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Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation
This book presents an in-depth description of information structure in Isthmus Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken by around 50,000 people in southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, and represents the first book-length treatment of information structure in a Mesoamerican language. Three main observations motivate the study: Strong documentation and a relatively large and active speaker community create a unique opportunity to document information structure in Isthmus Zapotec and to study the language as it is used by speakers in everyday life;As a tonal and verb-initial language, the examination of Isthmus Zapotec represents a chance to explore the possible combinations of tone, intonation, morphology and verb-initial syntax that may occur in the coding of information structure; andThe close analysis of spontaneous speech in an endangered language contributes to our theoretical understanding of information structure and informs our knowledge of language documentation practices and revitalization efforts. Overall, the analysis presented here demonstrates the value and need for information structure studies to document and analyze naturally-occurring data.
Language Activism
While top-down policies and declarations have yet to establish equal status and opportunities for speakers of all languages in practice, activists and advocates at local levels are playing an increasingly significant role in the creation of new social imaginaries and practices in multilingual contexts. This volume describes how social actors across multiple domains contribute to the elusive goal of linguistic equality or justice through their language activism practices. Through an ethnographic account of Indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language activism in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study illuminates the (sometimes conflicting) imaginaries of what positive social change is and how it should be achieve...
Contesting Leviathan
In 1999, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, the first gray whale in seven decades was killed by Makah whalers. The hunt marked the return of a centuries-old tradition and, predictably, set off a fierce political and environmental debate. Whalers from the Makah Indian Tribe and antiwhaling activists have clashed for over twenty years, with no end to this conflict in sight. In Contesting Leviathan, anthropologist Les Beldo describes the complex judicial and political climate for whale conservation in the United States, and the limits of the current framework in which whales are treated as “large fish” managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Emphasizing the moral dimension of...
Information structure in spoken Japanese
This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguistics and functional linguistics. As a case study, it investigates IS phenomena in spoken Japanese: particles including so-called topic particles, case particles, and zero particles; word order; and intonation. The study discusses how these phenomena are related to cognitive and communicative mechanisms of humans.
Information structure and information theory
This volume results from the workshop "Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express" at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought - and this book brings - together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored. The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.
Demonstratives in discourse
This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on mann...
Quantification and scales in change
This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more...
Nominal anchoring
The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are: How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one re...
Communication and Content
Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and r...
Referring expression generation in context
Reference production, often termed Referring Expression Generation (REG) in computational linguistics, encompasses two distinct tasks: (1) one-shot REG, and (2) REG-in-context. One-shot REG explores which properties of a referent offer a unique description of it. In contrast, REG-in-context asks which (anaphoric) referring expressions are optimal at various points in discourse. This book offers a series of in-depth studies of the REG-in-context task. It thoroughly explores various aspects of the task such as corpus selection, computational methods, feature analysis, and evaluation techniques. The comparative study of different corpora highlights the pivotal role of corpus choice in REG-in-co...
