This is the first guide and introduction to the extraordinary range of languages in Amazonia, which include some of the most the most fascinating in the world and many of which are now teetering on the edge of extinction. Alexandra Aikhenvald, one of the world's leading experts on the region, provides an account of the more than 300 languages, comparing their common and unique features, setting out their main characteristics, and describing the histories and cultures of the people who speak them. The languages abound in rare features and in most cases have been in contact with each other for generations, giving rise to complex patterns of linguistic influence. The author draws on her own extensive field research to tease out and analyse the patterns of their genetic and structural diversity. In the process she shows how they reflect the interrelations of language and culture: different kinship systems, for example, produce different linguistic outcomes. She also explains the roles and workings of their unusual features including evidentials, tones and whistles, and elaborate positional verbs. The book ends with a glossary of terms, and a comprehensive list of references for those interested in following up a language or linguistic phenomenon. Alexandra Aikhenvald's fascinating book is aimed at a wide readership, including linguists and anthropologists. It is unburdened by esoteric terminology, written in her characteristically straightforward style, and brought vividly to life with numerous anaecdotes of her experience in the region. It may be used as reference for research and as an introduction for courses in Latin American studies, Amazonian studies, linguistic typology, and general linguistics.

This book considers the phenomenon of sluicing. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material (as in Someone saw her, but I don't know who _.). Elliptical constructions of this type are now known to occur widely in the world's languages in some form or another, and create interesting problems for linguistic analysis, involving complex interactions between syntax, semantics and morphology, as well as prosody. The present volume brings together new research by leading experts who analyse sluicing constructions in English, Dutch, Frisian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Malagasy, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Bengali. The book expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar. In addition to the nine chapters dedicated to specific languages, the volume features an introductory chapter and Haj Ross's original (1969) landmark paper on sluicing.

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.

Supporting you with varied features throughout, this intriguing new book provides a foundational understanding of politics and protest before focusing on step-by-step instructions for carrying out analysis on your own. It includes up to date cases, such as analysis of memes about Brexit, Trump and coronavirus, that cater for this quickly moving field.

Interpreting Motion presents an integrated perspective on how language structures constrain concepts of motion and how the world shapes the way motion is linguistically expressed. Natural language allows for efficient communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring a precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of qualitative spatial reasoning. It shows how motion descriptions in language are mapped to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. The authors provide an extensive discussion of prior research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, devoting chapters to the compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion, and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from textual descriptions. The book is written accessibly for a broad scientific audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and those working in fields such as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

Fracking and the Rhetoric of Place investigates the rhetorical strategies of speakers at public hearings on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") in order to understand how places shape and are shaped by citizens as they engage in their democracy. As an important argumentative resource in environmental controversy, the rhetoric of place helps citizens situate themselves within local contexts and raise their voices in times of social conflict. Justin Mando uses rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and corpus analysis to offer scholars of place-based rhetoric and environmental communication a heuristic approach to studying their own sites. This approach reveals that place-based arguments are a ubiquitous rhetorical resource in the dispute over hydraulic fracturing that shapes how the issue is perceived. Pro-frackers and anti-frackers use rhetoric of place in striking ways that reveal their values, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. Place functions as an interface of potential common ground that connects the local to the global, what is here to what is there. Scholars and students of rhetoric, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly interesting.

This volume takes up the challenge of surveying the present state of a variety of approaches to the identification, analysis and interpretation of metaphor across communication channels, situational contexts, genres and social spheres. It reflects three foremost trends of present metaphor research, namely the communicative approach, the cognitive modelling approach and the multimodality approach. These trends are considered as areas of research emerging on the ground of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, initiated by Lakoff. The book intends to show their concomitances as well as mark their diversifying paths. The aim is to bring about and make apparent the many connections among assumingly different trends stemming from CMT. Whereas discrepancies between communicative and conceptual perspectives might seem irredeemable, the book emphasizes and claims that the background framework of CMT provides a solid foundation for collaboration and mutual influence. Consequently, the analysis of metaphor usage in context may provide insights for cognitive modelling proposals. The analysis of cognitive configuration of conceptual domains may, in turn, illuminate our understanding of communicative decisions in discourse. The integration of multimodal metaphor analysis puts forward the idea that diverse modal manifestations of metaphor reveal the symbiosis between communicative and cognitive stances. The various subject areas and methodologies illuminate the scene of current research in the field. The poignant contributions open far reaching avenues into the realm of human thought and discourse.

This book is perhaps the most stunning available demonstration of the explanatory power of the parametric approach to linguistic theory. It is akin, not to a deductive proof, but to the discovery of a footprint in a far-off place which leaves an archeologist elated. The book is full of intricate reasoning, but the stunning aspect is that the reasoning moves between not only complex syntax and diverse languages, but it makes predictions about what two-year-old children will assume about the jumble of linguistic input that confronts them. Those predictions, Hyams shows, are supported by a discriminating analysis of acquisition data in English and Italian. Let us examine the linguistic context for a moment before we discuss her theory. The ultimate issue in linguistic theory is the explanation of how a child can acquire any human language. To capture this fact we must posit an innate mechanism which meets two opposite constraints: it must be broad enough to account for the diversity of human language, and narrow enough so that the child does not make irrelevant hypotheses about his own language, particularly ones from which there is no recovery. That is, a child must not posit a grammar which permits all of the sentences of a language as well as other sentences which are not in the language. In a word, the child must not create a language in which one cannot make adult discriminations between grammatical and ungrammatical.

This book explores young children's language acquisition in multilingual households through an original longitudinal study of the author's own children and interviews with members of other Korean-English families. The study investigates how multilingual children not only acquire multiple languages (verbal communication) but also acquire multiple strategies of non-verbal communication. In the process, it is also revealed that parents learn from children, collaboratively shaping the language of their family together in a manner that is between and beyond languages and cultures. The book explores the different types and frequency of non-verbal behaviours acquired by multilingual children and reveals how multilingual families use a range of multimodal resources to communicate effectively in a way that creates solidarity. The results of this longitudinal study are discussed within the paradigm of translanguaging and provide insight into an underrepresented multilingual population. With accompanying online videos, this book offers rich multimodal family interaction data for students and researchers interested in multilingualism, family language practices, and first and second language acquisition.

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.

Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors studies how marginalized groups use rhetorical strategies to craft legitimacy for themselves and how those in positions of power work to maintain their authority. Kinney uses archival research to parse the rhetorical devices employed by Mormon feminist women. The author assumes a pan-historical methodology by examining four unique examples of notable Mormon feminist rhetors that stretch across the 189-year history of this religion: Emmeline B. Wells (1828-1921), Fawn Brodie (1915-1981), Sonia Johnson (1936-present), and Kate Kelly (1980-present). Backed by intensive analysis, the author finds Mormon feminist women take up the ancient rhetorical canons as a heuristic to cultivate a position of authority for themselves: Wells employs arrangement patterns, Brodie engages with memory, Johnson draws upon invention practices, and Kelly applies delivery strategies. Scholars and students of communication, rhetoric, religion, and women's studies will find this book particularly interesting.

This book presents the latest work in the field of complementation studies. Leading scholars and upcoming researchers in the area approach complementation from various perspectives and different frameworks, such as Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars, to offer a broad survey of the field and provide thought-provoking reading.

This book introduces multimodality and technology as key concepts for understanding learning in the 21st century. The author investigates how a nationwide socio-educational policy in Uruguay becomes recontextualised across time/space scales, impacting interaction and learning in an English as a Foreign Language classroom. The book introduces scalar analysis to better understand the situated and fractal nature of education policy as meaning-making, subsequently defining learning from a multimodal socio-semiotic approach. The analytical integration of different policy scales shows what policy means to various stakeholders, and what learning means for students and teachers. This depends both on how they position themselves and how they engage with the policy educational media. This innovative book will appeal to students and scholars of technology and learning, as well as multimodality.

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, gaming, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, and French). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists, including genre, style and stance. With commentaries from the two most internationally recognized scholars of new media discourse (Naomi Baron and Susan Herring) and essays by well-established scholars and new voices in sociolinguistics, the volume will be more current, more diverse, and more thematically unified than any other collection on the topic.

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking 'enunciative' tradition and the English-speaking 'pragmatic' tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees.
Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages.
This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.

This book explores early new critical debates about intention, tracing how and why intention was dismissed across much humanities scholarship, and how it can be revisited and made relevant as a key formative, evaluative, and ethical concept. The author argues that the academic disinterest in intention occurred simultaneously as genre criticism and later the rhetorical interest in genre came into its own. Genre became a way to simultaneously elide and naturalize intention. The book elaborates on the pedagogical, ethical, and empirical consequences naturalizing intention through genre has had for rhetorical studies and it offers a new term, "curations" to identify discursive forms, actions, and intentions working simultaneously. Finally, he also examines the gap between the humanities and STEM fields and shows specific ways scientists and engineers have called for the humanities to become more invested in intention as both a critical and an operational concept. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies and critical discourse analysis, rhetoric and professional communication, including those in fields such as medicine, engineering, STS and business studies.

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of 'signs', rather than 'strings'. This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky's heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories.

Yet the concept of 'compositionality' itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents.

This book examines the distribution and interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Through a detailed analysis of simplex and complex anaphors in Dutch and English, as well as other Romance and Germanic languages, the authors show that the relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent can be captured in terms of general Minimalist principles.

This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.

This book presents empirical research of grammatical collocations of the type: verb and the prepositions "of" and "to". It is based on comparisons of English and Czech sentences containing verbs and prepositions that are followed by the object. The author creates English-Czech verbal prepositional counterparts and groups on the grounds of the similar semantic, syntactic features. She identifies the features that are the same for each verb group and generalizes them. The book determines trends and tendencies for verbs when they collocate with a certain preposition.

This is the first comprehensive History of Renaissance Rhetoric. Rhetoric, a training in writing and delivering speeches, was a fundamental part of renaissance culture and education. It is concerned with a wide range of issues, connected with style, argument, self-presentation, the arousal of emotion, voice and gesture. More than 3,500 works on rhetoric were published in a total of over 15,000 editions between 1460 and 1700. The renaissance was a great age of innovation in rhetorical theory. This book shows how renaissance scholars recovered and circulated classical rhetoric texts, how they absorbed new doctrines from Greek rhetoric, and how they adapted classical rhetorical teaching to fit modern conditions. It traces the development of specialised manuals in letter-writing, sermon composition and style, alongside accounts of the major Latin treatises in the field by Lorenzo Valla, George Trapezuntius, Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Johann Sturm, Juan Luis Vives, Peter Ramus, Cyprien Soarez, Justus Lipsius, Gerard Vossius and many others.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items. The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology, and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. This book is the first to report on the state of the art on these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and approaches to cross-linguistic research on the subject from generative and non-generative, synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

Teun Van Dijk is one of the most influential and significant scholars Critical Discourse analysis. This collection brings together his most important writing, with a substantial introduction, positioning the essays for the undergraduate market within the context of his own work and within broader developments in CDA. Teun Van Dijk's work is already widely studied at undergraduate level, and this new collection will make his work more accessible and easily available to the undergraduate student. It will also include suggestions for further study.