This edited collection investigates historical linguistic politeness and impoliteness. Although some research has been undertaken uniting politeness and historical pragmatics, it has been sporadic at best, and often limited to traditional theoretical approaches. This is a strange state of affairs, because politeness plays a central role in the social dynamics of language. This collection, containing contributions from renowned experts, aims to fill this hiatus, bringing together cutting-edge research. Not only does it illuminate the language usage of earlier periods, but by examining the past it places politeness today in context. Such a diachronic perspective also affords a further test-bed for current models of politeness. This volume provides insights into historical aspects of language, particularly items regularly deployed for politeness functions, and the social, particularly interpersonal, contexts with which it interacts. It also sheds light on how (social) meanings are dynamically constructed in situ, and probes various theoretical aspects of politeness. Its papers deploy a range of multilingual (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian and Chinese) diachronic data drawn from different genres such as letters, dramas, witch trials and manners books.

Inspired by Frank Palmer's work, this book addresses a set of specific topics pertaining to the description of modality in English and places them in a broader context. A number of more general theoretical and typological matters are also raised, which bear upon the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. The methodology adopted is mostly functional-typological, though some reference is made to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from cognitive linguistics to parametric variation. Modal meanings are seen to extend beyond particular lexical and grammatical exponents, through sentential semantics and into actual contexts of use. At the same time, the study of modality seems to challenge commonly held views on the relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis. Other languages discussed include Brazilian Portuguese, Classical and Modern Greek and Spanish.

This book received the Enrique Alcaraz research award in 2010. This volume derives from the COMINTER-SIMULNEG research project which aims at designing a pragmatic model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons, as well as developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. Contributions to this volume focus on three main issues: (a) explaining intercultural communication; (b) research on intercultural business communication; (c) the use of simulation and gaming methodology for the acquisition of communicative and cross-cultural competence in business settings. This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study and practice of intercultural business communication, borrowing concepts from social anthropology, social cognition, cognitive linguistics, and intercultural pragmatics.

Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics, this study, anchored in Cognitive Semantics, offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy's groundbreaking model of linguistic attention, applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly complex patterns of interaction, convergence, and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic recombination, from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity, another fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions, interlocutors, in production and reception, will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.

This volume explores the relationship between shared disciplinary norms and individual traits in academic speech and writing. Despite the standardising pressure of cultural and language-related factors, academic communication remains in many ways a highly personal affair, with active participation in a disciplinary community requiring a multidimensional discourse that combines the professional, institutional, social and individual identities of its members. The first section of the volume deals with tensions involving individual/collective values and the analysis of collective vs. individual discoursal features in academic discourse. The second section comprises longitudinal investigations of the academic output of single scholars, so as to highlight the individuality in their choices and the reasons for not conforming with the commonality of conventions shared by their professional community. The third part deals with genres that are meant to impose commonality on the members of an academic community, not only in the drafting of specialized texts but also when these are reviewed or evaluated for possible publication.

This book attempts to analyse irony, paradox, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism from the point of view of both Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. In order to do so, we have regarded each trope as a cognitive model, and observed that the various ICMs that resulted from this approach had in common an essential feature: they were all constructed around the creation of contrasts. Also, we have developed a common processing model for these ICMs, which shows that these so-called figures of speech can be fully considered conceptual mechanisms of meaning creation and derivation. Apart from determining which specific pragmatic implications these models bring about and studying their underlying cognitive operations, we have argued that they should be described in terms of the contextual effects they produce. Therefore, a new classification and definition of these tropes is provided.

This book examines how Japanese learners of English learned about managing politeness while they were studying at language schools in New Zealand. Specifically, it investigates how they learned to produce and interpret a range of disagreement strategies during oppositional talk with native speakers of English. Employing a combined qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis, the book discusses the initial pragmatic competence of the learners, and describes how their competence developed over a ten-week period. The book outlines some points of cultural divergence which may have influenced the direction and the extent of the learners' pragmatic development. It also sheds light on the language-acquisition strategies utilised by the learners during their tenure in the host culture. Most crucially, the book illuminates patterns of directness and indirectness in the learners' selected disagreement strategies. These patterns challenge the generally accepted theory that politeness always increases with social distance.

Has the internet changed the nature of conducting controversies? This question cannot be answered easily as different forms of human interaction in an online environment exist and controversies in an online environment have not been analyzed from a linguistic point of view so far. On the other hand, there are many linguistic analyses of controversies in the Early Modern Period. First, this volume describes the communicative background of two online discussion forums dedicated to the study of historical arms and armor. Then, the volume analyzes the similarities and differences between Early Modern controversies and controversies in online internet discussion forums. Further, this book offers an accurate analysis of the strategies used in online discussion forums, analyzing two controversial threads taken from two online discussion forums and provides insights into the individual tactics and strategies applied in online controversies and highlights the similarities and differences of applied principles, norms, and rules. The book finally comments on stylistic choices used by participants in the controversies.

This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled «Corpora: Seminar and Workshops, held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.

This book explores the cognitive and communicative processes involved in the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) within cross-cultural specialized contexts where non-native speakers of English - i.e. Western experts and non-Western migrants - interact. The book argues that the main communicative difficulties in such contexts are due precisely to the use of ELF, since it develops from the non-native speakers' transfer of their native language structures and socio-cultural schemata into the English they speak. Transfer, in fact, allows non-native speakers to appropriate, or authenticate, those English semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and specialized-discourse structures that are linguistically and conceptually unavailable to them. It follows that there are as many ELF varieties as there are communities of non-native speakers authenticating English. The research questions justifying the ethnographic case studies detailed in this book are: What kind of cognitive frames and communicative strategies do Western experts activate in order to convey their culturally-marked knowledge of specialized discourse - by using their ELF varieties - to non-Westerners with different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds? What kind of power asymmetries can be identified when non-Westerners try to communicate their own knowledge by using their respective ELF varieties? Is it possible to ultimately develop a mode of ELF specialized communication that can be shared by both Western experts and non-Western migrants?

The aim of this volume is to present a state-of-the-art view on corpus studies. This collection of papers, presented at the XII Susanne Hubner Seminar in November 2003 at the University of Zaragoza, comprises both quantitative and qualitative analyses and studies on both written and oral corpora. Structured in seven sections, the book covers a wide range of approaches and methodologies and reflects current linguistic research. The papers have been written by scholars from a large number of universities, mainly from Europe, but also from the USA and Asia. The volume offers contributions on diachronic studies, pragmatic analyses and cognitive linguistics, as well as on translation and English for Specific Purposes. The book includes several papers on corpus design and reports on research on oral corpora. At a more specific level, the papers analyse aspects such as politeness issues, dialectology, comparable corpora, discourse markers, the expression of evidentiality and writer stance, metaphor and metonymy, conditional sentences, evaluative adjectives, delexicalised verbs and nominalization.

The studies presented in this volume concentrate on aspects of Late Modern English correspondence in the usage of individuals belonging to different social classes, writing for different purposes, and finding themselves in different social contexts, both in Britain and in its colonies. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of letters presents both a challenge and an opportunity to obtain access to as full a range of styles as would be possible for a period for which we only have access to the language in its written form. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed 'second-generation' corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning letters as a text type, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of register or variety specific traits are high-lighted, alongside issues concerning the (often less than easy) relationship between strictly codified norms and actual usage on the part of speakers whose level of education could vary considerably.

Text is a linguistic unit of communication in which linguistically expressed conceptual units are connected in different conceptual structures. The conceptual construal of things, events and relations is structured on the basis of a variety of cognitive and communicational options. These choices form discourse schemas, partly in a culturespecific way. There is a dynamic relationship between schema and instantiation. The volume approaches these questions from a functional perspective, where the processual nature of discourse is as important as its structural character. The volume has two parts: the first one presents theoretical papers, the second deals with certain discourse types, and some linguistic features that characterize specific discourse types.

This volume originates from the editors' interest in one of the most relevant fields of research these days: Intercultural and International Business Communication. The needs of the business world to communicate effectively at an international level in order to overcome language differences have proved to be a fascinating topic for many scholars. International business discourse is culturally-situated and therefore context-dependent, and all three -- discourse, culture and context -- play a key role in the communication process. The present contributions analyse this topic under the perspective of theory, research and teaching. Different scholars have offered their views on the subject, presenting contributions on different areas related to business communication all over the world.

The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.

This book is about the borrowing of inflectional morphemes in language contact settings. This phenomenon has at all times seemed to be the most poorly documented aspect of linguistic borrowing. Contact-induced morphological change is not rare in word formation, but exceptional in inflection. This study presents a deductive catalogue of factors conditioning the probability of transfer of inflectional morphology from one language to another and adduces empirical data drawn from Australian languages, Anatolian Greek, the Balkans, Maltese, Welsh, and Arabic. By reference to the most advanced theories of morphology, a thorough analysis of the case studies is provided as well as a definition of inflectional borrowing according to which inflectional borrowing must be distinguished from mere quotation of foreign forms and is acknowledged only when inflectional morphemes are attached to native words of the receiving language.

This book deals with the notion of reformulation and more specifically with a group of lexico-grammatical units which help codify and signal the activity of reformulation in English. While discourse markers in English have been described in detail, the area of reformulation is a relatively unexplored area in comparison with languages such as French or Spanish. In this respect, this book has been conceived as a contribution to the field of Discourse Markers and in particular to the markers that help display the function of reformulation in English. First of all, a definition of the notion of reformulation is provided as a necessary precondition for the elaboration of a taxonomy of English reformulators. These are grouped into different classes and sub-classes on the basis of the type of reformulation effected. Thus, four main types are identified: Expansion, Modification, Reassessment and Compression. After an inductive and interpretive analysis of examples taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the syntactic and distributional properties of these units, as well as their environments of use are described and discussed.

This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as «cup in «a cup of tea, classifiers such as «head in «ten head of cattle, and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components - which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender - and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.

This book describes three of the main problems that the word-formation process known as conversion presents, namely those related to its definition, its delimitation, and its directionality. The latter constitutes, however, the main focus of the study, which is based on a corpus of over seven hundred lexical units and, more specifically, on 231 actual noun-verb conversion pairs. Considering that directionality is intrinsic to conversion, the main question is whether it is always possible to establish the direction of conversion or whether it is possible to do so only in some cases. Moreover, the study reveals what 'type' of directionality is involved, that is, whether the process is unidirectional, bidirectional or multi-directional. In order to answer these questions, both diachronic (etymology and dates of first records) and synchronic criteria (semantic dependence, restriction of usage, semantic range, semantic pattern, phonetic shape, morphologic type, stress, and the principle of relative markedness) are analysed and assessed.

This book explores the intercultural problems related to the widespread use of English in written and oral communication by native and non-native speakers in institutional and business settings. Each chapter looks at a different set of issues emerging from the confrontation of cultures across national, institutional and organizational discourse communities, taking an intercultural or cross-cultural approach. The focus is on workplace settings, both in institutional and business contexts (e.g. politics, public services, media, international corporate communication, advertising, business negotiations, etc.). The theme is all the more interesting today not only in consideration of the sheer magnitude of this phenomenon and its capillary spread, but above all on account of the pervasive penetration of English into professional and workplace contexts as a communication language also for local/internal communication. The complexity of intercultural communication as an object of research is reflected in the variety of the topics explored, the range of settings investigated, and the diversity of methodological approaches taken.

Voice and Mirroring in L2 Pronunciation Instruction presents an approach to teaching pronunciation which aims for learners to internalize the “voices� (complexes of linguistic and non-linguistic features that embody particular speakers’ emotion, social stance, and group identification) of proficient speakers of the second language (L2). Beginning with a review of “bottom-up� and “top-down� approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) research and pronunciation teaching, the authors present previously published and new findings in interlanguage phonology and variationist approaches to SLA showing the powerful impact of sociolinguistic context on L2 pronunciation. On the basis of this review, the authors argue that a top-down approach which begins with social context is preferable in both the research and teaching of L2 pronunciation. They highlight the Mirroring Project as one such approach that includes the social factors impacting L2 pronunciation, such as interlocutor, empathy, and nonverbal elements. With accompanying instructional activities that have been used in a variety of teaching and learning settings in the U.S., the authors demonstrate how this project can help language learners modify their L2 pronunciation patterns and improve their intelligibility as they internalize and channel the voices of speakers they have selected as models. The audience for the volume includes language teachers, particularly those desiring to use top-down pedagogical approaches like the Mirroring Project to improve learners’ intelligibility, and academic researchers interested in studying the way adults can acquire second language phonology by holistically adopting and channeling the voices of speakers they admire. The book is also of potential interest to language teacher educators, curriculum developers, and textbook writers.

Arising from a colloquium held in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in March 2004, this volume offers fresh insights into Swiss culture and literature from an Irish perspective. It brings together articles by writers and scholars from various academic fields including cultural studies, linguistics and literature. The book is a reflection of the multifaceted interests of Irish academics in Switzerland as a cultural space in the heart of Europe. Ireland as a vantage point, situated at the western margin of the European continent, offers new perspectives from which differences as well as surprising parallels between the two cultures become visible and from which Switzerland appears in a different light. The volume critically addresses questions of identity in Swiss literature and culture and discusses them from various angles - by analysing the representation of minority cultures in Swiss literary and media discourse, by reading Swiss literature in an intercultural context, but also through accounts of Irish visitors in Switzerland and Swiss writers travelling to or living in Ireland.

This study explores the field of ESL (English as a Second Language) classroom learning within a formal learning institution. Influenced by the sociocultural theory in SLA (Second Language Acquisition), the book sheds light on the question that has been boggling the minds of language practitioners and researchers: Why is ESL classroom talk the way it is? Based on a case study of a school in an ESL community, it argues persuasively that classroom talk may be linked in important ways to an operative sociocultural structure of ESL pedagogy over and above the classroom at the institutional level. The book examines issues which have here-to-fore been avoided by writers and researchers in current SLA writings and classroom studies. It confronts complex and complicated contextual and research methodological issues to make visible what has up to now been that elusive « structure behind the oral practices in language classrooms. Research methods are drawn from language education and several disciplines within linguistics and the social sciences. Emerging from a multidisciplinary methodological framework are a number of surprising revelations about the meanings and functions of ESL classroom talk.

This book explores multiparty, multicultural interaction at international business meetings. It investigates discourse at an Italian company's meetings of its international distributors, conducted mainly in English and attended by participants from different countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Data come from audio recordings of the meetings, normally lasting two to three days, and are supplemented by the author's observations of the meetings. The study uses a series of approaches to analyze selected linguistic and interactional features, presenting an in-depth analysis and discussion of data extracts that draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches. It highlights the way the main company speaker and some of the multilingual participants use discursive strategies to build common ground, to construct a cooperative business relationship or to negotiate or avert conflict. The study questions the role of cultural differences in approaching multicultural, multilingual meetings and argues that organizational roles, the business context and individual differences must also be considered.