This book describes an immersion program (school education conducted in a language different from that used at home) from a psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and methodological view. The research is based on the more than 70,000 children in the Catalan immersion program, and the characteristic features of this program have relevance to researchers and practitioners in other countries. The book begins by describing the conditions to be fulfilled by any immersion program in order to be of benefit to the children taking part in it. As assessment is made as to how experiments carried out in Catalonia meet these basic prerequisites. The book then examines the specific characteristics of the immersion program in Catalonia. Two features are singled out for particular attention: the low sociocultural background of the pupils and the early age, 3-4 years, of the children when the program begins. By analyzing these two variables, the author is able to revise certain theoretical and methodological aspects of second language learning-the prime role often attributed to comprehension over production and the hypothesis that a threshold level of mastery of LI (home language) is needed to gain access to the second language. The book describes a process whereby L2 is acquired in such a way as to permit meaningful and effective comprehension and production in the new language from the very outset stressing that L2 is learned as it is used instead of being learned first and used later.

Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of language acquisition, specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the previous century and that will no doubt continue engaging them into the present one.

How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.

This book is about the doing and experiencing of diagnosis in everyday life. Diagnoses are revealed as interactive negotiations rather than as the assigning of diagnostic labels. The authors demonstrate, through detailed discourse analyses, how the diagnostic process depends on power and accountability as expressed through the talk of those engaged in the diagnostic process. The authors also show that diagnostic decisions are not only made by professional experts trained in the art and science of diagnosis, but they can also be made by anyone trying to figure out the nature of everyday problems. Finally, diagnostic reasoning is found to extend beyond typical diagnostic situations, occurring in unexpected places such as written letters of recommendation and talk about the nature of communication. Together, the chapters in this book demonstrate how diagnosis is a communication practice deeply rooted in our culture. The book is interdisciplinary and unusually broad in its focus. The authors come from different experiential scholarly backgrounds. Each of them takes a different look at the impact and nature of the diagnostic process. The diagnoses discussed include autism, Alzheimer's disease, speech and language disorders, and menopause. The focus is not only on the here and now of the diagnostic interaction, but also on how diagnoses and diagnostic processes change over time. The book can serve as an undergraduate or graduate text for courses offered in various disciplines, including communication, sociology, anthropology, communication disorders, audiology, linguistics, medicine, and disability studies.

Selection of 24 essays by the dictionary researcher Reinhard Hartmann on a ~Interlingual Lexicographya (TM), a genre much neglected in the literature, including interdisciplinary approaches to translation equivalence, its analysis in contrastive text linguistics and its treatment in the bilingual dictionary, with particular attention to the user perspective, in English and German.

Interjections in Ancient Greek have long lacked a comprehensive account, despite their frequent occurrence in major texts. The present study of their semantics and pragmatics, encompassing all items encountered in Greek drama from the 5th century BC, applies a moderate minimalism, theory-driven method. Readers are offered a thorough and detailed study of this elusive, and in several respects deviant, class of linguistic items.

This volume brings together ten contributions to the study of untutored (mainly) second but also first language acquisition. All chapters have been written from a functionalist perspective and take as the main theoretical framework a model of spontaneous second language acquisition centered on the "basic variety" as proposed by Klein and Perdue. The chapters in the volume are grouped around two research themes. The first theme concerns the acquisition of scope phenomena (negation, scope particles), the second one deals with referential movement (reference to person, time and space). Both parts provide insights in the structure of learner varieties at various stages of development, and are followed by a discussion chapter. Scope phenomena, such as negation and frequency adverbials present an important learning problem, as learners have to reconcile the logical structure of their utterances with the syntactic specifics of the language being learned. Their acquisition has been relatively neglected in studies up to date, however, and we even lack detailed knowledge about the interpretation of scope particles in the target languages. The chapters in this part of the volume set out to provide more knowledge about scope phenomena in general; more detailed descriptions of the particles in the languages under consideration; and a more general understanding of how scope is acquired. Strong findings resulting from the "ESF" project suggested universal trends in how untutored learners deal with acquisition in the very early stages (the basic variety). Chapters in this second part of the volume on referential movement look at acquisition at more advanced stages, including the production of near native speakers. Learners who progress beyond the basic variety increasingly grammaticalise their productions. This later development is supposedly more variable, as more specific aspects of the target languages are now being acquired. Chapters in this part allow to shed more light on the question regarding universal and language-specific influences on language acquisition.

This book examines the intersection of culture and language in Ireland and Irish contexts. The editors take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the ways in which culture, identity and meaning-making are constructed and performed through a variety of voices and discourses. This edited collection analyses the work of well-known Irish authors such as Beckett, Joyce and G. B. Shaw, combining new methodologies with more traditional approaches to the study of literary discourse and style. Over the course of the volume, the contributors also discuss how Irish voices are received in translation, and how marginal voices are portrayed in the Irish mediascape. This dynamic book brings together a multitude of contrasting perspectives, and is sure to appeal to students and scholars of Irish literature, migration studies, discourse analysis, traductology and dialectology.

Second Language Learning is an up-to-date survey and analysis of second language acquisition theory, from the early seventies through to the present day. It discusses the development of ideas in this expanding area of language study and looks at the implications of these ideas and directions for future research. Requiring some previous knowledge of second language acquisition research, this book will be of interest to advanced students and teachers of applied linguistics, second language learning and language pedagogy. Its study questions and activities, together with its useful bibliography and list of resources for the researcher, provide practical opportunities for replicating and extending the studies reported, as well as exploring further the principles presented in the book.

This book proposes a new model of phonology that integrates rules and repairs triggered by markedness constraints in a classical derivational model. In developing this theory, the book offers new solutions to many long-standing problems involving syllabic and segmental phonology with analyses of natural language data, both well-known and relatively unknown. The book also includes a new treatment of Palatalization and Affrication processes, a novel theory of feature visibility as an alternative to feature underspecification and an extensive critique of Optimality Theory.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not only to notoriously difficult aspects of interpreting linguistic objects, such as indexicals, anaphora, and metonymy, but also to establishing the precise reference of common nouns and the scopes of noun phrases. The central issue in computational semantics is how processes of finding and combining the relevant linguistic and contextual information into contextually appropriate meanings can be organised. Traditional approaches of applying context information to disambiguated natural language expressions do not work well, due to the massive ambiguity in natural language. Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations. Underspecified representation and inference are therefore the key topics in this book. The book is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who take an interest in the computation of meaning, and who want to know what is happening in this exciting field of research.

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler's diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

This book provides a detailed model of both the discourse and knowledge of physics and offers insights toward developing pedagogy that improves how physics is taught and learned. Building on a rich history of applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to scientific discourse, the book uses an SFL framework, here extended to encompass the more recently developed Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach, to explore the field's multimodal nature and offer detailed descriptions of three of its key semiotic resources - language, image, and mathematics. To complement the book's SFL underpinnings, Doran draws on the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory, which offers tools for understanding the principles of how knowledge is developed and valued, to explore the manifestation of knowledge in physics specifically and its relationship with discourse. Through its detailed descriptions of the key semiotic resources and its analysis of the knowledge structure of physics, this book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers in multimodality, discourse analysis, educational linguistics, and science education.

When data consist of grouped observations or clusters, and there is a risk that measurements within the same group are not independent, group-specific random effects can be added to a regression model in order to account for such within-group associations. Regression models that contain such group-specific random effects are called mixed-effects regression models, or simply mixed models. Mixed models are a versatile tool that can handle both balanced and unbalanced datasets and that can also be applied when several layers of grouping are present in the data; these layers can either be nested or crossed. In linguistics, as in many other fields, the use of mixed models has gained ground rapidly over the last decade. This methodological evolution enables us to build more sophisticated and arguably more realistic models, but, due to its technical complexity, also introduces new challenges. This volume brings together a number of promising new evolutions in the use of mixed models in linguistics, but also addresses a number of common complications, misunderstandings, and pitfalls. Topics that are covered include the use of huge datasets, dealing with non-linear relations, issues of cross-validation, and issues of model selection and complex random structures. The volume features examples from various subfields in linguistics. The book also provides R code for a wide range of analyses.

The book elaborates one of Roman Jakobson's many brilliant ideas, i.e. his insight that the two cognitive strategies of the metaphoric and the metonymic are the end-points on a continuum of conceptualization processes. This elaboration is achieved on the background of Lakoff and Johnson's twodomain approach, i.e. the mapping of a source onto a target domain of conceptualization. Further approaches dwell on different stretches of this metaphor-metonymy continuum. Still other papers probe into the specialized conceptual division of labor associated with both modes of thought. Two new breakthroughs in the cognitive linguistics approach to metaphor and metonymy have recently been developed: one is the three-domain approach, which concentrates on the new blends that become possible after the integration or the blending of source and target domain elements; the other is the approach in terms of primary scenes and subscenes which often determine the way source and target domains interact.

The present volume of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics series, presents cutting-edge corpus pragmatics research on language use in new social and educational environments. The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics offers a platform to scholars who carry out rigorous and interdisciplinary research on language in real use. Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific research, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a precise methodology based on mathematics and statistics while Pragmatics strives to interpret intended meaning in real language. This series will give readers insight into how pragmatics can be used to explain real corpus data, and how corpora can illustrate pragmatic intuitions.

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 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.

Since it was first established in the 1970s, the Applied Linguistics and Language Study series has become a major force in the exploration of practical problems in human communication and language education. Drawing extensively on empirical research and theoretical work in linguistics, sociology, and psychology and education, the series explores key issues in language acquisition and language use. In this book Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter describe the discoursal properties of language and demonstrate what insights this approach can offer to the student and teacher of language. The authors examine the relationship between complete texts, both spoken and written, and the social and cultural contexts in which they function. They argue that the functions of language are often best understood in a discoursal environment and that exploring language in context compels us to revise commonly-held understandings about the forms and meanings of language. In so doing, the authors argue the need for language teachers, syllabus planners and curriculum organisers to give greater attention to language as discourse. Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching challenges many current language teaching orthodoxies and offers the reader new, and sometimes provocative, perspectives on language awareness. There are chapters on issues in teaching spoken and written language; patterns of text organisation; literature, culture and language teaching; teaching grammar and vocabulary from a discourse perspective; and planning a discourse-based language syllabus. Each chapter has reader activities to consolidate the points made throughout the book and there is a detailed and wide-rangingbibliography. The book is a thought-provoking exploration of discourse analysis which will be of relevance to applied linguists, to teachers of both English and foreign languages, and to students of language in education.

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.

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