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This volume deals with a variety of pragmatic issues involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second-language acquisition and cross-cultural studies. Part I contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from contrastive work, for example, the question of tertium comparationis and its place in the development of contrastive studies as well as the applicability of generalizations proposed by speech-act theorists in contrasting concrete languages and cultures. The second part tackles a number of pragmatic issues involved in second-language learners' written productions, classroom discourse, as well as more general questions pertaining to pragmatic errors and learners' interlanguage. An Index of terms and an Index of names complete the volume.
This innovative and original volume brings together studies that apply cognitive and functional linguistics to the study of the L2 acquisition of Japanese. With each article grounded on the usage-based model and/or conceptual notions such as foregrounding and subjectivity, the volume sheds light on how cognitive and functional linguistics can help us understand aspects of Japanese acquisition that have been neglected by traditionalists.
This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages."
The Language of Daily Life in England (14001800) is an important state-of-the art account of historical sociolinguistic and socio-pragmatic research. The volume contains nine studies and an introductory essay which discuss linguistic and social variation and change over four centuries. Each study tackles a linguistic or social phenomenon, and approaches it with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, always embedded in the socio-historical context. The volume presents new information on linguistic variation and change, while evaluating and developing the relevant theoretical and methodological tools. The writers form one of the leading research teams in the field, and, as compilers of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, have an informed understanding of the data in all its depth. This volume will be of interest to scholars in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and socio-pragmatics, but also e.g. social history. The approachable style of writing makes it also inviting for advanced students.
Introduction / Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Identity construction: On young women's prosodic construction of identity: evidence from Greek conversational narratives / Argiris Archakis and Dimitris Papazachariou -- Now he thinks he's listening to rock music: identity construction among German teenage girls / Janet Spreckels -- Multilingual practices and identity negotiations among Turkish-speaking young people in a diasporic context / Vally Lytra and Taskin Baraç -- Particular expressions: Lexical innovations in Madrid's teenage talk: some intensifiers / Juan A. Martínez López -- En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language / Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Languages in contrast: a proposal for comparative research on youth language with an outline of diatopic-contrast research within the Hispanic world / Klaus Zimmermann -- Pragmatic markers in contrast: Spanish pues nada and English anyway / Anna-Brita Stenström -- Anglicisms in the informal speech of Norwegian and Chilean adolescents / Eli-Marie Drange -- Similarities and differences between slang in Kaunas and London teenagers' speech / Jolanta Legaudaite
The contributions to the book Communicating Gender in Context deal not only with grammatical gender, but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with.In accordance with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.
"This is a trailblazing volume. Too often do studies in historical linguistics adopt social (or other) theories of yesterday. But here we have cutting-edge research on social roles, identities and practices applied innovatively to historical data, leading to new insights-not just about Late Modern English but also about the dynamics of language, social phenomena and change-and lighting the way for future research." Jonathan Culpeper, Senior Lecturer, English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University --
The history of English writing is, to a considerable extent, the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts, the materials studied represent procedural and behavioural discourse in a variety of genres. The primary texts, from AElfric s homilies to medieval cooking recipes to seventeenth-century American conduct literature to present-day language textbooks, display a variety of linguistic devices typical of instruction. The materials nonetheless differ with respect to the explicitness of their instructive purpose. Bringing together a broad range of instructional writing from the Old, Middle and Modern English periods, this collection celebrates the sixtieth birthday of Risto Hiltunen, who has successfully combined discourse-linguistic approaches with the history of English in his research, and inspired the colleagues and former students contributing to this volume."
This monograph reconsiders the question of speech isochrony, the regular recurrence of (stressed) syllables in time, from an empirical point of view. It proposes a methodology for discovering isochrony auditorily in speech and for verifying it instrumentally in the acoustic laboratory. In a small-scale study of an English conversational extract, the gestalt-like rhythmic structures which isochrony creates are shown to have a hierarchical organization. Then in a large-scale study of a corpus of British and American radio phone-in programs and family table conversations, the function of speech rhythm at turn transitions is investigated. It is argued that speech rhythm serves as a metric for th...
This detailed study challenges the claim that syntax is arbitrary and autonomous, as well as the assumption that Spanish clitic clusters constitute grammaticalized units. Diverse--apparently unrelated--restrictions on clitic clustering in both simplex VP's and Accusative cum Infinitive structures are shown to be cognitively motivated, given the meaning of the individual clitics, and the compositional/interpretative routines those meanings motivate. The analysis accounts, in coherent and principled fashion, for the absolute non-occurrence of some clusters, and the interpretation-dependent acceptability of all remaining clitic combinations: cluster acceptability depends on the ease with which the given clitic combination can be processed to yield a congruent message; there is no point in combining clitics whose meanings preclude speedy processing of the cluster. The monograph goes beyond previous work on Spanish clitics in its wealth of data, the range of syntactic phenomena discussed, and its analytic scope.