This study is devoted to a corpus of Old Russian letters, written on pieces of birchbark. These unique texts from Novgorod and surroundings give us an exceptional impression of everyday life in medieval Russian society. In this study, the birchbark letters are addressed from a pragmatic angle. Linguistic parameters are identified that shed light on the degree to which literacy had gained ground in communicative processes. It is demonstrated that the birchbark letters occupy an intermediate position between orality and literacy. On the one hand, oral habits of communication persisted, as reflected in how the birchbark letters are phrased; on the other hand, literate modes of expression emerged, as seen in the development of normative conventions and literate formulae.

The present book is a study in the field of linguistic pragmatics, by using conversation analysis and microsociolinguistics as an extension of speech act theory, as well as in the field of applied linguistics by offering an analysis of a genuine Romanian conversational corpus. The study is first of all important for its theme - that of conversational narratives, since it is the first comprehensive research of this issue in Romanian research. Chapter 1 deals with the theoretical framework of the research which is based on the integration of two theoretical perspectives, conversation analysis and narrative analysis. Narrative analysis offers the instruments necessary for the micro analysis of narratives as fragments per se, whereas conversation analysis offers the basis for the integration of narratives in the context of conversational interaction. Chapter 2 views conversational narratives as texts having certain linguistic features and content traits. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the narrative as process. Chapter 3 investigates the content of the story proper, analysing its communicative functions, in other words it analyzes the functions of narratives as message. Chapter 4 examines the interaction between narrative and conversation from the perspective of the interactional role of cooperation between the two discourse genres, the perspective adopted being again that of conversation analysis. Chapter 3, The functions of conversational narratives, is the most extended of all chapters and considers conversational narrative as a complex multifunctional message. It is the author's merit to have completed and systemized the discussion on the functions of conversational narrative starting from complete theories on the functions of language. In the present case, the author opts for Halliday, discriminating mainly between the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. These three functions are detailed by using the theory of the communicative code on the functions of language proposed by Jakobson. The two theories (Halliday's and Jakobson's) are convergent, both viewing language from the perspective of communication. The advantage of this combination is obvious in the discussion on the interpersonal function, which can be detailed in an emotive (expressive, according to Buehler) function (which constructs the speaker), a persuasive function, which focuses on the interlocutor, a phatic function, which maintains the channel of communication and expresses the concern for the mutual saving of the interlocutors' faces. The right assumption adopted by the author is that in each and every case there is a dominant function, which relates to the purpose of communication, that is to the very illocutionary or perlocutionary dimension of the story, whereas the other functions are present but subordinate (it is the case of the referential and textual functions) or simply absent (the poetic function). The chapter offers a coherent and integrative perspective on the complexity of the functions of conversation analysis, on the complexity of the literature in the field. The analysis is entirely original, the only stories discussed being the ones taken from the corpus collected by the author. From a methodological point of view, the chapter makes extensive use of the Speech Act Theory and the Politeness Theory, with many sociolinguistic elements. The linguistic sections provide the interested readers with lists of formulas, cliches, etc., the present study enriching the picture of Romanian oral discourse. This book is very nicely and correctly written; it is a pleasant read. Professor Dr. Alexandra Cornilescu University of Bucharest

This volume pays homage to the historian of logic Angel d'Ors (1951-2012), by bringing together a set of studies that together illuminate the complex historical development of logic and semantics. Two main traditions, Aristotelian and terminist, are showcased to demonstrate the changes and confrontations that constitute this history, and a number of different authors and texts, from the Boethian reception of Aristotle to the post-medieval terminism, are discussed. Special topics dealt with include the medieval reception of ancient logic; technical tools for the medieval analysis of language; the medieval theory of consequence; the medieval practice of disputation and sophisms; and the post-medieval refinement of the terminist tools. Contributors are E.J. Ashworth, Allan Back, Maria Cerezo, Sten Ebbesen, Jose Miguel Gambra, C.H. Kneepkens, Kalvin Normore, Angel d'Ors, Paloma Perez-Ilzarbe, Stephen Read, Joke Spruyt, Luisa Valente, and Mikko Yrjoensuuri. These articles were also published in Vivarium, Volume 53, Nos. 2-4 (2015).

Pragmatic Issues in Specialized Communicative Contexts, edited by Francesca Bianchi and Sara Gesuato, illustrates how interactants systematically and effectively employ micro and macro linguistic resources and textual strategies to engage in communicative practices in such specific contexts as healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogue, TED talks, archaeology academic communication, student-teacher communication, and multilingual classrooms. Each contribution presents a pedagogical slant, reporting on or suggesting didactic approaches to, or applications of, pragmatic aspects of communication in SL, FL and LSP learning contexts. The topics covered and the issues addressed are all directly relevant to applied pragmatics, that is, pragmatically oriented linguistic analysis that accounts for interpersonal-transactional issues in real-life situated communication.

Honoured with the 2017 AESLA Research Award of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics. Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora comprises fourteen contributions by leading scholars in the field of English corpus linguistics, covering areas of central concern in corpus research and corpus methodology. The topics examined in the different chapters include issues related to corpus compilation and annotation, perspectives from specialized corpora, and studies on grammatical and pragmatic aspects of English, all these examined through a broad range of corpora, both synchronic and diachronic, representing both EFL and different native varieties of English worldwide. The volume will be of primary interest to students and researchers working on English corpus linguistics, but is also likely to have a wider general appeal. Contributors are: Bas Aarts, Sian Alsop, Anita Auer, Jill Bowie, Eduardo Coto-Villalibre, Pieter de Haan, Johan Elsness, Moragh Gordon, Hilde Hasselgard, Turo Hiltunen, Magnus Huber, Marianne Hundt, Mikko Laitinen, Martti Makinen, Beatriz Mato-Miguez, Mike Olson, Antoinette Renouf, and Bianca Widlitzki.

In this book, Peter Juul Nielsen examines the foundations of morphological theory from a structural-functional perspective on language as a sign system. He offers a framework for the analysis of morpheme relations based on a thorough discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure, indexical relations, zero as meaningful absence and morphological relations across grammatical categories. It is argued that when paradigmatically related morphological structures have different syntactic functions, the semantics of the paradigmatic opposition consists in the specification of functional potential. The framework is applied in three detailed studies of Danish nonfinite verbs presenting new accounts of their morphological structure, semantic coding and paradigmatic organisation.

The volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language and social interaction in an under-researched and less commonly taught Asian language.

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.

This is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.

Video-recordings of families and groups of friends watching the FIFA men's football World Cup in their homes allow access to the empirical rather than the imagined or inscribed audiences of a major television event. Qualitative analyses reveal how natural audiences behave in the reception situation appropriating live televised football through talk. Gerhardt shows how the mainly English television viewers use an array of linguistic and embodied resources to turn watching football into a meaningful activity in their groups. Cohesive devices and sequentiality link the fans' talk-in-interaction to the televised text (commentary and pictures). Gaze behaviour, pointing, and even jumping up and down are used as resources for a variety of functions like the construction of an identity as football fan.

The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker's intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics

A basic property of human language is that it unfolds in time; the left and right margin of discourse units do not behave in a symmetrical fashion. The working hypothesis of this volume is that discourse elements at the left periphery have mainly subjective and discourse-structuring functions, whereas at the right periphery, such elements play an intersubjective or modalising role. However, the picture that emerges from the different contributions to this volume is far more complex. While it seems clear that the working hypothesis cannot be upheld in a "strong" way, most of the chapters - especially those based on corpus data - show that an asymmetry between left and right periphery does exist and that it is a matter of frequency.

This volume is dedicated to Robin Cooper on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The honoree's contributions to formal linguistics and language technology range from quantifier storage techniques and generalised quantifiers to the development of foundations and applications of a type-theoretical framework for formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language, with a focus on linguistic interaction in conversation. In this book the reader will find brilliant contributions of prominent linguists, computer scientists and philosophers which ranges over a broad repertoire of topics related to the outstanding work of Robin Cooper.