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Quotatives
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 327

Quotatives

Research on quotation has yielded a rich and diverse knowledge-base. Scientific interest has been sparked particularly by the recent emergence of new quotative forms in typologically related and unrelated languages (i.e. English be like, Hebrew kazé, Japanese mitai-na).The present collection gives a platform to research conducted within different linguistic sub-disciplines and on the basis of a variety of Western and non-Western languages. The introduction presents an overview of forms and functions of old and new quotative constructions. The nine chapters investigate quotation from different perspectives, from conversation analysis over grammaticalization and language variation and change to typological and formal approaches. The collection advocates a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon 'quotation', seeking a more nuanced knowledge-base as regards the linguistic properties, social uses and pragmatic functions than monolingual or single disciplinary approaches deliver. The cross-disciplinary nature and the wealth of data make the findings broadly available and relevant.

The Grammar of Thinking
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 276

The Grammar of Thinking

Sentence (1) represents the phenomenon of reported thought, (2) that of reported speech: (1) Sasha thought: "This is fine" or Sasha thought that this would be fine (2) Sasha said: "This is fine" or Sasha said that this would be fine While sentences as in (1) have often been discussed in the context of those in (2) the former have rarely received specific attention. This has meant that much of the semantic and structural complexity, cross-linguistic variation, as well as the precise relation between (1) and (2) and related phenomena have remained unstudied. Addressing this gap, this volume represents the first collection of studies specifically dedicated to reported thought. It introduces a w...

Evidential Marking in European Languages
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 714

Evidential Marking in European Languages

How are evidential functions distinguished by means other than grammatical paradigms, i.e. by function words and other lexical units? And how inventories of such means can be compared across languages (against an account also of grammatical means used to mark information source)? This book presents an attempt at supplying a comparative survey of such inventories by giving detailed “evidential profiles” for a large part of European languages: Continental Germanic, English, French, Basque, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Modern Greek, and Ibero-Romance languages, such as Catalán, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Each language is treated in a separate chapter, and their profiles are based on a largely unified set of concepts based on function and/or etymological provenance. The profiles are preceded by a chapter which clarifies the theoretical premises and methodological background for the format followed in the profiles. The concluding chapter presents a synthesis of findings from these profiles, including areal biases and the formulation of methodological problems that call for further research.

Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 648

Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) ...

Gender Across Languages
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 364

Gender Across Languages

This is the second of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the a...

Pragmatics of Society
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 720

Pragmatics of Society

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

Speech Representation in the History of English
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 265

Speech Representation in the History of English

Representing what someone else has said is an integral part of spoken and written communication. Speech representation occurs in many contexts from news reports and legal trials to everyday conversation. Although commonplace, it requires sophisticated choices regarding what to represent and how to represent it. These choices can highlight a speaker's voice, shape our perception of the reported speech, or support our claims of authority.While speech representation in Present-day English has been studied extensively, this book extends the discussion to historical periods. Speech Representation in the History of English explores speech representation of the past, providing in-depth analyses of ...

Language Change in the 20th Century
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 300

Language Change in the 20th Century

Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages examines the distinctive features that set the study of the 20th century apart from preceding periods. With a primary focus on Romance languages, including Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, the book advocates for the adoption of innovative methodologies to enhance the nuanced retrieval of research data: the use of speaker’s attitudes questionnaires, apparent time constructions, and S-curves. Additionally, new materials are addressed as diachronic data sources: mass-media recordings from radio and TV, colloquial conversations, and sociolinguistic corpora. Results focus on the evolution of discourse markers, address terms, as well as on the influence of specific processes such as colloquialization or external mechanisms on the language changes developed during this period. In sum, the 20th century is presented in this book as a new strand in diachronic studies, rather than another time span.

Optimality-theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 383

Optimality-theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints. Unlike previous work on the topic, this book also takes into account the question of directionality of grammar. A model of grammar in which optimization processes interact bidirectionally allows both language generation-the process of selecting the optimal form of a given meaning-and language interpretation-the process of optimal interpretation of a given f...

A Matter of Complexity
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 270

A Matter of Complexity

Since natural languages exist in two different modalities – the visual-gestural modality of sign languages and the auditory-oral modality of spoken languages – it is obvious that all fields of research in modern linguistics will benefit from research on sign languages. Although previous studies have provided important insights into a wide range of phenomena of sign languages, there are still many aspects of sign languages that have not yet been investigated thoroughly. The structure of subordinated clauses is a case in point. The study of these complex syntactic structures in the visual-gestural modality adds to our understanding of linguistic variation in the domain of subordination. Mo...