de gruyter mouton jul 2009 (10 résultats)

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware - This comprehensive project has the objective of describing and assessing pronunciation talent with special focus on its psychological and neural correlates. The first part of this undertaking describes the extensive tests necessary to measure phonetic talent in its various dimensions, such as production and perception, the segmental and suprasegmental levels of speech, and different utterance forms such as spontaneous speech, reading and imitation. Subjects are examined in their native language (German), a familiar second language (English) and, to a lesser degree, an unfamiliar language (Hindi). The project also investigates psychological and behavioral influences such as empathy or motivation on pronunciation performance, as well as correlations with general linguistic aptitude. The described measures and correlations allow a reliable classification of proficiency and talent level to be used in the selection of subjects for the neuroimaging studies in the second part of the project. These use functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to observe differences in brain activity between talented and untalented individuals during the performance of phonetic tasks (perception of phonetic differences, imitation, reading). 404 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume makes accessible a substantial range of recent research in Cognitive Grammar. From disparate sources, it brings together a dozen innovative papers, revised and integrated to form a coherent whole. This work continues the ongoing program of progressively articulating the theoretical framework and showing its descriptive application to varied grammatical phenomena.A number of major topics are examined in depth through multiple chapters viewing them from different perspectives: grammatical constructions (their general nature, their metonymic basis, their role in grammaticization), nominal grounding (quantifiers, possessives, impersonal it), clausal grounding (its relation to nominal grounding, an epistemic account of tense, a systemic view of the English auxiliary), the 'control cycle' (an abstract cognitive model with many linguistic manifestations), finite clauses (their internal structure and external grammar), and complex sentences (complementation, subordination, coordination). In each case the presentation builds from fundamentals and introduces the background needed for comprehension. At the same time, by bringing fresh approaches and new descriptive insights to classic problems, it represents a significant advance in understanding grammar and indicates future directions of theory and research in the Cognitive Grammar framework.The book is of great interest to students and practitioners of cognitive linguistics and to scholars in related areas. 412 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -While variation within individual languages has traditionally been focused upon in sociolinguistics, its relevance for grammatical theory has only recently been acknowledged. On the methodological side, there is an ongoing competition between large-scale statistical analyses and investigations that rely more heavily on introspection and elicited grammaticality judgements. The aim of this volume is to bridge the 'cultural gap' between empirical-variationist and formal-theoretical approaches in linguistics. The volume offers case studies that seek to combine corpus-based and competence-based approaches to the description of variation. In doing so, it opens up new avenues for locating and analyzing variability, both at the level of the individual speaker and between speakers of different dialects and generations. The contributions document the plurality of current research into models of grammatical competence that live up to the challenge of variationist data. More specifically, parameter-based (e.g. Minimalist), constraint-based (e.g. Optimality Theoretic), and usage-based (e.g. Construction Grammar) approaches to variation are discussed. The volume therefore is of interest to a broad public within linguistics, including syntacticians of different theoretical persuasion, morphologists and sociolinguists. While a majority of contributions addresses facets of variation in English and German, the volume also includes variationist studies written by specialists of French, Dutch, Icelandic, and Uralic. 420 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book aims to provide a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English on the basis of the systematic study of deictic, syntactic and semantic properties of authentic examples drawn from literary as well as non-literary sources. In the area beyond direct and indirect speech or thought, 'free indirect discourse' has often been implicitly treated as a residual category that can accommodate anything that is neither one nor the other. This book takes a fresh look at the evidence in the area of deixis, particularly through a close study of pronoun and proper name use, and proposes to distinguish the more character-oriented free indirect type from a narrator-oriented 'distancing' indirect type, which is grammatically wholly structured from the narrator's deictic standpoint. Unlike free indirect representations, which coherently represent the character's viewpoint, the distancing indirect type sees narrators appropriating character discourse for their own purposes, which may for instance be ironic. The distinctions thus drawn shed new light on the much debated 'dual voice' approach to free indirect discourse. Included in the scope of this book are subjectified uses of clauses such as I think, which no longer primarily construe a cognition process, but rather come to function as hedges. Such speaker-encoding uses are argued to involve an interpersonal type of structure, not based on complementation, whereas the non-subjectified cases receive an interclausal complementation analysis which does not have recourse to the problematic notion of 'reporting verb'. This monograph is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students interested in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of reported speech viewed from a constructional perspective. 400 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book demonstrates how the underlying principles of the English-based FrameNet project are successfully applied to the description and analysis of typologically diverse languages. The stimulating collection of articles brings together insights from lexical semantics, corpus linguistics, computational lexicography, machine learning, and psychology to address three main questions: To what degree is it possible to apply semantic frames derived from the English lexicon to the description and analysis of other languages What types of resources are necessary for the creation of FrameNets for French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Spanish How can the creation of multi-lingual FrameNets be automated The contents exemplifies the liveliness of current research on cross-lingual applications of Frame Semantics to natural language processing. 364 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware - This volume tracks the impact Processing Instruction has made since its conception. The authors explain Processing Instruction, both its main theoretical underpinnings as well as the guidelines for developing structured input practices. They review the empirical research conducted to date, so that readers have an overview of new research carried out on the effects of Processing Instruction. The work concludes with reflections on the generalizability and limits of the research on Processing Instruction and offers future directions for Processing Instruction research. 232 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive. Special emphasis is put on the existence of an implicit argument (ususally an agent) and its representation in the passive. A review of data from syntax, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics shows that the implicit agent is not just a conceptually understood argument. It is argued that it is represented at the level of argument structure and that this is what sets the passive apart from other patient-subject constructions. A corpus-based case study on the use of the passive in academic writing analyzes the use of the passive in this particular register. One of the findings is that about 20-25% of passives occur in constructions that do not require an auxiliary, a result that challenges corpus studies on the use of the passive that only consider full be-passives. It is also shown that new active-voice constructions have emerged that compete with the passive without having a more visible agent. The emergence of these constructions (such as 'This paper argues.') is discussed in the context of changes in the rhetoric of scientific discourse. The book is mainly of interest to linguists and graduate students in the areas of English syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 240 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The questions as to why most languages appear to have more trouble borrowing verbs than nouns, and as to the possible mechanisms and paths by which verbs can be borrowed or the obstacles for verb borrowing, have been a topic of interest since the late 19th century. However, no truly substantial typological research had been undertaken in this field before the present study. The present work is the first in-depth cross-linguistic study on loan verbs and the morphological, syntactic and sociolinguistic aspects of loan verb accommodation. It applies current methodologies on database management, quantitative analysis and typological conventions and it is based on a broad global sample of data from over 400 languages and the typological data from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). One major result of the present study is the falsification, on empirical grounds, of long-standing claims that verbs generally are more difficult to borrow than other parts of speech, or that verbs could never be borrowed as verbs and always needed a re-verbalization in the borrowing language. 492 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware - This book deals with the emergence of nominal morphology from a cross-linguistic perspective and is closely related to Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition (ed. by D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, M. Kilani-Schoch) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the fundamental inflectionally expressed categories of the noun (number, case, gender) in one of the languages belonging to different morphological types (isolating, fusional-inflecting, agglutinating, root inflecting) and families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic/Baltic, Greek, Finnic, Turc, Semitic, Indian American). The analyses are based on parallel longitudinal observations of children in their second and early third year of life as well as their input. The focus lies on the transition from a pre-morphological to a proto-morphological stage in which grammatical oppositions and so-called 'mini-paradigms' begin to develop. The point at which children start to discover the morphological structure of their language and the speed with which they develop inflectional distinctions of lexical items has been found to be dependent on the morphological richness of the input language on the paradigmatic as well as the syntagmatic axis of linguistic structure. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Natural Morphology, Usage-based theories). 460 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Etat : Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -In a collection of 16 papers, eminent scholars from several disciplines present diverse and yet cohering perspectives on the expression of social knowledge, its acquisition and management. Hence, the volume is an attempt to view the social functions of language in a novel, systematic way. Such an approach has been missing due to the complexity of the matter and the emphasis on purely cognitive properties of language. The volume starts with a presentation of overarching issues of the social nature of humans and their language, providing strong evidence for the social fundaments of human nature and their reflection in language and culture. The second section demonstrates how social functions can be displayed in discourse by using language play and humor, irony and attributions as well as references to social schemas. The chapters in the third part examine a wide range of particular linguistic elements carrying social-cognitive functions. An important finding is that social-cognitive functions have to be inferred on the basis of social knowledge, frequently with the help of non-verbal cues, since languages offer only few direct expressions for them. In other words, linguistic devices used to express social content tend to be multifunctional. Interestingly, this multifunctionality does not prevent their rapid recognition. The volume presents valuable information to linguists by widening the cognitive-linguistic framework and by contributing to a better understanding of the role of pragmatics. It is also beneficial to social and cognitive psychologists by offering a broader view on the encoding and decoding of social aspects. Finally, it offers a number of fruitful ideas to students of cultural and communication studies. 484 pp. Englisch.