disfluency by integrating visual-gestural features, such as hand gestures, gaze, and facial expressions, captured in situated interaction.

This book presents three major hypotheses concerning the development of fricatives in Gothic. First, Gothic introduced aspiration or a phonological feature [spread glottis] to the fricative system. Second, this acquisition of aspirated fricatives should be explained as a contact-induced change. Specifically, a Gothic/Greek bilingual community may be held responsible for initiating and diffusing the contact change. Third, I claim that this contact-driven featural enrichment prompted an array of radical restructurings of fricatives in their phonological and morphological organizations in Gothic, notably the occurrence of Final Devoicing in contrast to the nonoccurrence of medial voicing, the elimination of Verner’s Law effects in strong verbs, the operation of Thurneysen’s Law, and the apparently irregular split of PGmc. */fl-/ to Go. /fl-/ and /þl-/. Thus, privileged by a Lower Danube community largely composed of Greek/Gothic bilinguals, this cluster of mid-fourth-century innovations came to define the phonological and morphological identities of Biblical Gothic.

This book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork, premodern texts, and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010, this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim, explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language, and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.

The present book provides an introduction to the linguistic model of Construction Grammar, offering a full analysis of the grammar of the English language. It covers all levels of morpho-syntactic form-meaning units: including sentence types, tense and aspect, argument structure, phrases, idioms, word and morphological constructions. In line with its usage-based approach, all constructions are discussed using authentic corpus examples. In order to illustrate how constructions can be learnt, the book draws on authentic data from child language. Furthermore, corpus analysis is used to show which lexical items typically occur in the slots of constructions and make up their ‘collo-profile’.A key feature of the book is that it develops a systematic method for showing how constructions combine to form actual utterances. For this purpose, so-called ‘construction grids’ are developed which contain all the constructions that make up even the most complex sentences and show points of overlap between them.

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.

This book contributes to the discussion of challenges faced in different areas of corpus linguistics, namely the compilation, annotation, and analysis of linguistic corpora. In a field of growing corpus sizes and expanding possibilities of gathering data, some old issues persist, while at the same time new problems have emerged. As the compilation and study of language corpora gets increasingly sophisticated and complex, continuous attention on ways of dealing with the data in question and challenges in text selection and interpretation is needed. The contributions to this volume address problems relating to a variety of areas in corpus linguistic study, including corpus annotation, data variability, learner language, social media texts, and database utilization. The authors provide critical overviews and research-based analyses, discuss the nature of some of the common pitfalls, and offer solutions to existing problems.

This volume presents research on second language learning through audiovisual input, conducted within the SUBTiLL (Subtitles in Language Learning) project at the University of Barcelona. It includes studies exploring various language dimensions and skills, such as vocabulary, pronunciation, and reading, while also considering learner factors, such as language learning aptitude and proficiency. Two distinctive features of this collective volume are 1) the inclusion of children and teenagers as participants in studies, addressing the gap concerning young learners in this line of research, and 2) an emphasis on longitudinal studies, enhancing the ecological validity of the findings. The studies in this volume also showcase a diverse range of research instruments, from eye-tracking to retrospective interviews, enriching our comprehension of this innovative research area. A concluding chapter synthesizes these findings, linking them to prior research and advancing our understanding of the role of audiovisual input in language acquisition.