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Focusing on the sociolinguistic history of Germanic languages, the current volume challenges the traditional teleological approach of language historiography. The 30 contributions present alternative histories of ten ‘big’ as well as ‘small’ Germanic languages and varieties in the last 300 years. Topics covered in this book include language variation and change and the politics of language contact and choice, seen against the background of standardization processes of written and oral text genres and from the viewpoint of larger sections of the population.
The essays in this volume are concerned with early printed narrative texts in Western Europe. The aim of this book is to consider to what extent the shift from hand-written to printed books left its mark on narrative literature in a number of vernacular languages. Did the advent of printing bring about changes in the corpus of narrative texts when compared with the corpus extant in manuscript copies? Did narrative texts that already existed in manuscript form undergo significant modifications when they began to be printed? How did this crucial media development affect the nature of these narratives? Which strategies did early printers develop to make their texts commercially attractive? Which social classes were the target audiences for their editions? Around half of the articles focus on developments in the history of early printed narrative texts, others discuss publication strategies. This book provides an impetus for cross-linguistic research. It invites scholars from various disciplines to get involved in an international conversation about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century narrative literature.
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of spatial configurations of language use and of language use in space. It consists of four parts. The first part covers the various practices of describing space through language, including spatial references in spoken interaction or in written texts, the description of motion events as well as the creation of imaginative spaces in storytelling. The second part surveys aspects of the spatial organization of face-to-face communication including not only spatial arrangements of small groups in interaction but also the spatial dimension of sign language and gestures. The third part is devoted to the communicative resources of constructed spaces and the ways in which these facilitate and shape communication. Part four, finally, is devoted to pragmatics across space and cultures, i.e. the ways in which language use differs across language varieties, languages and cultures.
Open publication Opening the 9-volume-series Handbooks of Pragmatics, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics. It covers the central theories and approaches as well as key concepts and topics characteristic of mainstream pragmatics, i.e. the traditional and most widespread approach to the ways and means of using language in authentic social contexts. The in-depth articles provide reliable orientational overviews useful to researchers, students, and teachers. They are both state of the art reviews of their topics and critical evaluations in the light of subsequent developments. Topics are thus considered within their scholarly context and also critical...
This book is a collection of studies about forms of address in the world’s languages, with a focus on contrast and difference. The individual chapters highlight inter- and intralinguistic variation in the expression of address and its sociol-cultural functions across media, registers, geographical contexts and time – in more than 15 languages. The volume showcases the variety of approaches that exists in current address research, including the breadth of contrastive methodologies harnessing surveys and questionnaires, focus group discussions, corpus linguistics, discourse and conversation analysis to offer complementary perspectives on culture-specific address practice. This volume is for students and researchers of address and social interaction in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including various sub-disciplines of linguistics (such as contrastive, variational and intercultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and morphology) and intercultural communication, as well as experts in individual languages and qualitative sociologists.
The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
This book traces the German-Hebrew contact zones in which Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss lived and produced their creative work in early twentieth-century Germany and later in British Mandate Palestine after their voluntary or forced migration in the 1920s and 1930s. Set in shifting historical contexts and literary debates – the notion of the German vernacular nation, Hebraism and Jewish Revival in Weimar Germany, the crisis of language in modernist literature, and the fledgling multilingual communities in Jerusalem, the writings of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss emerge as unique forms of counterlanguage. The three chapters of the book are dedicated to Scholem’s Hebraist lamentation, Kraft’s Germanist steadfastness and Strauss’s polyglot dialogue, respectively. The examination of their correspondences, diaries, scholarship and literary oeuvres demonstrates how counteractive writing practices helped confront concrete and metaphorical crises of language to produce compelling alternatives to literary silence, amnesia or paralysis that were prompted by cultural marginality and dislocation.
According to well-established views, language has several subsystems where each subsystem (e.g. syntax, morphology, phonology) operates on the basis of hierarchically organised units. When it comes to the graphematic structure of words, however, the received view appears to be that linear structure is all that matters. Contrary to this view, a sub-field of writing systems research emerges that can be called non-linear or supra-segmental graphematics. Drawing on parallels with supra-segmental phonology, supra-segmental graphematics claims the existence and relevance of cross-linguistically available building blocks, such as the syllable and the foot, in alphabetical writing systems, such as t...
How do participants display affectivity in social interaction? Based on recordings of authentic everyday conversations and radio phone-ins, this study offers a fine-grained analysis of how recipients of affect-laden informings deploy sound objects, i.e. interjections (oh, ooh and ah) and paralinguistic signals (whistle and clicks), for responsive displays of affectivity. Examining the use of such sound objects across a number of interactional activities including news telling, troubles talk, complaining, assessments and repair, the study provides evidence that the sound pattern and sequential placement of sound objects systematically contribute to their specific meaning-making in interaction, i.e. the management of sequence organisation and interactional relevancies (e.g. affiliation). Presenting an in-depth analysis of a little researched area of language use from an interactional linguistic perspective, the book will be of theoretical and methodological interest to an audience with a background in linguistics, sociology and conversational studies.