TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Published research and conference presentations on the Chinese language in the last decade have tended to focus on adult language processing. This book provides a comprehensive resource for the critical discussion of major issues in learning to read Chinese from a child acquisition perspective. The combined contributions from researchers in Asian studies, linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, cognitive psychology, reading, and education inform international comparative studies of literacy by making apparent the features of the Chinese culture, language, writing system, and pedagogy that may facilitate or impede the acquisition of literacy.

The Pragmatics Reader is the indispensable set of readings for all students studying Pragmatics at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Combining key classic texts with newer extracts covering current developments in contemporary Pragmatics, each reading has been carefully selected to both showcase the best thinking and latest research and also to reflect the international nature of the field.

The 30 varied readings, including four specially commissioned papers, have been organised into eight themed sections: Linguistic Pragmatics; Post-Gricean Pragmatics; Indexicality; Historical Pragmatics; Politeness, Face and Impoliteness; Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; Pragmatics and Conversation - Development and Impairment; and Pragmaticians on Pragmatics. Each of these sections is supported and enhanced by substantial editorial commentaries, pre-reading, in-reading and post-reading activities and suggestions for further reading, both in print and online. The book also features a general introduction, a glossary of key terms, and a conclusion that explores the relationship between pragmatic theory and practice before anticipating the future directions of the subject.

Readings: Dawn Archer and Peter Grundy - J. L. Austin - John R. Searle - H. P. Grice - Pieter A. M. Seuren - Robert C. Stalnaker - Stephen C. Levinson - Reinhard Blutner - Diane Blakemore - Billy Clark - Robyn Carston - Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson - Stephen C. Levinson - Jo Rubba - Jef Verschueren - Elizabeth Close Traugott - Laurel J. Brinton - Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen - Erving Goffman - Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson - Miriam A. Locher and Richard J. Watts - Jonathan Culpeper - Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Julianne House and Gabriele Kasper - Haruko Minegishi Cook - Istvan Kecskes - Anat Ninio and Catherine E. Snow - Emanuel A. Schegloff - Heidi Ehrenberger Hamilton - Roman Kopytko - Jon F. Pressman - Charles L. Briggs

This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

This volume presents a comprehensive look at the phenomenon of formulaic language (multi-word units believed to be mentally stored and retrieved as single units) and its role;in fluent speech production. Focusing on second language speech, the book provides an overview of research into the role of formulaic language in fluency, details a study which provides evidence of that role, and outlines teaching plans and strategies to foster it. This important area has not been examined in such depth and scope before, and this work has many implications for future research and language pedagogy. It will appeal to researchers in discourse analysis and second language acquisition.

This book explores implications of the modern view of central banks rising from the proposition that words have no meaning beyond their use in a particular context and setting. It studies coded language to explain why a central bank's decisions and communicative interactions can't be devoted to a coded language which is an artificial language.

This volume tracks the impact Processing Instruction has made since its conception. The authors explain Processing Instruction, both its main theoretical underpinnings as well as the guidelines for developing structured input practices. They review the empirical research conducted to date, so that readers have an overview of new research carried out on the effects of Processing Instruction. The work concludes with reflections on the generalizability and limits of the research on Processing Instruction and offers future directions for Processing Instruction research.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses 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 and historians to the development of the sociology of language.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses 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 scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines - anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

Being presented with phrases of the kind, 'take the plunge' and 'write a letter', native speakers of English tend to agree that the former is more idiomatic that the latter. What exactly is it about these two phrases that guide speakers' judgements? Adopting a usage-based perspective, this study addresses the question 'which factors do speakers rely upon when assessing the idiomaticity of a construction?'.
"
Rethinking Idiomaticity "is the first study to bring together a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and quantitative judgement data to explore the nature of idiomaticity as a complex concept that comprises semantic and formal variation parameters. Wulff's fascinating book is suitable for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of lexicography, phraseology, corpus linguistics and those who are employing quantitative approaches.
Cognitive linguists interested in the empirical underpinnings of their theoretical assumptions will also find this required reading.

The contributors present a coherent collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background, providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on the discursive grounding of metaphor from a cognitive-linguistic perspective.

This new addition to Routledge 's Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, brings together the very best and most influential scholarly research in over half a century of language-acquisition research. The collection represents and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, by highlighting models and methodologies from and implications for adjacent fields such as psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, computer science, and comparative cognition. In addition, the collection steers users to the most important, as well as controversial, issues that lie at the frontier of language acquisition research.

With a new introduction by the editor, comprehensive index, and a chronological table of the gathered materials, this four-volume collection provides both student and scholar alike with all the key writings on language acquisition in one convenient and authoritative reference resource

This book emerges as a response to the increasing use of English as a lingua franca in the multilingual European context. It provides an up-to-date overview of the sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and educational aspects of research on third language acquisition by focusing on English as a third language.

In June 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission determined that J. Robert Oppenheimer, wartime director of the Manhattan Project and Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk. Consequently, America's most prominent scientist was removed from government service. In contrast to historical and political explanations of the Oppenheimer case, Holloway explores the role that rhetoric played in Oppenheimer's demise. In doing so, the author draws attention to the symbolic nature of politics and character and highlights the significant interaction of political and scientific terminologies in American discourse.

Holloway's analysis and evaluation suggest that the accusations against Oppenheimer used the most powerful terms of the mid-1950s--communism, progress, and science--to legitimize the government's questionable action. Oppenheimer, for his part, failed to use his most strategic rhetorical resources in his defense, and therefore participated in his own ruin. Holloway highlights the rhetorical interaction among accusation, self-defense, and decision statements through a microscopic rhetorical analysis of the case's five central documents. An original extension and refinement of Kenneth Burke's cluster-agon method, which Holloway calls terminological algebra, is proposed as a systematic analytical tool consistent with Burke's theories. Recommended for critics of rhetoric and political communication.

Gila Schauer's study of interlanguage pragmatic development in English is situated in the context of studying abroad. It is the first book-length study of a common occurrence worldwide, but one that has not received the focus it deserves. Schauer examines the interlanguage pragmatic development of German learners of English at a British University over the course of a year. The focus is not only on the learners' productive pragmatic development, but also on their pragmatic awareness, which is compared with their grammatical awareness. The analysis undertaken is both qualitative and quantitative, and the book draws some important conclusions relevant to the whole field of interlanguage pragmatics. It will be engaging reading for researchers and for those doing postgraduate studies in applied linguistics, especially those working on interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, multilingualism and second language acquisition.

This book contains an account of language and drama between 1945 and 2005, synthesizing linguistic and dramatic knowledge in order to illuminate the ways in which anxieties and attitudes toward language manifest themselves in discourses on and around English theatre of the period, and how these anxieties and attitudes reflect back through the theatre of this period.

This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the first Sino-Tibetan language to be reduced to writing. Old Chinese is the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE) and the ancestor of later varieties of Chinese, including all modern Chinese dialects. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart's new reconstruction of Old Chinese moves beyond earlier reconstructions by taking into account important new evidence that has recently become available: better documentation of Chinese dialects that preserve archaic features, such as the Min and Waxiang dialects; better documentation of languages with very early loanwords from Chinese, such as the Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Vietnamese languages; and a flood of Chinese manuscripts from the first millennium BCE, excavated or discovered in the last several decades. Baxter and Sagart also incorporate recent advances in our understanding of the derivational processes that connect different words that have the same root. They expand our knowledge of Chinese etymology and identify, for the first time, phonological markers of pre-Han dialects, such as the development of *r to -j in a group of east coast dialects, but to -n elsewhere. The most up-to-date reconstruction available, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction brings the methodology of Old Chinese reconstruction closer to that of comparative reconstructions that have been used successfully in other language families. It is critical reading for anyone seeking an advanced understanding of Old Chinese.

Negation is a sine qua non of every human language but is absent from otherwise complex systems of animal communication. In many ways, it is negation that makes us human, imbuing us with the capacity to deny, to contradict, to misrepresent, to lie, and to convey irony. The apparent simplicity of logical negation as a one-place operator that toggles truth and falsity belies the intricate complexity of the expression of negation in natural language. Not only do we find negative adverbs, verbs, copulas, quantifiers, and affixes, but the interaction of negation with other operators (including multiple iterations of negation itself) can be exceedingly complex to describe, extending (as first detailed by Otto Jespersen) to negative concord, negative incorporation, and the widespread occurrence of negative polarity items whose distribution is subject to principles of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters in this book survey the patterning of negative utterances in natural languages, spanning such foundational issues as how negative sentences are realized cross-linguistically and how that realization tends to change over time, how negation is acquired by children, how it is processed by adults, and how its expression changes over time. Specific chapters offer focused empirical studies of negative polarity, pleonastic negation, and negative/quantifier scope interaction, as well as detailed examinations of the form and function of sentential negation in modern Romance languages and Classical Japanese.

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.

This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual and logical semantics, historical development, and acquisition. There are also specific chapters on modality in Zapotec and American Sign Language, which show the range of forms that modal notions can take. To assist its tutorial function, the book closes with a comprehensive conceptual outline of all the chapters. Key features: new series textbook covers the essentials of modality

Pragmatics, often defined as the study of language use and language users, sets out to explain what people wish to achieve and how they go about achieving it in using language. Such a study is clearly of direct relevance to an understanding of translation and translators. The thirteen chapters in this volume show how translation - skill, art, process and product - is affected by pragmatic factors such as the acts performed by people when they use language, how writers try to be polite, relevant and cooperative, the distinctions they make between what their readers may already know and what is likely to be new to them, what is presupposed and what is openly affirmed, time and space, how they refer to things and make their discourse coherent, how issues may be hedged or attempts made to produce in readers of the translation effects equivalent to those stimulated in readers of the original. Particular attention is paid to legal, political, humorous, poetic and other literary texts.