"Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence" seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. It examines global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

Nonveridicality and evaluation interact in obvious ways in conveying opinion and subjectivity in language. In Nonveridicality and Evaluation Maite Taboada and Radoslava Trnavac bring together a diverse group of researchers with interests in evaluation, Appraisal, nonveridicality and coherence relations. The papers in the volume approach the intersection of these areas from two different points of view: theoretical and empirical. From a theoretical point of view, contributions reflect the interface between evaluation, nonveridicality and coherence. The empirical perspective is shown in papers that employ corpus methodology, qualitative descriptions of texts, and computational implementations.

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.

In A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters, Maria de la O Hernandez-Lopez and Lucia Fernandez-Amaya have joined marketing researchers and linguists to provide the tools to understand consumers' communication in different professional settings. Service encounters have been widely studied due to the fact that the communicative exchange between the customer and the server is essential for the success of the service encounter itself. In this volume, the role of language, linguistics and communication is examined in an area of research that has traditionally been related to business and marketing. This is achieved through the presentation of works from a variety of perspectives that may help to advance in this particular context and also contribute to improving communication in service encounters.

claim is that such morphological processes can be learnt without symbolization and innate knowledge. See Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) for the original model of past tense acquisition, Plunkett and Marchman (1993), Nakisa, Plunkett and Hahn (1996) and Elman et al. (1996) for developments and extensions to other morphological processes, and Marcus et al. (1992) and Pinker and Prince (1988) for criticism. One line of investigation supporting the view of language as a genetic endowment is closely linked to traditional research on language acquisition and argues as follows: If language is innate there must be phenomena that should be accessible from birth in one form or the other. Thus it is clear that the language of children, especially young children and preferably babies should be investigated. As babies unfortunately don't talk, the abilities that are available from birth must be established in ways different from the usual linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic research of the last few years has shown that at the age of 4 and 8 months and even during their first week of life children already have important language skills. From the fourth day, infants distinguish their mother tongue from other languages. From the first months children prefer the sound of speech to 'other noise'. At the age of 4 months, infants prefer pauses at syntactic boundaries to random pauses.

"The Semantics of English Negative Prefixes" proposes a new system for describing the semantic properties of negative prefixes in English. Specifically, the system captures the semantic distinctions between pairs of negative words that share same bases but end in different prefixes like amoral vs. immoral, dissatisfied vs. unsatisfied, maltreat vs. mistreat, non-human vs. anti-human, etc. The book provides guidance on two matters. As a reference for derivation, it informs the readers about the mechanisms of forming negative words. To do so, it describes the prefixes in terms of the cognitive theories of category, domain and construal.As a reference for usage, it informs the readers about the meaning differences between prefixally-negated words. To do so, it bases the description on actual instances and supports the differences by means of collocations. "The Semantics of English Negative Prefixes" outlines a model which unifies the principles of two popular approaches to language description. Cognitive Semantics is the theory that takes account of mental operations. Usage-based Semantics is the practice that focuses on actual utterances. Accordingly, it is an essential source for any reader interested in English language. It achieves its aims by means of clear layout, actual data, ample exemplification, lucid explanation and discrete evidence.

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.

The genitive/accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum. Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian, this volume analyzes two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements-the genitive of negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and thus require an integrated analysis. Further, that the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics, and that the genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack commitment to existence. Kagan's subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between case-marking and other properties, such as definiteness, specificity, number and aspect. It also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood, and relates her overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.

Over half a century ago, J. L. Austin predicted developments in the discipline of grammar which, in properly establishing it as a science, would at the same time displace a large part of philosophy - philosophical logic, to be specific. With the boundary finally removed between what philosophers then called 'logical syntax' (essentially logical form) and what grammarians study as syntax, Austin believed that 'we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy ...in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs'. It was a radical, almost heretical, vision - the study of logic, one of the original and fundamental planks of philosophy, subsumed under the science of grammar. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Victor Dudman developed an English grammar of the kind Austin had predicted. His work impressed many, but was ultimately misunderstood. Jean Curthoys' introduction explores the philosophical issues involved in those misunderstandings. Dudman's later, unfinished, but conceptually most complete, work is the second part of this book.

Semantics: A Cognitive Account of Linguistic Meaning is a comprehensive introduction to the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions in English: words and sentences. In conducting the analysis, it draws on two sources. First, it relies on the assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, which describes language as being non-modular, symbolic, usage-based, meaningful and creative. Second, it hinges on the assumptions of Cognitive Semantics, which describes meaning as being embodied, motivated, dynamic, encyclopaedic and conceptualised. It explicates these assumptions clearly and applies them to diverse areas of language. Ultimately, it enables students to recognise the complexity of the English linguistic system, and trains them to solve the intricate puzzles characterising its nature.

David Brazil's pioneering work on the grammar of spoken discourse ended at A Grammar Of Speech (1995) due to his untimely death. Gerard O'Grady picks up the baton in this book and teststhedescription of usedlanguageagainst a spoken corpus. He incorporates findings from the last decade of corpus linguistics study, notably concerning phrases and lexical items larger than single orthographic words and ellipsis. He demonstrates theadded communicative significance that the incorporation of two systems of intonation ('Key' and 'Termination') bring to the grammar. O'Grady reviews the literature andcovers the theorybefore moving on to a practical, analytic section. His final chapter reviews the arguments, maps the road ahead and lays out the practical applications of the grammar. The book will be of great interest to researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis and also EFL/ESL.

Organisations which act on behalf of society are expected to act fairly, explaining themselves and their procedures to people they encounter. For the police, explanation is routine and repetitive. It is also extremely powerful. "Rights Communication" provides an unusual opportunity to observe different speakers and writers explaining the same texts in their own words in British police stations. Data analyses cast explanation not as a skill but a technology, a rich resource for making meaning, representing identities and organising social participation.

The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical - especially pedagogical - applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer's view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.

Language is one of humanity's greatest achievements, yet one which virtually all children achieve remarkably quickly. How much more remarkable, therefore, when children learn not one but two languages! There are many single case studies describing children from families where determined parents adopt strategies to maximise their children's chances of becoming bilingual. Many more children, whose parents speak a mixture of languages, also become bilingual without this extra help. How this occurs and why some children have more problems than others in a bilingual environment are some of the issues addressed by this book, which is a longitudinal study of how children learn to use more than one language. The family is assumed to be the key factor in these processes, and bilingual language development is placed firmly within an interactive context, as it is from this context that the development of childhood bilingualism can best be understood. Thus the aims of this book are to examine how young children become bilingual, and to show what factors predict early childhood bilingualism.

This volume is about dislocation, i.e. the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge.

Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

The papers in this volume address central issues in the study of Plurality and Quantification from three different perspectives: * Algebraic approaches to Plurals and Quantification * Distributivity and Collectivity: Theoretical Foundations * Distributivity and Collectivity: Empirical Investigations Algebraic approaches to the semantics of natural languages were in dependently introduced for the study of generalized quantification, pred ication, intensionality, mass terms and plurality. The most prominent modern advocate for an algebraic theory of plurality (and mass terms) is certainly Godehard Link. It is indicative of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Link's work that most of the contributions in this volume take the logic of plurals proposed by Godehard Link (Link 1983, 1987) as their foundation or, at the very least, as their point of reference. Link's own paper in this volume provides a concise summary of many of the central research issues that have engaged semanticists during the last decade. Link's paper also contains an extensive bibliography that provides an excellent resource for scholars interested in the semantics of plurals. Since we can refer readers to Link's paper for an excellent survey of the subject matter of this book, we will limit our attention in this in troduction to summarizing the individual contributions in this volume. The book is organized into three main sections; within each section the papers are ordered alphabetically. However, as in much of linguistic the orizing, there is an exception: for reasons pointed out above, Godehard Link's article appears as Chapter 1.

This book presents and discusses theoretical and practical perspectives on English pronunciation theory, research and practice in order to establish evidence-based pronunciation teaching models, teaching and research priorities, and recommendations for best practices in teaching English pronunciation. The chapters provide a balanced view of theory and practice based on the authors' empirical findings and their extensive professional experiences in English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) and lingua franca contexts. The book identifies pronunciation teaching priorities that take into account individual learner variables, disseminates knowledge about theoretical frameworks, explores teachers' and learners' beliefs and practices regarding pronunciation instruction, and shares empirical findings regarding teacher education and teaching interventions in diverse contexts with English learners of different ages and language backgrounds. Overall, the chapters highlight the need to focus on intelligibility models that consider individual learner differences, and teacher and contextual variables.

I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences.

Future Times, Future Tenses examines how the future is expressed by means of tense, aspect, and modality across a wide range of languages, among them French, Polish, Basque, Turkish, and West Greenlandic. From the present point of view, the future is not fixed: while there is arguably only one past, the future is largely open and/or indeterminate. Reference to the future has thus become one of the most hotly-debated topics in contemporary linguistics: the interactions of future tense with future time, and of future tense with the semantics of possible worlds, are crucial to any satisfactory account of temporal linguistics. This book considers and seeks a resolution to outstanding issues in the field by uniting linguistic and philosophical perspectives on future reference in natural language. Scholars from different parts of the world approach these issues from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistic typology, formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. In the process they question the very validity of the traditional notion of a specific marker for future tense. The book shows the close connections between linguistic, logical, metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological issues concerning the future and reveals the value of linking linguistic considerations of tense and aspect to philosophical approaches to modality and time.

In this book, Yufang Ho compares the text style difference between the two versions of John Fowles' "The Magus," exemplifying the methodological principles and analytic practices of the corpus stylistic approach.
"The Magus "was first published in 1966 and was revised and republished by Fowles in 1977. Fowles' own comment on the second edition was that it was 'rather more than a stylistic revision.' The book explores how the revised version is linguistically different from the original, especially in terms of point of view (re) representation. The corpus stylistic approach adopted combines qualitative and quantitative comparison to confirm the overall text style difference. The analysis demonstrates that computer assisted methods can identify significant linguistic features which literary critics have not noticed and provide a more detailed descriptive basis for literary interpretation of (either edition) of the novel. This analysis of "The Magus "serves as a case study and exemplar of how corpus techniques may be used generally in the study of linguistics.

What makes good language learners tick? What do they do that poor learners don't do? Could we help the poor learner by teaching them some of the good learners' tricks? The nature of second language learning is extremely complex and a great deal of research is needed to improve our understanding of it. In spite of much theorizing, very little has been done to study its processes directly and empirically. This study constitutes a beginning. It sets out to discover the strategies of good language learners. The book will be useful not only to researchers, but also to teachers and to those who make language teaching policy.

Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and nouns in the sentence. Special attention is paid to the role nouns and noun phrases play in the explication of aspect in English (and similar languages). The grammatical marking of aspect is shown to be a compensatory phenomenon imposed by language structure. Comparisons made using Slavic (mainly Bulgarian) data reveal that compositional aspect is a mirror image of verbal aspect. When explicated compositionally, aspect is also determined by pragmatic factors. Ultimately, it is part of man's cognitive potential.