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Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history. In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, inter...
'Family Talk' presents a close examination of talk and its role in the day-to-day life of the American family. The text analyses an extensive body of data to identify ways in which family members create and enact their identities within the family.
Usage-based linguistics, which is currently very popular, bases its understanding of language on two key points: Languages are cognitive-social constructs (i.e., learned vs genetically endowed), and, in order for communication and meaning to happen, speakers must find a way to meet/understand each other, overcoming various differences (lexicon, social, register, etc.) to arrive there. In this book, high-level contributors combine research from various usage-based perspectives to explore these questions: How do proficient speakers accomplish 'mental contact' or communication through the available semiotic linguistic resources they share with other members of their discourse community? How do young children learn to accomplish this? And how do speakers of multiple languages learn to accomplish this across languages?
Amusement is an emotion with power. It has the power to make us laugh, but it can also have a power over us (for good or for ill) to control our attention or memory. Amusement can empower our resistance to oppression, or it can itself become an oppressive force. Our amusement can make others feel shame. Amusement even has the power to affect (and be affected by) out moral assessment of others. This volume offers twelve essays from leading and emerging scholars that explore the moral quagmire that is the emotion of amusement. It is a collection that considers the moral psychology of amusement from a range of perspectives, going as far back as ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy up to the most current psychological and sociological findings.
Little Words is an interdisciplinary examination of the functions and change in the use of clitics, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, discourse particles, auxiliary/light verbs, prepositions, and other “little words” that have played a central role in linguistic theory and in language acquisition research. Leading scholars present advanced research in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse function, historical development, variation, and acquisition by children and adults. This unique volume integrates the views and findings of these different research areas into one professional source to be used within and across disciplines. Languages studied include English, Spanish, French, Romanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Slavonic, and Medieval Leonese.
In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with t...
Over the last several decades, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and psycholinguists have investigated the implicit and explicit continuum in language development and use from theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives. This book addresses these perspectives in an effort to build connections among them and to draw pedagogical implications when possible. The volume includes an examination of the psychological and neurological processes of implicit and explicit learning, what aspects of language learning can be affected by explicit learning, and the effects of bilingualism on the mental processing of language. Rigorous empirical research investigations probe specific aspects of acquiring morphosyntax and phonology, including early input, production, feedback, age, and study abroad. A final section explores the rich insights provided into language processing by bilingualism, including such major areas as aging, third language acquisition, and language separation.
In the last three decades the field of endangered and minority languages has evolved rapidly, moving from the initial dire warnings of linguists to a swift increase in the number of organizations, funding programs, and community-based efforts dedicated to documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Sustaining Linguistic Diversity brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. Together, these contributions provide a state-of-the-art overview of current work in defining, documenting, and developing the world's smaller languages and language varieties. The book begins by grappling with how we define endangerment—how lan...
Arabic, one of the official languages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in today’s political and economic spheres. The study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: earliest grammatical accounts date from the 8th century and include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. In recent years the academic study of Arabic has become increasingly sophisticated and broad. This state-of-the-art volume presents the most recent research in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, including computational linguistics, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. It also covers sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis by looking at issues such as gender, urbanization, and language ideology. Underlying themes include the changing and evolving attitudes of speakers of Arabic and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation in the Middle East.