Bøger udgivet af De Gruyter Mouton

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

Textbooks inform readers that the precursor of Standard English was supposedly an East or Central Midlands variety which became adopted in London; that monolingual fifteenth century English manuscripts fall into internally-cohesive Types; and that the fourth Type, dating after 1435 and labelled ¿Chancery Standard¿, provided the mechanism by which this supposedly Midlands variety spread out from London. This set of explanations is challenged by taking a multilingual perspective, examining Anglo-Norman French, Medieval Latin and mixed-language contexts as well as monolingual English ones. By analysing local and legal documents, mercantile accounts, personal letters and journals, medical and religious prose, multiply-copied works, and the output of individual scribes, standardisation is shown to have been preceded by supralocalisation rather than imposed top-down as a single entity by governmental authority. Linguistic features examined include syntax, morphology, vocabulary, spelling, letter-graphs, abbreviations and suspensions, social context and discourse norms, pragmatics, registers, text-types, communities of practice social networks, and the multilingual backdrop, which was influenced by shifting socioeconomic trends.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Gestures are now viewed as an integral part of spoken language. But little attention has been paid to the recipients' cognitive processes of integrating both gesture and speech. How do people understand a speaker's gestures when inserted into gaps in the flow of speech? What cognitive-semiotic mechanisms allow this integration to occur? And what linguistic and gestural properties do people draw on when construing multimodal meaning? This book offers answers by investigating multimodal utterances in which speech is replaced by gestures. Through fine-grained cognitive-linguistic and cognitive-semiotic analyses of multimodal utterances combined with naturalistic perception experiments, six chapters explore gestures' potential to realize grammatical notions of nouns and verbs and to integrate with speech by merging into multimodal syntactic constructions. Analyses of speech-replacing gestures and a range of related phenomena compel us to consider gestures as well as spoken and signed language as manifestations of the same conceptual system. An overarching framework is proposed for studying these different modalities together - a multimodal cognitive grammar.

This is a comprehensive grammar of the Hills Karbi variety spoken predominantly in the Karbi Anglong districts. Karbi belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) family but its exact phylogenetic status has remained unclear. By providing a diachronically-oriented functional analysis of all structural levels of Karbi, this grammar offers a reference work that provides a thorough account of this language. The data in this grammar come from fieldwork that was primarily carried out in the district capital of Diphu although the corpus includes recordings of speakers from all over the two Karbi Anglong districts. This corpus is freely available both as fully glossed text in Himalayan Linguistics (Konnerth and Tisso 2018) and as original media files in ELAR (SOAS University of London). Now also including a glossary, this grammar is a thoroughly revised version of the 2014 dissertation of the author, which won the 2015 P¿¿ini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT). In this revised version, a few new sections have been added and numerous other sections have been thoroughly updated.

Linguistic varieties such as female speech, foreigner talk, and colloquial language have not gone unnoticed when it comes to Classical Greek, but little is known about later periods of the Greek language. In this collective volume leading experts in the field outline some of the most important varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, basing themselves on a broad range of literary and documentary sources, and advancing a number of innovative methodologies. Close attention is paid to the linguistic features that characterize these varieties, with in-depth discussions of lexical, morpho-syntactic, orthographic, and metrical variation, as well as the interrelationship between these different types of variation. The volume thus offers valuable insights into the nature of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, laying the foundation for future studies of linguistic variation in these later stages of the language, while at the same time providing a point of comparison for Classical Greek scholarship

In the Iranic-Semitic-Turkic contact area, where many languages are described as verb-final, 'Targets' (Goals, Recipients, etc.) tend to appear in the immediate postverbal position, a pattern violating the alleged 'basic word order'. Investigating empirical material, the present volume examines the idea of its contact-induced origin by combining various languages from inside and outside this contact area: the Greek variety Romeyka, Indic Domari, Iranic Balochi Kurdish, Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian and Sogdian, Nilotic Maa, Semitic Arabic and Aramaic, Sibiran and Iran-Turkic. The contributors investigate word order variation of transitive, ditransitive, and copula structures as well as intransitives with Targets. Their analyses highlight the relevance of grammatical, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive principles. The volume highlights the importance of Target structures for linguistic theory by offering new perspectives and will be of interest to typologists and linguists interested in word order variation and information structure.

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind. Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems-their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come-is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.

This grammar of Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) phonology adds to a sparse literature on the units of categorical form in the world's sign languages. At the same time, it brings descriptive and theoretical research on sign language phonology into better alignment by systematically evaluating current models of sign language phonology for each of the main parameters - handshape, location, and movement - against the KSL data. This grammar also makes a methodological contribution by using a unique dataset of KSL minimal pairs in the analysis, demonstrating that minimal pairs are not as infrequent in sign languages as previously thought.The main content of the book is found in five chapters on handshape, location, core articulatory movement, manner of movement, and other distinctive features (e.g., orientation, mouth actions). The book also contains two large appendices that document the phonological evidence for each of the 44 handshapes and 37 locations.This book will be a key reference for descriptive and typological studies of sign phonology, as well as a helpful resource for linguists interested in understanding the similarities and differences between current models of sign phonology and identifying promising avenues for future research.

Adverbs seem to raise unsolvable issues for theories of word-classes, both crosslinguistically and language-internally. The contributions in this volume all address this categorial problem from a variety of formal and functional points of view. In the first part, current definitions of the class for Romance and Germanic languages are being questioned and improved, drawing on data from English, German and Italian. The second part is devoted to adverbial scope in Romance (French, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese), Germanic, Modern Greek and Chinese, under special consideration of modal adverbs, subject-oriented manner adverbs and domain adverbs and adverbials. Syntactic and semantic relationships appear to lay the ground for a robust and fine-grained functional definition of adverbs and adverbials.

What is the boundary between lying and (intentionally) misleading? How does perjury differ from a garden-variety lie? In these fourteen essays, distinguished linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars draw on theoretical and empirical studies to map the landscape of falsehood, deception, and perjury and to survey practices of manipulation through puffery, bluffing and bullshit in courtrooms, politics, and everyday life.

This monograph presents an overview of current perspectives on the interaction between language, culture, and cognition, with a special focus on Africa. More specifically, it discusses the investigation of lexical-semantic fields and the occasional ethnocentric bias in cognitive experiments related to these domains. Additional topics addressed are cross-cultural differences in spatial orientation, and the progress made in the investigation of linguistic relativity or onomastics, modern views on the ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics, as well as politeness and impoliteness strategies. Furthermore, the impact of conversation analysis and the investigation of non-verbal communication in the field of anthropological linguistics and intercultural communication studies are being discussed.

Anybody with the chance of teaching English to Indonesian speakers should have experienced difficulties when it comes to non-verbal predicates and the placement of be. This volume looks at this matter from a grammar competition perspective.An experiment conducted in Bandar Lampung with Indonesian learners of English identified specific error patterns. These patterns result from grammar competition between the L1 Indonesian and the L2 English. This work mainly deals with the influence of adverbs such as still or already, and the category of the non-verbal predicate (adjectival, nominal, preposition phrase).Although the main focus of this work is in the field of language acquisition, this volume also provides a detailed contrast between English and Indonesian non-verbal predicates and the contrast of the English copula be and the Indonesian copulas ada and adalah. The lingusitic description is done in a generative DM-based approach. Thus, this volume does not only provide new insights in the field language acquisiton, but also in the generative description of Indonesian in general and non-verbal predicates in particular.

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world's languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term 'binominal lexeme' is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

Researchers have looked into the role of individual differences in second language learning and found that differences between learners in areas such as language aptitude, language learning motivation and exposure to the language influence second language learning. Most of this research concerned adults. Far fewer studies have addressed the role of individual differences in second language learning of young learners.As second language learning programmes tend to start earlier than before and children are nowadays frequently exposed to a foreign language in social settings such as online games and social media, studying the role of individual differences in young learners can contribute both to SLA-theories and to evidence-based L2 education.This book discusses recent findings concerning the role of individual differences in language learning in young learners. The chapters in the book concern different topics linked to internal individual differences such as language aptitude, motivation, attitude and external individual differences such as exposure and type of instruction, the relative contribution of internal and external factors to language learning, and the interplay between the two types of individual differences.

Hate speech creates environments that are conducive to hate crimes and broad-scale conflict. This book discusses the mechanics of hate speech and its expression from a linguistic perspective. The author addresses the challenges that legal practitioners and linguists meet when dealing with hate speech, especially with the advent of social media, and offers the reader a comprehensive linguistic approach to the legal problem of hate speech.

In the francophone world of the 20th and early 21st centuries, collective violence, trauma and mediatization interact with each other. World Wars, wars of independence and decolonization, the Shoa, exile, migration and terrorism cause traumas which are mediatized in text and image, but also in commemorative rites, music, the press or museums. This volume provides an analysis of these media as well as a presentation of the theoretical framework. Contains contributions by: Angela Kühner, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Nathalie Maillard, Montréal (Canada); Boris Cyrulnik, Bordeaux (France); Catherine Wermester, Paris I Sorbonne (France); Rémi Dalisson, Rouen (France); Pierre Schoentjes, Gent (Belgium); Laurence Campa, Paris-Nanterre (France); Vincent Marie, Nîmes (France); Christian von Tschilschke, Siegen (Germany); Nathalie Piégay, Paris VII Diderot (France); Peter Kuon, Salzburg (Austria); Dominique Trouche, Toulouse (France); Jonas Hock, Regensburg (Germany); Christian Delage, Paris VIII (France); Fransiska Louwagie, Leicester (United Kingdom); Yoram Mouchenik, Paris XIII (France); Esther Kilchmann, Hamburg (Germany); Catherine Milkovitch-Rioux, Clermont-Ferrand (France); Sarah Kouider Rabah, Blida (Algeria); Susanne Gehrmann, Berlin (Germany); Olivier Barlet, Paris (France); Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Saarbrücken (Germany); Alexandre Dauge-Roth, Lewiston (United States); Delphine Robic-Diaz, Tours (France); Anja Bandau, Hannover (Germany); Christoph Singler, Besançon (France); Françoise Naudillon, Concordia (Canada); Elisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, Montréal (Canada); Isaac Bazié, Montréal (Canada); Nicolas Violle, Clermont-Ferrand (France); Isabelle Galichon, Pau/Bordeaux (France); Karim Hammou, Paris (France)

The goal of this handbook is to provide a comprehensive resource on the Amazonian languages that synthesizes a diverse body of work by a highly international group of linguists. It will provide a review of the current state of the art, thus laying the groundwork for future scholarship in this important area. Volume 2 will focus on theory-neutral grammatical descriptions of smaller Amazonian language families.

Wang Wei has traditionally been considered one of the greatest of Tang dynasty poets, together with Li Bo and Du Fu. This is the first complete translation into English of all of his poems, and also the first substantial translation of a selection of his prose writings. For the first time, readers encountering his work in English translation will get a comprehensive understanding of Wang Wei's range as a poet and prose writer. In spite of the importance of Wang Wei's poetry in the history of Chinese literature, no one has attempted a complete translation of all of his surviving poems; moreover, even though he was known for his skill in composing prose pieces in the recognized genres of his day (especially as a writer of commissioned compositions), very little of his prose has been translated. This translation will enable students with limited or no knowledge of Chinese to get a full sense of Wang Wei's compositional range. Moreover, since Wang Wei was known for being a devout Buddhist, having the complete poetry available in reliable translation as well as all of the prose that is connected to the Buddhist faith will be useful to students of Chinese religion.