This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.

Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

Ever since antiquity conceptual hierarchies have been an indispensable element in western thinking on knowledge structures. They are also considered to be a central principle in the organization of lexis. The cognitive salience of the base level discovered in the last few decades has caused doubts to be raised about the dominance of logical inclusion relations in everyday language. With reference to French, Spanish, and lexical data from other languages, the study demonstrates that there are numerous linguistic features supporting the view that the structure of ordinary vocabulary is rooted in the base level rather than in logical hierarchies.

Dieses Buch fuhrt Sie in die Welt der Linguistik ein. Anhand des Deutschen sowie mit Bezugen zu den Sprachen Spanisch, Franzoesisch, Italienisch und Englisch lernen Sie, wie in der Linguistik methodisch vorgegangen wird, wie Sprachen lautlich und grammatisch strukturiert sind, sowie welche Bedeutungsphanomene auftreten. In weiteren Kapiteln lernen Sie regionale sowie soziale Variationen einer Sprache kennen, die historische Entwicklung von Sprachen, die Analyse von Texten sowie die Beziehung zwischen Sprache und Schrift. UEber ihre Sprache(n) haben Menschen schon immer nachgedacht. Man versteht die Methodik und Ziele der heutigen Linguistik besser, wenn die geschichtliche Entwicklung dieser Disziplin in Grundzugen bekannt ist. Im letzten Kapitel lernen Sie daher anhand von Biographien ausgewahlter Koryphaen der Linguistik, welche Entwicklungen die Linguistik gepragt haben. In jedem Kapitel befinden sich Selbstfragen sowie UEbungsaufgaben, mit denen Sie die gelernten Inhalte einuben und vertiefen koennen.