Ever since the notion of explanatory adequacy was promoted by Chomsky in his 1965 Aspects, linguists and psycholinguists have been in pursuit of a psychologically valid theory of grammar. To be explanatorily adequate, a theory of grammar can not only describe the general characteristics of a language but can also account for the underlying psychological processes of acquiring and processing that language. To be considered psychologically valid, a grammar must be learnable by ordinary children (the problem of acquisition) and must generate sentences that are parsable by ordinary people (the problem of processing). Ultimately, the fields of language acquisition and processing are concerned with the same goal: to build a theory that accounts for grammar as it is acquired by children; accessed in comprehension and production of speech; and represented within the human mind. Unfortunately, these two fields developed independently and have rarely been well-informed about each other's concerns. Both have experienced past difficulties as a result.
Recently, new models have been developed with full consideration to cross-linguistic diversity. Gone are many of the basic assumptions of conventional models, and in their place a variety of innovative and more flexible assumptions have emerged. However, in their attempt to address cross-linguistic issues, these processing models have yet to fully address the developmental challenge: How can a child without a stable grammar process language and still manage to acquire new grammar?
This book attempts to develop a model of language processing that addresses both cross-linguistic and developmental challenges. It proposes to link the setting of a basic configurational parameter during language acquisition to the different organization of processing strategies in left- and right-branching languages. Based primarily on Mazuka's doctoral dissertation, this volume incorporates various responses to the original proposal as well as the author's responses to the comments.

This book offers a unique perspective on meaning in language, broadening the scope of existing understanding of meaning by introducing a comprehensive and cohesive account of meaning that draws on a wide range of linguistic approaches. The volume seeks to build up a complete picture of what meaning is, different types of meaning, and different ways of structuring the same meaning across myriad forms and varieties of language across such domains, such as everyday speech, advertising, humour, and academic writing. Supported by data from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research, the book combines different approaches from scholarship in semantics, including formalist, structuralist, cognitive, functionalist, and semiotics to demonstrate the ways in which meaning is expressed in words but also in word order and intonation. The book argues for a revised conceptualisation of meaning toward presenting a new perspective on semantics and its wider study in language and linguistic research. This book will appeal to scholars interested in meaning in language in such fields as linguistics, semantics, and semiotics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This work describes the way in which conversations between drug users vary and change according to context and circumstances in ways that suggest that there is no single "truth" about the state we call "addicted". The central thesis of the book is that the explanations that drug users give for their drug use make sense not so much as a source of facts, but as primarily functional statements shaped by a climate of moral and legal censure. Consequently, the signficance of drug conversations lies not in their literal semantics but in the purposes such conversation serve. The argument raises a number of fundamental issues about the performative rather than the informative nature of language, about the nature of the "scientific facts" concerning drug use, and about the very nature of science itself. Starting with a general overview of the problems arising from a mechanistic and deterministic view, the book identifies a need for a new approach to the understanding of verbal behaviour. Secondly, it gives an account of a new form of analysis, based on over 500 conversations carried out with drug users in Scotland and the north of England. In a final data section, evidence is presented link

This volume is intended for students who desire a practical introduction to the use of language in daily and professional life. It may be used either as part of a course or as an aid to independent study. Readers will find that concepts relating to language and discourse are highlighted in the text, explained clearly, illuminated through examples and practice exercises, and defined in the "Glossary/Index" at the back of the book.
Divided into two parts, this text presents an introduction to the elements and practice of discourse analysis in general, as well as an introduction to the actual kinds of discourse crucial to personal and professional life. In Part I, examples and practice exercises are used which make use of a variety of genres common in daily and professional life. Genres included are advertising, biography, travel guide, news clipping, prose fiction, students' writing, telephone conversation, poetry, police-suspect interview, face-to-face conversation, war cry, political speech, medical text, legislation, textbook, discourse of the mentally disturbed, and detective fiction among others. Wherever feasible, authentic examples are used. Part II of the book applies the principles and techniques of Part I to an investigation of discourse in daily use. Chapters include discourse in education, medicine, law, the media, and literature. Not only will these be of particular interest to students planning to enter any of these professions, but will also be of general interest, since all of us encounter them in daily life. As a result, this is a very practical book.

This book is the first to summarize the voluminous literature on the development of cognitive, codification, language, and expressive/affective (CCCE) skills "from a clinical standpoint." Emphasizing the need to ground services in research and theory, the author constructs three basic clinical models--a conceptual model for understanding, a descriptive model for formal assessment, and a facilitative model for intervention. These models have major implications for the work of all those who deal with CCCE problems in a professional capacity.

Continuing the tradition of this series, which has become a standard reference work in language acquisition, Volume 4 contains chapters on three additional languages/language groups--Finnish, Greek, and Korean. The chapters are selective, critical reviews rather than exhaustive summaries of the course of development of each language. Authors approach the language in question as a case study in a potential crosslinguistic typology of acquisitional problems, considering those data which contribute to issues of general theoretical concern in developmental psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. Each chapter, therefore, provides the following:
* "Grammatical Sketch of Language." Brief grammatical sketch of the language or language group, presenting those linguistic facts which are relevant to the developmental analysis.
* "Sources of Evidence." Summary of basic sources of evidence, characterizing methods of gathering data, and listing key references.
* "Overall Course of Development." Brief summary of the overall course of development in the language or language group, giving an idea of the general problems posed to the child in acquiring a language of this type, summarizing typical errors, domains of relatively error-free acquisition, and the timing of acquisition--areas of the grammar that show relatively precocious or delayed development in crosslinguistic perspective.
* "Data." Specific developmental aspects of the language examined in depth, depending on each individual language and available acquisition data.
* "Conclusions." An interpretive summary of theoretical points raised above, attending to general principles of language development and linguistic organization suggested by the study of a language of this type, plus comparisons with development of other languages.

This book is a collection of eleven chapters which together represent an original contribution to the field of (multimodal) spoken dialogue systems. The chapters include highly relevant topics, such as dialogue modeling in research systems versus industrial systems, evaluation, miscommunication and error handling, grounding, statistical and corpus-based approaches to discourse and dialogue modeling, data analysis, and corpus annotation and annotation tools. The book contains several detailed application studies, including, e.g., speech-controlled MP3 players in a car environment, negotiation training with a virtual human in a military context, application of spoken dialogue to question-answering systems, and cognitive aspects in tutoring systems. The chapters vary considerably with respect to the level of expertise required in advance to benefit from them. However, most chapters start with a state-of-the-art description from which all readers from the spoken dialogue community may benefit. Overview chapters and state-of-the-art descriptions may also be of interest to people from the human-computer interaction community.

Offering a unique focus on the development of human communication, this book integrates and synthesizes a more comprehensive array of research than most investigations of communicative development. As such, it incorporates materials dealing with the development of nonverbal communication, language, and cognition, and examines how they are integrated in the growing child's everyday interaction. This information is distilled into a set of key principles and practices--culled from a variety of fields including developmental and social psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and communication--for parents or adults interested in child development.
While this book does not offer an in-depth view in any one area, it provides a comprehensive overview of the various components of human communicative development and its significance for the child's cognitive and emotional growth. It is quite clear that developmental processes are constrained by multiple influences whose interactions have just begun to be uncovered. Examining the diverse facets of communicative development will enable professionals to garner further insights into the mystery of human communication.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

This book deals with the narrative discourse--specifically lifestories--of 16 patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). It attempts to understand the discourse of these patients in contextual terms. Thus far, the dominant explanation for "incoherence" in AD speech has been largely provided by research in psycholinguistics, much of which has understood AD speech in terms of the progressively deteriorating nature of the disease. This study provides a complementary view by examining ways in which some social factors--audiences, setting, and time--influence the extensiveness and meaningfulness of AD talk.
By offering both an examination of interactions across the data as well as analyzing particular cases in detail, this unusual study attempts to juxtapose some general insights regarding AD discourse with case-specific ones. Sociolinguistic analyses of the data demonstrate how certain audiences and particular settings set in motion discourse activities that either facilitate the patients' ability to recall their pasts or impede it. This analysis also includes a critical look at the researcher's contribution in negotiating and reinforcing these activities. Ethnographic details about the social worlds of some of these patients shed light on how larger social contexts at least indirectly contribute to exacerbating the patients' conditions or stabilizing them. The analyses of both context and language provides a more global understanding of the Alzheimer experience. This study also discusses some interactional strategies by which professionals can begin to engage AD patients in meaningful talk as well as ways by which they can better "hear" AD patients' cues at narrating. Throughout, this book underscores the need to factor in social factors when making assessments regarding AD patients' communicative abilities.

This book provides descriptions and illustrations of cutting-edge text analysis methods for communication and marketing research; cultural, historical-comparative, and event analysis; curriculum evaluation; psychological diagnosis; language development research; and for any research in which statistical inferences are drawn from samples of texts. Although the book is accessible to readers having no experience with content analysis, the text analysis expert will find substantial new material in its pages. In particular, this collection describes developments in semantic and network text analysis methodologies that heretofore have been accessible only among a smattering of methodology journals.
The book's international and cross-disciplinary content illustrates the breadth of quantitative text analysis applications. These applications demonstrate the methods' utility for international research, as well as for practitioners from the fields of sociology, political science, journalism/communication, computer science, marketing, education, and English. This is an "ecumenical" collection that contains applications not only of the most recent semantic and network text analysis methods, but also of the more traditional thematic method of text analysis. In fact, it is originally with this volume that these two "relational" approaches to text analysis are defined and contrasted with more traditional "thematic" text analysis methods. The emphasis here is on "application." The book's chapters provide guidance regarding the sorts of inferences that each method affords, and up-to-date descriptions of the human and technological resources required to apply the methods. Its purpose is as a resource for making quantitative text analysis methods more accessible to social science researchers.

As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third lawsuit in 1950, which was eventually decided in Brown v. Board of Education. Amidst the Black parents' resistance, Elizabeth Avery Waring, a twice-divorced northern socialite, and her third husband, federal judge J. Waties Waring, launched a rhetorical campaign condemning white supremacy and segregation. In a series of speeches, the Warings exposed the incongruity between American democratic ideals and the reality for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. They urged audiences to pressure elected representatives to force southern states to end legal segregation. Wanda Little Fenimore employs innovative research methods to recover the Warings' speeches that said the unsayable about white supremacy. When the couple poked at the contradiction between segregation and "all men are created equal," white supremacists pushed back. As a result, the couple received both damning and congratulatory letters that reveal the terms upon which segregation was defended and the reasons those who opposed white supremacy remained silent. Using rich archival materials, Fenimore crafts an engaging narrative that illustrates the rhetorical context from which Brown v. Board of Education arose and dispels the notion that the decision was inevitable. The first full-length account of the Warings' rhetoric, this multilayered story of social progress traces the symbolic battle that provided a locus for change in the landmark Supreme Court decision.

The volume combines a historical and philosophical study of Russell's theory of descriptions. It defends, develops and extends the theory as a contribution to natural language semantics while also arguing for a reassessment of the important of linguistic inquiry to Russell's philosophical project.

This edited volume offers a series of state-of-the-art conceptual papers and empirical research studies which consider how contextual factors at multiple levels dynamically interact with individuals to influence how they go about the complex business of learning and using a second language.

This book is the first in-depth examination of the application of theories of space to issues of second language learning. The author introduces the work of key thinkers on the theory of space and place and the relevance of their ideas to second language acquisition (SLA). He also outlines a new conceptual framework and set of terms for researching SLA that centre on the idea of 'language learning environments'. The book considers the spatial contexts in which language learning takes place and investigates how these spatial contexts are transformed into individualised language learning environments, as learners engage with a range of human and nonhuman, and physical and nonphysical, resources in their daily lives. Revisiting linguistics and language learning theory from a spatial perspective, the book demonstrates that the question of where people learn languages is equally as important as that of how they do so. This work is essential reading for any researcher wishing to research the role of the environment as an active player in SLA.

Gunther Kress argues for a radical reappraisal of the phenomenon of literacy, and hence for a profound shift in educational practice. Through close attention to the plethora of objects which children constantly produce--drawings, cut-outs, writings and collages-- Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions-- actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing.
This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy and thought and action. It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities which will become essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentering of language in educational theory and practice.

In Signs, Language and Communication readers familiar with the arguments of Professor Harris' previous work, including Signs of Writing, will find those ideas developed here to cover not just writing, but aspects of art, design and manufacture.
Roy Harris proposes a new theory of communication. He begins with the premise that the mental life of an individual should be conceived as a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the past and future. He concludes by arguing that communication should be viewed as both a product and a resource of this constant act of integration.

Ancient Greek is commonly considered a 'synthetic' or 'inflectional' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word 'periphrastic' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in , 'it was happening', or *s , 'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of 'verbal periphrasis' and 'adjectival periphrasis' from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.

Research on metaphor has been dominated by Aristotelian questions of processes in metaphor understanding. Although this area is important, it leaves unasked Platonic questions of how structures of the mind affect such processes. Moreover, there has been relatively little work on how metaphors affect human behavior. Although there are numerous postdictive or speculative accounts of the power of metaphors to affect human behavior in particular areas, such as clinical or political arenas, empirical verification of these accounts has been sparse.
To fill this void, the editors have compiled this work dedicated to empirical examination of how metaphors affect human behavior and understanding. The book is divided into four sections: metaphor and pragmatics, clinical uses of metaphor, metaphor and politics, and other applications of metaphor. Chapters contained within these sections attempt to merge Aristotelian questions with Platonic ones.

Conversational analysis is an interdisciplinary field that draws on cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, pragmatics, and the ethnography of communication. These various disciplines provide both qualitative and quantitative foundations for conversational analysis. The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate what communication is: what its goals are, why people talk, and how conversational goals are achieved. The primary concerns of this study are to investigate the interactions among cognition, emotion, and social norms, using the floor model proposed by Edelsky (1981) and Schultz, Florio, and Erickson (1982), and to further develop their model for the analysis of conversational interaction.

The grandmother granddaughter conversation examined in this book makes explicit what the detailed study of interaction reveals about two social problems--"bulimia" and "grandparent caregiving." For the first time, systematic attention is given to interactional activities through which family members display ordinary yet contradictory concerns about health and illness:
* a grandmother's (who is also a registered nurse) attempts to initiate, confront, and remedy her granddaughter's lack of responsibility in admitting bulimic "problems" and committing to professional medical assistance;
* a granddaughter's methods for avoiding ownership of the alleged bulimic problems by discounting the legitimacy of her grandmother's expressed concerns.
Through analysis of a single audio-recorded and transcribed conversation, Wayne Beach reveals the altogether pervasive and often troubled talk surrounding family medical predicaments. From a careful review of extant theories that seek to explain eating disorders and grandparent caregiving, it becomes clear that an overreliance on self-report data has promoted underspecified understandings of "social contexts" -- conceptualizations void of real time practices and interactional consequences mirroring how families manage their daily affairs and understandings regarding health and illness. In contrast, this volume draws attention to family members' embodied interactional activities. Here it is seen, for example, how methods for expressing concern and caring by "individuals" may nevertheless eventuate in interactional troubles and problems "between" family members. The analysis reveals that, while displays of basic concerns for others' health and well being are routine occurrences between family members in home environments -- and of course, across friendship and various support networks -- even the delicate and well-intended management of such occasions guarantees neither agreement on the nature of the alleged "problems" nor, consequently, a commitment to seek professional help as a means of remedying a medical condition. In such cases, the very existence of an illness is itself a matter of some contention to be interactionally worked out. And it is perhaps both predictable and symptomatic that those explicitly denying (or as with the granddaughter, indirectly failing to admit) that problematic health behaviors exist, also somehow let it be made known that far too much attention is being given to possibilities and consequences of illness in the first instance.
Implications of this investigation extend well beyond "bulimia" and "grandparent caregiving" to a vast array of casual and institutional involvements between family members, friends, and bureaucratic representatives such as those involved in long-term caregiving, dealing with cancer and Alzheimer's disease, or conducting psychiatric interviews and HIV/AIDS counseling sessions. Findings regarding the interactionally organized nature of talk about bulimia, as well as the problematic nature of caregiving, will be of value to researchers focusing on language and social interaction, health practitioners, and families alike.
This volume includes the full transcript of the conversation in the case study. A copy of the audio-recording is available for classroom adoption and/or personal purchase by contacting: Wayne A. Beach, School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4516.

Combines research with pedagogy to provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the topic for students approaching it for the first time. With a focus on the cognitive side of language contact, drawing on the closely related subjects of bilingualism and multilingualism, this textbook will also appeal to students beyond those taking Language Contact modules, on modules such as Bilingualism and SLA. The closest competitors all published at least 11 years ago, so this will be far and away the most up-to-date textbook on the market, combining cutting-edge insights from research with a core grounding in the subject.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached--not as one-time testimony--but as an ongoing, deepening conversation.

Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now--burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is "not" a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be "made" a story. "On Listening to Holocaust Survivors" shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and--just as important--the ways they are not able to do so.

Research on the development of metaphor abilities in children can be dated back as far as 1960, with Asch and Nerlove's pioneering study, which concluded that children were unable to understand metaphors until middle or even late childhood. However, the study of metaphor in children did not take off until the 1970s; research continued to show metaphor as a relatively late-developing skill, based on children's inability to paraphrase correctly metaphoric sentences presented out of any situational or narrative context.
In the past decade, research into the development of figurative language has broadened considerably in scope. Efforts have been underway to demonstrate the cognitive underpinnings of the ability to make sense of figurative language and to demonstrate the role of metaphor and its cousin, analogy, in the development of cognition.
Metaphor is now considered to be a central aspect of language and thought and thus a crucial variable in cognitive development. The articles in this issue support the claim that no longer can any theory of language acquisition afford to ignore how children are able to recognize the distinction between what is said and what is meant and how they are able to grasp what is meant when people say things they do not mean.