In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

This book shows that the discourse of the Labour party 1994-2007, revolving around three key concepts of identity, narrative and metaphor, not only reflected new Labour's policy and organisational changes, but that it was also an essential part of its successful strategies of renovation and of power legitimation.

This book presents a cognitive semantic model of what the whole range of functions is that English and German discourse particles can fulfil, how these functions are related, why discourse particles fulfil just these functions and not others, and what factors condition their interpretation. Methodologically, conversation analysis and various methods from lexical semantics, such as field analysis and semantic decomposition, as well as contrastive studies are combined with the statistical analyses of large corpora, simulation experiments involving supervised learning in artificial neural networks, and the representation of the results in a computational lexicon. This methodologically interdisciplinary study thus not only presents a general model of polysemy which includes structural aspects, a conceptual background frame, and the contribution of the lexeme, it also provides full coverage for the functional readings of discourse particles and a unified definition of the word class.

This work represents the first integrated account of how deixis operates to facilitate points of view, providing the raw material for reconciling index and object. The book offers a fresh, applied philosophical approach using original empirical evidence to show that deictic demonstratives hasten the recognition of core representational constructs. It presents a case where the comprehension of shifting points of view by means of deixis is paramount to a theory of mind and to a worldview that incorporates human components of discovering and extending spatial knowledge. The book supports Peirce's triadic sign theory as a more adequate explanatory account compared with those of Buhler and Piaget. Peirce's unitary approach underscores the artificiality of constructing a worldview driven by logical reasoning alone; it highlights the importance of self-regulation and the appreciation of otherness within a sociocultural milieu. Integral to this semiotic perspective is imagination as a primary tool for situating the self in constructed realities, thus infusing reality with new possibilities. Imagination is likewise necessary to establish postures of mind for the self and others. Within these imaginative scenarios (consisting of overt, and then covert self dialogue) children construct their own worldviews, through linguistic role-taking, as they legitimize conflicting viewpoints within imagined spatial frameworks.

"

The volume constitutes a state-of-the-art account of issues related to teaching, learning and testing speaking in a second language. It brings together contributions by Polish and international scholars which seek to create links between theory, research and classroom practice, report the findings of studies investigating the impact of linguistic, cognitive and affective factors on the development and use of speaking skills, and provide concrete pedagogic proposals for instruction and assessment in this area. As such, the book will be of interest not only to second language acquisition theorists and researchers, but also to foreign language teachers willing to enhance the quality of speaking instruction in their classrooms.

The term "special population" occupies a particular purpose and has a particular role in the discourse of higher education. This book uses the term as an umbrella term for any student who tends to be underrepresented on college campuses and has a very specific set of unique needs: among others, individuals with physical and learning disabilities, international students, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ students, single parents, and first generation and other non-traditional student groups. Sometimes these "special" student groups are visible to educators; however, quite often they are hidden in plain sight, which makes it difficult for educators to work effectively and meaningfully with these student groups. This book uses the framework of critical intercultural communication pedagogy to generate a discussion about pedagogical issues surrounding students who are categorized as "special populations", focusing on culturally sensitive pedagogical methods to educate all students.

This book provides a detailed study of Icelandic argument structure alternations within a syntactic theory of argument structure. Building on recent theorizing within the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, the author proposes that much of what is traditionally attributed to syntax should be relegated to the interfaces, and adapts the late insertion theory of morphology to semantics. The resulting system forms sound-meaning pairs by generating hierarchical structures that can be translated into morphological representations, on the one hand, and semantic representations, on the other. The syntactic primitives, however, underdetermine both morphophonology and semantics. Without appealing to special stipulations, the theory derives constraints on the external argument of causative-alternation verbs, interpretive restrictions on nominative objects, and the optionally agentive interpretation of verbs denoting self-directed motion.

The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity focuses on the semantic structure of Chinese classifiers under the cognitive linguistics framework, and the implications thereof on linguistic relativity and language acquisition. It examines the semantic correlation between a given classifier and its associated nouns. Nouns in Chinese, which are assigned specific classifiers according to their selected characteristics, reflect the process of human categorization. The concrete categories formed by the relationship between nouns and classifiers may serve to explain the conceptual structure of the Chinese language and certain underlying aspects of culture and human cognition. Song Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese for the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at university of Hawai'i at Manoa.

The six essays of Visual Identities are an important contribution to the growing field of industrial semiotics. Floch's major strength is his analysis of signs in a way which is both industrially relevant and textually precise. Until recently there have been two quite different and distinct ways of understanding commerical signs, such as logos and advertisements. Industry-based work has tended to look at questions of marketing and has often been reduced to the mass psychology of 'appeal' and audience research, whereas the textual analysis of commerical signs has tended to come from limited positions of identity politics and criticism (Marxism, feminism, etc). Floch manages to find a way between (and also outside) these traditions. In doing so he has produced a book which will interest industrial practitioners in advertising, marketing and design as well as students and academics in semiotics.

The book indentifies and assesses the importance of a range of influences on child language acquisition and development, paying particular attention to situational influences. Key issues are highlighted and recent research is presented. There are five sections: the deployment of speech during early development; linguistic interaction and family background - encoding the situation; multidimentional aspects of language development; and constraints on language development. There are twelve chapters on these themes.

This study advances a model for critical discourse analysis (CDA) which draws on evolutionary psychology and cognitive linguistics, applied in a critical analysis of immigration discourse. It will be of special interest to students and researchers with which to explore new perspectives in CDA.

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.

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.

Educators strive to create "assessment cultures" in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, "What We Really Value, " introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches.
For the authors of "Organic Writing Assessment, " the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad's original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies.
"Organic Writing Assessment" represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM's flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property of natural language. This monograph provides a comprehensive survey of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness. The book discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness, which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer science. It argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential for further contextual specification, and proposes a unified logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic, philosophy of language, and NL- oriented AI. Although it makes extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts since all technical terms are carefully explained.

Study abroad is now both an international industry and an experience that can have a deep impact on students' attitudes and approaches to second language learning. Narratives of Second Language Identity in Study Abroad brings together three important research areas by exploring the impact of study abroad on second language identities through narrative research. It outlines a new model of second language identity that incorporates a range of language and personal competencies. The three main dimensions of this model are explored in chapters that begin with students' study abroad narratives, followed by the authors' in-depth analysis. Further chapters use narratives to assess the impact of programme type and individual difference. Arguing that second language identity development is one of the more important outcomes of study abroad, the book concludes with recommendations on how study abroad programmes can best achieve this outcome.

This concise and well-organized grammar of classical Arabic, here translated from its original German into English for the first time, provides students of Arabic with a highly useful reference tool. While brief enough to be used with efficiency, the book is also rich in content and thorough in its coverage. Beginning- or advanced-level students working on classical texts and styles will find this grammar quick to use, reliable, and up-to-date. More than just a translation into English, this edition of Wolfdietrich Fischer's Grammar of Classical Arabic includes many revisions and additions provided by the author. In particular, the chapter on syntax offers numerous new text examples and other improvements. The bibliography has been updated to include significant recent contributions to the field of classical Arabic grammar and linguistics. Translated by Jonathan Rodgers with attention to both accuracy and readability, this book is an accessible reference tool that every student of classical Arabic will want to have on hand.

"Analysing Multimodal Documents" presents the first systematic, corpus-based, and theoretically rigorous approach to the description and analysis of multimodal documents. John Bateman introduces researchers and advanced students to a linguistically-based method of analysis that shows how different modes of expression--including language, rhetoric, images, typography, colour and space--go together to make up a document with a recognizable genre. The author draws upon both academic research and concrete experience of how designers and production teams put documents together.

Hdi is a hitherto undescribed language spoken in northern Cameroon. The language belongs to the Central Branch of Chadic. The aim of the book is to provide a fairly complete description of the grammar of this language. Consequently, the grammar describes the phonology, morphology and syntax of Hdi and the semantic and discourse functions coded in this language. Most clauses in Hdi are verb-initial, with the subject directly following the verb. The object is often marked by a preposition. What makes Hdi unusual is that the object-marking preposition is unique and does not function elsewhere as a locative preposition. Another interesting feature of Hdi is that there are two types of clauses, pragmatically independent and pragmatically dependent, and that the difference between these is coded by different tense and aspectual systems. In addition, there are two clausal orders for complex sentences: The order embedded clause-matrix clause codes one type of modality, while the order matrix clause-embedded clause codes another. The language also has a rich system of verbal extensions coding the semantic roles of arguments and adjuncts and the direction of movement. The grammar is of interest not only to linguists working in African, Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics, but also to general linguists, since it describes phenomena rarely seen in other languages of the world. The grammar is described in terms accessible to linguists working within various theoretical frameworks.