Bøger udgivet af De Gruyter Mouton

China, with the world's largest population, numerous ethnic groups and vast geographical space, is also rich in languages. Since 2006, China's State Language Commission has been publishing annual reports on what is called "language life" in China. These reports cover language policy and planning invitatives at the national, provincial and local levels, new trends in language use in a variety of social domains, and major events concerning languages in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Now for the first time, these reports are available in English for anyone interested in Chinese languge and linguistics, China's languge, education and social policies, as well as everyday language use among the ordinary people in China. The invaluable data contained in these reports provide an essential reference to researchers, professionals, policy makers, and China watchers.

This volume explores linguistic diversity and complexity in different urban contexts, many of which have never been subject to significant sociolinguistic inquiry. A novel mixture of cities of varying size from around the world is studied, from megacities to smaller cities on the national periphery. All chapters discuss either the multilingualism or the pluricentric aspect of the linguistic diversity in urban areas, most focussing on one urban centre. The book showcases multiple approaches ranging from a quantitative investigation based partly on census data, to qualitative studies flowing, for example, from extensive ethnographic work or discourse analysis. The diverse theoretical backgrounds and methodological approaches in the individual chapters are complemented by two chapters outlining the current trends and debates in the sociolinguistic research on urban multilingualism and pluricentricity and suggesting some possible directions for future investigations in this field.The book thus provides a broad overview of sociolinguistic research of multilingual places and pluricentric languages.

This book presents a first comprehensive overview of existing research on information structure in sign languages. Furthermore, it is combined with novel in-depth studies of Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. The book discusses how topic, focus, and contrast are marked in the visual modality and what implications this has for theoretical and typological study of information structure. Such issues as syntactic and prosodic markers of information structure and their interactions, relations between different notions of information structure, and grammaticalization of markers of information structure are highlighted. Empirical studies of the two sign languages also showcase different methodologies that are used in such research and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. The book contains a general introduction to the field of information structure and thus can be used by linguists new to the field.

This book investigates formal characteristics and discourse functions of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in spoken ELF as represented in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Building on the findings of previous ELF research, the book proposes that creativity might serve as a fundamental concept in accounting for the variation that seems to be central to describing and understanding English as a lingua franca.

Über lange Zeit hat die Rechtsbetrachtung die rhetorische Perspektive ausgeblendet. Man verfolgte die Idee einer logisch-exakten, wissenschaftlich begründeten Rechtsfindung und befürchtete, der praxisbezogene Ansatz der Rhetorik führe in die Beliebigkeit. Neuere und neueste Untersuchungen zeigen jedoch, dass die Rhetorik seit der Antike mit relativer Verlässlichkeit die Gewinnung des Rechts und die Rechtslehre formiert hat.Rhetorische Muster bestimmten und bestimmen nicht nur die juristische Texterstellung und den Vortrag im Gerichtsprozess, die Argumentation und die Grundlagen der Ausbildung, sondern auch die sog. juristische Methode und Idee des Rechtsstreits: das Konzept, den anstehenden Konflikt formalisiert, klug und scharfsinnig über ein systematisiertes Begründen auszutragen. Das Handbuch Juristische Rhetorik bietet einen umfassenden Überblick zur Rechtsrhetorik und weiterführende Hinweise.

This book presents comprehensive, thorough and updated analyses of key cognitive individual difference factors (e.g., age, intelligence, language aptitude, working memory, metacognition, learning strategies, and anxiety) as they relate to the acquisition, processing, assessment, and pedagogy of second or foreign languages. Critical reviews and in-depth research syntheses of these pivotal cognitive learner factors are put into historical and broader contexts, drawing upon the multiple authors' extensive research experience, penetrating insights and unique perspectives spanning applied linguistics, teacher training, educational psychology, and cognitive science. The carefully crafted chapters provide essential course readings and valuable references for seasoned researchers and aspiring postgraduate students in the broad fields of instructed second language acquisition, foreign language training, teacher education, language pedagogy, educational psychology, and cognitive development.

Heritage language education is a relatively new field developed as "heritage" has become an important trope of belonging, legitimacy and commodification. Many recent studies treat the "heritage language learner" as an objective category. However, it is a social construct, whose meaning is contested by researchers, school administrators and the students themselves. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2007-2011 at a weekend Japanese language school in the United States, this monograph investigates the construction of the heritage language learner at the intersections of the knowledge-power complex, ideologies of language and national belonging, and politics of schooling. It examines the ways individuals become, resist and negotiate their new subjectivity as heritage language learners through becoming objects of study, being caught in nationalist aspirations and school politics regarding what to teach to whom, and negotiating with peers with various linguistic proficiency and family backgrounds. The volume proposes a new approach to view the notion of heritage language learner as a site of negotiation regarding the legitimate knowledge of language and ways of belonging, while offering practical suggestions for schools.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

Roman Jakobson stands alone in his semiotic theory of poetic analysis which combines semiotics, linguistics and structuralist poetics. This groundbreaking book proposes methods for developing Jakobson's theories of communication and poetic function. It provides an extensive range of examples of the kinds of Formalist praxis that have been neglected in recent years, developing them for the analysis of all poetry but, especially, the poetry of our urban future. Throughout the book the parameters of a city poetic genre are proposed and established; the book also develops the theory of the function of shifters and deixis with special reference to women as narrators. It also instantiates an experimental poetic praxis based on the work of one of Jakobson's great influences, Charles Sanders Peirce. Steadfastly adhering to the text in itself, this volume reveals the often surprising, hitherto unconsidered structural and semiotic patterns within poems as a whole.

The Manual of Galician Linguistics provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the current situation of the Galician language and introduces its readers to the most important topics of current linguistic research on Galician. This volume includes chapters covering diachronic and synchronic descriptions of all main areas of language structure (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicology), as well chapters on social and regional variation, language contact, sociolinguistics, language variation and other interesting areas of linguistic research. The chapters are rich in descriptive detail and grounded in modern linguistic theory. This manual will be an essential research tool for students and researchers who are interested in the Galician language and in Romance linguistics.

The book offers a cognitively realistic account of morphosyntactic alternations through a combination of corpus-based analysis and (psycho)linguistic experiments. The central thesis of the book is that the choice between competing constructions is driven by semantic, syntactic, morphological, phonological, discourse-related, and lectal features. The study outlines ways to assess the relative importance and cognitive plausibility of the various factors by advocating methodological pluralism - one of the pillars of a cognitively realistic linguistic theory. A deeper understanding of the cognitive grounding of the probabilistic structure of language is developed as reflected in the patterns and structures we see across different types of language data. The book outlines some of the different modelling techniques available for capturing the multivariate and probabilistic nature of linguistic knowledge quantitatively. It is argued that for making cognitively realistic statistical models, we first need to break these models by pitting different modelling techniques against each other and against human classification behaviour as manifested in a range of (psycho)linguistic experiments.

The book demonstrates that it is possible to study the language faculty with the core scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in accordance with the predictions.In light of the "reproducibility crisis" as extensively addressed in recent years in a number of fields, the demonstration that rigorous replication can be obtained in the study of the language faculty in terms of correlational and categorical predictions is particularly significant. While the claim has been made over the years that Chomsky's research program is meant to be a scientific study of the language faculty, a conceptual and methodological articulation has never been made as to how we can accumulate our knowledge about the language faculty by the basic scientific method, including, most crucially, how exactly we can put our hypotheses to rigorous empirical and experimental test.The book proposes how to do that by providing a conceptual basis for the methodology for language faculty science. The book also offers empirical demonstrations of the viability of the proposed methodology. The experiments were conducted with Japanese and English speakers. Overall, the book explores new directions for the study of the mind.

The book offers a new angle on long-standing questions about the categorial status of English participles and gerunds. The book makes a major point: participles are not verb forms which behave like adjectives, but actually are adjectives, linked with verbs via derivation. It argues that observed differences between participles and adjectives, which in the past have prompted linguists to draw a category distinction between them, are in reality due to the non-prototypical semantics of participles - a feature also found in other types of adjectives, with strikingly identical effects. This analysis then accounts for the word formation of adjectives such as boring, tired, drunk, which has always been mysterious. The book investigates the consequences of this analysis for our understanding of gerunds and V-ing-N compounds. With its comprehensive study of -ing forms, the book calls into question a number of widely-held assumptions - regarding the distinction between derivation and inflection, and the role of semantics in syntactic and morphological analysis. This book is of great interest to researchers and students in linguistics interested in morphology, syntax, semantics, lexical categorisation.

Researchers in applied linguistics have found medical and health contexts to be fertile grounds for study, from macro-levels of conceptual analyses to micro-levels of the "turn-by-turn." The rich array of health contexts include medical research itself, clinical encounters, medical education and training, caregivers and patients in everyday life - from the formal and ritualized to the ad hoc and ephemeral. This volume foregrounds the crucial role of applied linguists addressing real world problems, while simultaneously highlighting the varied ways that health can be understood as a rich site of language inquiry in its own right. Chapters cover a range of health topics including medical training, medical interaction, disability in education, health policy analysis and recommendations, multidisciplinary research teams, and medical ethics. While reporting and reflecting on their specific topics in clinical and health contexts, contributors also articulate their own hybrid identities as professional collaborators in health research, education, and policy.

This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages.New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component.The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

This book brings together a collection of studies on Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Research on Libras began in earnest 20 years ago, around the time that Libras was recognised as a national language of Brazil in 2002. Over the years, more and more deaf researchers have become sign language linguists, and the community of Libras scholars have documented this language and built robust resources for linguistic research. This book provides a selection of studies by these scholars, representing work in a variety of areas from phonology to creative literature.