Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics - Böcker

«Scholars in cognitive linguistics will find his points helpful as reminders of what to teach our own students, for his ideas are enlightening enough to stimulate more innovative research in this field. Furthermore, the author’s employment of diverse methods such as sample analysis and cross-linguistic research is particularly suitable for graduate students and beginners in cognitive linguistics. In this sense, this book serves as a much-needed handbook in academic programs of cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics in general.»(Ke Li and Shukang Li, Metaphor and Symbol) The general aim of this book is to contribute to a better understanding of metonymy, a phenomenon which still, despite the current upsurge in scholarly attention, remains puzzling in some respects. The theoretical framework of this book is provided by the school of thought commonly known as Cognitive Linguistics. The first part of the book analyses and develops various hypotheses concerning the nature of metonymy advanced in the literature to date. It presents numerous arguments in favour of the conceptual rather than purely linguistic basis of metonymy and shows that metonymy is a ubiquitous phenomenon not only in language but above all in thought. The second part contains a thorough analysis of the constraints to the scope of metonymy and discusses the differences between metonymy and other forms of so-called figurative language. The third part is devoted to the role and importance of metonymy in communication and focuses on the creative functions of metonymy, which have received surprisingly little scholarly attention to date, such as euphemism, vague language, and humour. The fourth part of this book is centred on some problematic issues concerning the distinction between metonymy, metaphor, and synecdoche.

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words – new words, both descriptive and analytical – for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language. The Writing of Aletheia is the first study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger’s language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philsophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger’s writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest.

This edited volume investigates the role of digital communication in relation to linguistic diversity and language education in today’s digitally networked world. It aims to examine (1) how language(s) are (re)contextualized and (re)localized concerning other languages, multimodalities, semiotic resources, genres, and repertoires in various domains of digital communication and (2) what pragmatic functions digital communication may serve in terms of language education – both in and out of classroom – and pedagogy. The collection includes contributions exploring diverse digital venues in which language has multiple different roles and functions, illustrating micro- and macro-linguistic practices in varied areas of society, including education, politics, technology, media, and popular culture.

This book explores how interactions are achieved in new academic discourses, from both cross-genre and cross-disciplinary perspectives. By adopting a corpus-based analysis, it takes a detailed look at academic blogs, online book reviews, the abbreviated summary of article highlights, and the challenging postgraduate genre of the three-minute thesis. Through careful study of these discourses, the author aims to expand our understanding of the way researchers seek to make their work accessible to new audiences and create more egalitarian and engaging relations with them. Specifically, the author offers thoughtful analyses of the workings of stance and engagement to see how academics manage these new rhetorical challenges and reach out to both lay and specialist audiences. Through these analyses we gain new insights into both the genres themselves and how academics write in the twenty-first century. The book thus serves as an up to the minute work on new issues in the field of English for Academic Purposes.

«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.

This book falls in the broad subject area of psycholinguistics and second-language acquisition. More specifically, this book is written for researchers stepping into the field of morphological processing so that they are not overwhelmed by the large number of individual studies and do not lose sight of the whole picture. 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, participant individual differences, and participant group-level differences, this book is a useful theoretical reference work for morphological processing researchers. By considering the various potential confounding factors reviewed in this book, researchers are in a better position to more scientifically and meticulously reduce or eliminate the effects of potential covariates so that they can focus on their independent variables of interest. It may also help researchers in evaluating previous studies and their findings and whether or not these studies may have failed to consider possible confounding factors.

«The contribution of Dr Doerr’s book is beyond measure. Her research relies on highly sophisticated methodology with invaluable practical applications in academic style editing for scholars who are non-native speakers of English. Academic Style Proofreading stands to become vital for readers from across the globe engaged in scholarly publication.»(John Casey Gooch, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Literature, University of Texas at Dallas, USA)«This book explicates the roles of hybridised professions in academic publishing and offers a fresh and thought-provoking corpus stylistics analysis of academic style proofreading. The author starts an important and timely conversation about explanations and treatment of academic style in the spirit of moving towards a more inclusive international academic discourse community. Its insights will be an invaluable resource to academics and publishing professionals alike.»(Karen Dwyer, PhD, Lecturer (Teaching) in Modern English Grammar and Research Methodology, University College London)In the current international context, it is increasingly required to write not only «correctly» but also in accordance with the stylistic expectations of the academic community. However, because academic style and its standards are only mentioned – if not glossed over – in textbooks and journal guidelines, many non-native students and scholars receive their linguistically correct papers with recommendations to «revise the English» but are unable to comprehend where the problem lies or how to address it. Moreover, change in and confusion among the language professionals who are in a position to assist these scholars – that is, revisors, copyeditors and proofreaders – impedes any clarity in terms of who should rework academic style before submission and publication.This volume seeks to unpack the concept of «academic style proofreading» and its components through a multifaceted analysis including methodologies such as terminology, corpus stylistics and error analysis. This is intended to define the purpose and intricacies of this new aspect of academic writing and present common errors in academic style, as well as possible proofreading solutions, in economics and the humanities. In doing so, the book presents an assessment of the issues, methods and implications of academic style proofreading for research, professional and educational purposes.

«Michelle Leese's book is a must-read for those interested in the German impersonal passive. Based on an experimental study of almost 400 zero-argument passives she convincingly shows that this allegedly "exceptional" passive is the very core from which all werden-passives in their meaning as "event-focused action" are derived.»(Petra M. Vogel, Professor of German Linguistics, University of Siegen, Germany)«This book presents a vast amount of original data to confront a glaring weakness of the aspect analysis of the German passive: if the actional passive is telic, why is the impersonal passive of the type Es wurde getanzt atelic? The answer given is a revelation delightful in its simplicity.»(Dr Christopher Beedham, Honorary Lecturer, Department of German, University of St Andrews, Scotland)Actional passives are conventionally considered to be the result of a voice analysis conversion process. They are said to derive from semantically identical underlying actives, even though most passives do not contain the agent – the entity carrying out the action – that would be crucial to such a conversion. Beedham’s aspect analysis offered an alternative perspective which discarded any notion of a mandatory connection to the active, and instead proposed that passive formation requires only a lexically telic verb, compositional telicity and a patient (affected entity) subject.This book challenges both these analyses via an empirical investigation into the somewhat neglected impersonal passive in German of the type Es wurde getanzt, which, as a zero-argument, atelic construction, exists as an exception to both the voice and aspect analysis rules. Using the theoretical framework of Saussurean structuralism and Beedham’s «method of exceptions and their correlations», this book presents a new, «event-focused» analysis of both this impersonal passive and the German actional passive in general; plus, it proposes that since Es wurde getanzt, as the barest form of passive and the closest realisation of the werden + ge-V-t core of all passives, is atelic, this werden-passive core too is atelic.

«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.

Polysemous lexical items have multiple senses associated with a single form, and these senses are interrelated. Polysemy is a universal and omnipresent phenomenon, providing a robust tool to convey creatively our ideas and thoughts. As a result, polysemy presents challenges for second language (L2) learners.Existing studies on the issue of polysemy in language acquisition often rely on researchers’ subjective understandings of the network of meanings around a lexical item or focus on English examples. Yet Chinese lexis exhibits greater polysemy than English and deserves its own examination. This book takes one Chinese polysemous item as an example to explore how native (L1) speakers and L2 learners perceive its multiple senses as well as how these senses are acquired by L2 learners. This book also investigates the predictive strengths of various factors that contribute to the acquisition pattern. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted to achieve these objectives, including methods from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

This book shares a narrative inquiry study that explores the voices of Chinese students and unveils how they understand their study of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as part of their higher education (HE) journey in the UK. The book foregrounds the neo-liberalisation of the university and considers visiting Chinese students in this commodified education space. While challenging common misperceptions of Chinese students that result in the negative labelling and homogenisation of this international student cohort, it links the discussion to aspects of Orientalism applied to East Asian students, reportedly still evident in Western universities today.For contextualisation purposes and the encouragement of a meaningful understanding of contemporary Chinese students, the book includes an exploration of Chinese Education Reforms. The core argument sees a need for an increasing understanding of contemporary Chinese students in the UK HE academic community in relation to social, historical and cultural considerations, in order to enhance their Western education experience.

In this book modality and its learner variety in Japanese are investigated from the perspective of grammaticalization in the functional framework. It 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. Accordingly, it deals with the modal system and its constituents in Japanese, accommodating all the grammatical means of modariti (modality) in the Nihongo bunpou (Japanese grammar system). This study also casts light on the learner variety of modality, which is comprised of two core systems, epistemic and deontic, both of which are evident at the utterance level and the morphosyntactic level. The learner variety of modality elucidated here is presented as a proto-modality, which is viewed as a system in its own right rather than as an improvised or distorted version of the native modal system in Japanese.

How have media constructions around terrorism changed since 9.11? This book analyses the ways that language is employed in the media to reference discourses around terrorism in different social systems and doctrines, and illustrates the ways in which news reporting around terrorism is filtered according to a wide range of phenomena including national interests, the goals of those who run the press, international relations, methods of news production, audience targeting and other historical, political and social factors.This book collects and analyses corpora from news articles in the two most widely read newspapers in China and the UK. Corpus techniques including frequency and keyness are merged with methods associated with critical discourse analysis particularly investigation of social context. This book shows that there is a wide range of possible discursive constructions of terrorism in the media. Such different perspectives are likely to shape national or even global opinion on how to tackle terrorism.

This volume contains selected chapters from researchers and scholars concerning global English in the Arab world. It brings a new perspective to the phenomenon of global English as today’s lingua franca by focusing on an area of the world that is troubled by the spread of English. The book goes to the heart of a linguistic dilemma: the impact of global English on the Arabic language, Arab culture, and identity. New empirical evidence and insights into this problem are presented by a variety of researchers. The majority raise concerns about the long-term viability of Modern Standard Arabic in the face of global English. In light of the ever-expanding growth of global English, this book gives voice to the worries of people in the Arab world about maintaining their language, culture, and identity.

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.

Given the increasing use of English worldwide and in intercultural communication, there is a growing interest in attitudes towards non-native speaker accents in English. Research on attitudes towards non-native English accents is therefore important because of concerns about positive and negative discrimination between people who speak with different accents. This book reveals exactly what types of accent variations trigger positive and negative attitudes towards the speaker.The author argues that certain types of variation in the pronunciation of English can have a significant effect on how listeners identify an accent and explores how this variation affects the development of certain attitudes towards the speaker. Specific sounds that are difficult for many learners to acquire (e.g. the initial sounds in ‘this’ or ‘June’) are examined in terms of attitudes towards speakers’ pronunciation, including an original comparison of two different kinds of non-native accents (German and Greek). The results of the study provide a basis for further research in second language acquisition and applied linguistics as well as practical information for language instructors at all levels of English education.

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 Stanisław 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 (passé composé, passé 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.

Analysis of language as a combination of both a structural and a lexical component overlooks a third all-encompassing aspect: dynamics. Dynamic Linguistics approaches the description of the complex phenomenon that is human language by focusing on this important but often neglected aspect.This book charts the belated recognition of the importance of dynamic synchrony in twentieth-century linguistics and discusses two other key concepts in some detail: speech community and language structure. Because of their vital role in the development of a dynamic approach to linguistics, the three linguists William Labov, André Martinet and Roman Jakobson are featured, in particular Martinet in whose later writings – neglected in the English-speaking world – the fullest appreciation of the dynamics of language to date are found. A sustained attempt is also made to chronicle precursors, between the nineteenth century and the 1970s, who provided inspiration for these three scholars in the development of a dynamic approach to linguistic description and analysis.The dynamic approach to linguistics is intended to help consolidate functional structuralists, geolinguists, sociolinguists and all other empirically minded linguists within a broader theoretical framework as well as playing a part in reversing the overformalism of the simplistic structuralist framework which has dominated, and continues to dominate, present-day linguistic description.

This corpus-based study investigates the use of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose through the analysis of three English versions of the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber).Previous studies have explored the relevance of the cultural and linguistic positioning of different translators, but thus far no corpus-based study of nominalization has been undertaken in relation to translator style. This book uses quantitative and qualitative analyses of the nominalized transform of finite verbal forms in three Chinese-to-English translations to distinguish between translator styles, concluding that nominalization is a key identifier in translations. This book provides a comprehensive picture of the use of nominalization in English translations of Chinese literary prose and, more generally, encourages further study into nominalization in translation.

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 book serves as an insightful ethnographic introduction to the language and oral traditions of the Inugguit, a sub-group of the Inuit who live in north-west Greenland. A unique work, it encompasses an overview of the grammar of Polar Eskimo – a language spoken by about 770 people – as well as a description of their oral traditions (drum-dancing and story-telling) and the most extensive glossary of the language compiled to date. The book presents the Polar Eskimo language in the orthography established by the author in conjunction with the local community in Greenland, an extremely difficult task for a language made up of such an aberrant phonology and with no written tradition. By exploring their ways of speaking and ways of belonging, Leonard provides an original ethnographic interpretation of the nature of Inugguit social organization and their world-view. Some Ethnolinguistic Notes on Polar Eskimo will serve as an invaluable resource for linguists who specialise in the Eskimo-Aleut group and will be of much interest to anthropologists working in the Arctic region.

Language requires investigation within a broad framework, which can only be achieved if the elements studied belong to all realms of verbal (and to some extent non-verbal) communication. Grammar is merely the systematized aspect of language: by drawing on data from oral communication in a number of languages – with its phonological, pragmatic and gestural aspects – and taking into account palaeontology, anthropology, psychology and evolutionary biology, it is possible to shed new light on the phenomenon of language, meant and designed for communication, and not merely grammar.This book explores why language operates the way it does, why it is acquired the way it is, how it evolved in the first place, and why it is that some phenomena in language are universal while others are not. The author also considers whether apparently separate defining properties of our species are in fact narrowly correlated aspects of one and the same biological reality, which converges in language. Finally, the book explores the possibility that language is both the reason and the effect of the intrinsic responsibility that we feel for our fellow beings, akin to that which in different contexts is called love for our neighbour, or altruism.