John Benjamins

The translingual practices of young Mongolians and Bangladeshis suggest that contrary to those popular discourses which position youth as passive recipients of global culture, these young adults are better understood as actively and powerfully engaged with popular culture productions. Drawing on the examples of casual offline conversations and online Facebook interactions of university students in Mongolia and Bangladesh, this paper shows how processes of relocalization give new meanings to the translingual practices of these students as they draw on different modalities from popular culture (film, music and so on) and different linguistic and nonlinguistic resources. This transtextual and transmodal analysis enables us to show how these young adults relocalize linguistic and cultural resources in both their on- and offline interactions.

This chapter discusses the teaching of literary awareness to high-school students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Dedicated to the topic of iconicity, the proposed pedagogical experience stimulates students to work out the connection between visual and linguistic representations, identify such links in a variety of texts, create their own concrete poems, and justify their stylistic choices. Three sources of data are used: (i) questionnaires detailing participants’ profiles, (ii) students’ answers and creative writing, and (iii) unit evaluation questionnaires. The data obtained enabled an evidence-based evaluation of the workshop from the participants’ viewpoint. We argue that evaluating students’ learning empirically should be part and parcel of any pedagogical experience.

About the book: This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of “later language development”. Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb–argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cogniti...

This paper investigates how Italian native speakers express surprise in English as their second language on Facebook. A qualitative study was conducted on a corpus of forty English utterances by Italian native speakers conveying surprise and two control corpora composed of forty Italian and forty English native speakers’ expressions. First, a systemic approach will be adopted: by analysing the order in which the speaker reacts to, comments on, and wonders about new information, the objective is to determine a pattern peculiar to the verbal expression of surprise, and to ascertain how the mother tongue and the language-learning background are influential when expressing an instinctive reaction such as surprise in a foreign language. Attention will then be paid to the lexical expression of surprise. In particular, the analysis will focus on the features specific to non-native speakers (i.e. use of verbs and code-switching), on the codes peculiar to CMC (i.e. smileys and punctuation), ...

Roy Harris identifies the “main flaw” in J. L. Austin’s account of language as a “failure to consider to what extent being able to ‘do things with words’ is parasitic on being able to do things without them”. Harris’s comment here serves as a springboard for a critical evaluation of communicational theories based around “talk-in-interaction” or dialogic principles. The primacy thereby given to linguistic interaction arguably entails a mystification of communication processes and the dis-integration of the social world into which our communicational experiences are intervowen. Consequently, the ghost of segregationism, in the shape of Harris’s “fallacy of verbalism”, continues to haunt, at times faintly, at times aggressively, the assumptions and methodologies of the approaches in question.

Linguistic iconicity has been studied since ancient times (e.g., Plato’s Cratylus, see Cooper & Hutchinson 1997). Within modern grammatical description, this notion was mostly developed by Jakobson and Benveniste; nowadays, iconicity in language is even being experimentally tested (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016; Diatka & Milička 2017). However, most studies on linguistic iconicity pertain to prosody, sound symbolism, or morphology; syntactic iconicity has been vastly underexplored. In this paper, we present two hypotheses concerning syntactic iconicity: (1) syntactic descriptions of natural language strings have an inherent structure which is isomorphic to that of representations in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system; or (2) linear order imposed on phrase structure is isomorphic to that in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system. We will argue in favour of the former, which constitutes a novel perspective on iconicity in grammar. We furthermore...

This paper presents a translingual study of medical lexicology in English and Japanese that compares the meaning and usage of three suffixes often found in medical discourse: -gram, -graph and -graphy. By means of an in-depth observation of frequency counts and semantic profiling in actual usage, we present a proposal regarding which roots each of the suffixes allow, together with an analysis of the meaning subtleties of the affixes. This work, informed by both cognitive and corpus linguistics, advances the presence of a concurrent pattern in English-Japanese morphology within medical discourse. After presenting a number of parallelisms and differences within the corpora, the work concludes with an explanation of how and why the three suffixes under inspection display quite distinct meaning nuances that restrain them from being used at random, both in English and in Japanese.

This paper looks at the relations between tone and features from other phonological subsystems in Papiamentu. It proposes that the interaction of tonal features with features from stress and intonational subsystems provides important clues about the typological classification of Papiamentu as a tone language. Moreover, the taxis of tones, or their organization in the string, also provides a better understanding of this language. Papiamentu fits the description of tone-restricted languages but also exhibits features of intonational systems.

In response to shifts in requirements for research funding, interest in interdisciplinary engagement has burgeoned, but as yet the interactional dynamics of interdisciplinary meetings have received almost no attention. This chapter draws on a data set of over 20 hours of audio-recorded talk from 12 different interdisciplinary meetings involving biologists, mathematicians, bioinformaticians and statisticians. Drawing on a combination of applied conversation analysis and quantitative analysis (using the Interactional Discourse Lab developed by one of the authors), it explicates the ways in which disciplinary identities are deployed in the reconciliation of different perspectives on shared problems. In interdisciplinary engagement, the interactive and contingently accomplished process of identity construction is mediated by reference to epistemic rights associated with disciplinary membership, and while there is assumed parity of disciplinary entitlement, in practice the power of a dom...

This study charts variation in subject inversion constructions in Bantu languages. It distinguishes between seven types of inversion constructions: formal locative inversion, semantic locative inversion, instrument inversion, patient inversion, (clausal) complement inversion, default agreement inversion and agreeing inversion. Based on a set of nine surface variables, a matrix of inversion constructions is developed which identifies characteristics of the set of constructions overall as well as of each individual construction type. The distribution of the different inversion constructions is documented with reference to a sample of 46 Bantu languages, from which geographical and typological generalisations are drawn. For example, languages with instrument inversion or with patient inversion always have locative inversion (but not vice versa), or if a language has at least one inversion construction, it always has at least either default agreement inversion or agreeing inversion. Fin...

The objective of this paper is to analyse how European Union (EU) supranational terms related to consumer protection transfer into domestic legal systems of three English-language jurisdictions (the UK, Ireland and Malta) during the transposition of EU directives. Transposition is a process of incorporating EU directives into national law and capturing supranational terms during their entry into national legal systems. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus linguistics and legal analysis of terms, working with a corpus of five directives and their UK, Irish and Maltese transposing acts. Distinguishing between a term and a concept level, we propose a categorisation of transfer techniques arranged along a cline from foreignization to domestication. They involve imports, modifications (non-denominative and denominative variants), localisations and zero transfer both at the term level and the concept level.

The name dispute between Republic of Macedonia and Greece manifests itself in Greece’s objections to the use of the noun “Macedonia” or the adjective “Macedonian” to refer to any other ethnicity, culture, tradition and history except Greek. In order to promote itself as a sole claimant to the name, Greece has constructed a discourse which legitimizes its exclusive right to it, while at the same time it delegitimizes such right to Macedonia. However, this discourse does not only deny Macedonia the right to the name but it also denies Macedonia the right to discuss identity issues, while at the same time it obliterates Macedonian presence in the discourse in any relation to the disputed term. In this respect, this study seeks to analyze the specific linguistic strategies underlying these discursive effects.

This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situations. The chapters analyze humor-related issues in such genres as spontaneous conversations, broadcast dialogues, storytelling, media blogs, bilingual conversations, stand-up comedy, TV documentaries, drama series, family sitcoms, Facebook posts, and internet memes. The individual authors trace how speakers collaboratively circulate, reconstruct, and (re)frame either personal or public accounts of reality, aiming –among other things– to produce and/or reproduce humor. Rather than being “finished” products with a “single” interpretation, humorous texts are thus approached as dynamic communicative events that give rise to diverse interpretati...

This study implements an automated parser-based approach to the investigation of light verb constructions. The database consisting of ICE-GB and ICE-IRE is used to obtain qualitative and quantitative results on the use of light verb structures. The study explains and evaluates the steps employed to optimize parser output in detecting open lists of light verb constructions. It discusses the qualitative usage differences of these structures in the data between the two varieties and finds that ICE-GB favours fewer high frequency light verbs while ICE-IRE contains more diverse lower frequency light verbs and more passives. Overall, counts of light verb constructions are considerably higher than previously assumed. The projected counts suggest that attestations of light verb constructions will increase considerably if the search is not restricted to certain high-frequency light verbs as is typically done in studies employing manual or semi-automatic approaches to data collection.

Resumen Este estudio presenta el análisis de las metáforas conceptuales producidas en el discurso de afectados de esquizofrenia y profesionales relacionados con dicho trastorno mental. La investigación permite distinguir y comparar subgrupos coherentes de estos colectivos en el corpus de trabajo e interpretar modelos subyacentes de conceptualización de la enfermedad. El corpus analizado consiste en tres documentales que recogen relatos en primera persona. Se han clasificado cuantitativa y cualitativamente las expresiones metafóricas de los intervinientes y se han inferido conjuntos de ideas y creencias a la luz de la teoría de la metáfora conceptual, un marco teórico bien establecido en la lingüística cognitiva. Las conclusiones muestran los principales patrones de conceptualización de la enfermedad por parte de afectados vinculados a programas de rehabilitación social, afectados no vinculados a ellos, psiquiatras, y otros profesionales relacionados con la salud mental, así como sim...

In order to explore why people in multilingual contexts choose one mediation strategy or another, we conducted case studies involving short-term mobility for adoption purposes. For parents who adopt a child born in a different country, the experience necessitates a range of linguistic strategies that include language learning, interpreting and translation services, lingua francas, and intercomprehension. A study of ten Italian transnational adoptive families shows that adoptive parents tend to combine these strategies according to the situational relevance of four mobility-related variables: parental agency, accuracy of information, self-reliance, and intimacy. The adoptive parents’ opinions about the benefits and limitations of each strategy indicate that mediation strategies are complementary means to reach the complex general purpose of acquiring parenthood.

This study explores how U.S. President Donald Trump employs Twitter as a strategic instrument of power politics to disseminate his right-wing populist discourse. Applying the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the meaning and function of Trump’s discursive strategies on Twitter. The data consists of over 200 tweets collected from his personal account between his inauguration on January 20, 2017 and his first address to Congress on February 28, 2017. The findings show how Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous other. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation to further his agenda via social media. This study demonstrates how his top-down use of Twitter may lead to the normalization of right-wing populist discourses, and thus aims to contribute to the understanding ...

This book is a theoretically oriented, comparative study of noun phrases and their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties. This is the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the nominal structure in Uzbek, and compares it with corresponding structures in other article and article-less languages. Uzbek nominals represent a fertile ground to test the universality of the DP hypothesis and to make an insightful contribution to an ongoing debate about the functional architecture of the nominal domain in languages with and without articles. The study shows that the ordering of various nominal suffixes in Uzbek reflects a rich functional structure, involving not only DP but also KP. The work also discusses elements such as determiners, demonstratives quantifiers and adjectives, and positioning of these elements within the nominal domain. This study is especially useful for researchers interested in theoretical linguistics, comparative syntax and typology.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39. 48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Symposium on Iconidty in ...

Summary This work describes the contributions of Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), the 18th-century physicist and mathematician, to the fields of articulatory and experimental phonetics. First the authors provide evidence for Euler’s role in establishing the St. Petersburg Academy prize of 1780. Next, they consider a short and posthumously published work of Euler, the Meditatio de formatione vocum. It is shown that the Meditatio represents an early attempt to compare vowels in several languages, and includes a two-dimensional classification of vowels which anticipates in many ways the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart.

Compared to other domains of media discourse, economic-financial news contain a considerable amount of speech acts regarding future events, in particular predictions. This can be explained by their specific institutional context, financial markets, where investors constantly seek to single out gain opportunities and to correctly assess their risk. One of the crucial factors making economic-financial predictions worthy of being considered in investment decisions is argumentation, in particular the extent to which the predicted proposition follows from a plausible and acceptable reasoning. Starting from a corpus of 50 articles of the Italian economic-financial press, we consider the inferential dimension of prediction-oriented arguments, focusing on thelocus, i.e. the ontological relation on which the connection between the argument(s) and the predictive conclusion rests. All predictions found in the corpus were manually annotated with the softwareUAM Corpus Tool. For each of them we ...

This article presents a comparative analysis of the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure from Classical Latin through to the late medieval period, with particular reference to the Verb Second (V2) property. In the medieval period three distinct diachronic stages can be identified as regards V2: a C-VSO stage attested in Old Sardinian, a ‘relaxed’ V2 stage across Early Medieval Romance and maintained into 13th and 14th century Occitan and Sicilian, and a ‘strict’ V2 stage attested in 13th and 14th century French, Spanish and Venetian. The C-VSO grammar found in Old Sardinian is a retention of the syntactic system attested in late Latin textual records, itself an innovation on an ‘incipient V2’ stage found in Classical Latin, where V-to-C movement and XP-fronting receive a pragmatically or syntactically marked interpretation.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

Discourse theorists often defend their discursive stance on ‘reality’ and the material with reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s quote that, while an “earthquake or the falling of a brick…exist externally to thought,” they cannot “constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence”. While fully endorsing this statement, we argue that it does not licence discourse theorists to consider discursive formations divorced from their material context, but obliges us to account for the constraints and affordances of the material conditions on the structuring of the discursive field itself. Drawing on previous work, we argue that material conditions may render discourse systems incommensurate, such that they cannot be articulated through chains of equivalence within a radically restructured field. We suggest as a way forward the concept of the nomadic politician continually traversing between equivalential systems in order to reconfigure and renegotiate key signifiers...

This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions (Vorreiter 2003; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), our initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the nec...

1. Introduction 2. 1. A comparative evaluation of bilingual concordancers and translation memory systems (by Bowker, Lynne) 3. 2. Interactive reference grammars: Exploiting parallel and comparable treebanks for translation (by Hansen-Schirra, Silvia) 4. 3. Corpora for translator education and translation practice (by Bernardini, Silvia) 5. 4. CORPOGRAFO V.4: Tools for educating translators (by Maia, Belinda) 6. 5. The real use of corpora in teaching and research contexts (by Colominas, Carme) 7. 6. The use of corpora in translator training in the African language classroom: A perspective from South Africa (by Gauton, Rachelle) 8. 7. CAT tools in international organisations: Lessons learnt from the experience of the Languages Service of the United Nations Office at Geneva (by De Saint Robert, Marie-Josee) 9. 8. Global content management: Challenges and opportunities for creating and using digital translation resources (by Budin, Gerhard) 10. 9. BEYTrans: A Wiki-based environment for helping online volunteer translators (by Bey, Youcef) 11. 10. Standardising the management and the representation of multilingual data: The Multi Lingual Information Framework (by Cruz-Lara, Samuel) 12. 11. Tagging and tracing Program Integrated Information (by Kato, Naotaka) 13. 12. Linguistic resources and localisation (by Schaler, Reinhard) 14. Index