de gruyter mouton de gruyter mouton mär 2010 (23 results)

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Human thought and action is fundamentally shaped by a small set of cognitive categories, such as time, space, causality, or possession. It is not surprising, therefore, that all natural languages have developed many devices to express these categories. Temporality, for example, is reflected in the lexical meaning of verbs, in grammatical marking of tense and aspect, in time adverbials, in special particles, and in the application of discourse principles. Many of these devices have been the subject of intensive research across languages; but as a rule, this research focuses on particular aspects, it does not look at the expression of such a category as a whole, which is precisely the aim of the present series. The short volumes bring together what is known about the expression of a particular category in human language.Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Genthiner Strasse 13, 10785 Berlin 284 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Cognitive Sociolinguistics is a novel and burgeoning field of research which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of language at a usage-based level. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All ten contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimental methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. The search for methods that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors is thus another characteristic of the volume. In terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional variation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation.Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Genthiner Strasse 13, 10785 Berlin 332 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Das Sprecherzieherische Elementarbuch zählt seit über drei Jahrzehnten zu den national und international anerkannten Standardwerken der deutschen Sprecherziehung. Grundlage ist eine dialogorientierte Sprecherziehung. Jegliche mechanistische Sprechtechnik wird folglich entschieden abgelehnt.Auf die eingehende Behandlung der Funktion der Sprechorgane folgen jeweils unmittelbar die Übungskomplexe. Ihre praxiserprobten methodischen Hinweise und reichhaltigen, differenzierten Übungen dienen der Optimierung von Sprechatmung, Stimmgebung und insbesondere Artikulation (Erziehung zur Standardaussprache). Der dominierende Komplex Artikulation informiert dementsprechend über Klassifizierung und Einteilung der Laute, Koartikulation, Intonation und Phonostilistik. Er beschreibt anschaulich die Bildung der Laute, behandelt ausführlich Artikulationsfehler sowie regionale Abweichungen vom Aussprachestandard, unterbreitet detaillierte Abhilfevorschläge und die wichtigsten Ausspracheregeln.Die Publikation berücksichtigt die unterschiedlichen Belange verschiedener Arbeitsbereiche bzw. Zielgruppen und erhöht ihre Praktikabilität auch durch ein angemessenes Sachwortverzeichnis. Das Buch erwuchs aus der langjährigen sprechwissenschaftlichen Forschung sowie praktischen Tätigkeit und Erfahrung des Autors insbesondere in der Lehrer- und Dolmetscherausbildung an der Universität sowie in der Weiterbildung, der Schauspieler- und Sprecherausbildung für Funk und Fernsehen. Es wendet sich an Deutsche und Ausländer, Lernende und Lehrende: an alle, die aus privaten oder beruflichen Gründen an überregionaler Aussprache des Deutschen interessiert sind, d.h. an text- und situationsangemessener Verwendung der deutschen Standardaussprache.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the place left vacant by the death of God, the history of the last two centuries has undermined the confidence that reason will bind freedom and keep it responsible. We cannot escape this history, which has issued in a pervasive nihilism and has rendered all appeals to the ethical questionable. Nor could Kierkegaard. The specter of nihilism haunts all of his writings, as it haunts already German romanticism, to which he is so indebted. To exorcize it is his most fundamental concern. And it is the same fundamentally religious concern that makes Kierkegaard so relevant to our situation: What today is to make life meaningful If not reason, does the turn to the aesthetic promise an answer To really choose is to bind freedom. Either-Or calls us to make such a choice, i.e. to be authentic. But what does it mean to be authentic How are we today to think of such an authentic choice As autonomous action As a blind leap As a leap of faith Either/Or circles around these questions. 204 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And even when they did, they mostly just noted peculiar facts as ''quirks'' or ''unusual behavior'', without making too much of an effort at explaining them beyond calling them ''exceptions'' to various rules or generalizations. Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. Explaining the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other, is a reasonable and interesting challenge to any theory of how human language works. The present volume for the first time compiles selected papers on the study of rare linguistic features from various fields of linguistics and from a wide range of languages. 300 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Although Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a popular teaching method, research on CLIL has nearly exclusively focused on aspects of language learning. Besides that, we are still lacking any cognitively well-grounded theory about the special features of contexts in which the focus is on content learning, but in which a foreign language is used as the medium of communicating information. This book re-examines the basis for CLIL from a cognitive perspective and investigates how the use of a foreign language as a working language influences the processing of content. It summarizes findings from cognitive psychology on thinking, problem solving and conceptual processing, and integrates them with models of language-specific mental activities such as speech processing and text composition. This provides a theoretically well-grounded basis for the understanding of the special features of CLIL, and promotes a Cognitive Linguistic perspective on CLIL pedagogy.The theoretical considerations form the basis for an empirical study that offers the first insights into what CLIL learners actually do when they solve content-focused tasks while using an L2. Through spontaneous verbalization of thought, detailed verbal protocols were elicited and analysed into language and content focused cognitive processes. The analysis shows that both language and conceptual thought interact closely and that a focus on language in general has positive effects on the processing of semantic content; the use of an L2 as working language can enhance this effect. Additionally, the study offers a thorough reflection and new perspectives on verbal protocols as research tools, in particular in L2 contexts. 232 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The present volume is an edited collection of original contributions which all deal with the issue of recursion in human language(s). All contributions originate as papers that were presented at a conference on the topic of recursion in human language organized by Dan Everett in March 22, 2007. For the purpose of this collection all articles underwent a double-blind peer-review process. The present chapters were written in the course of 2008. Although the 'recursive' nature of linguistic expressions, i.e. the apparent possibility of producing an infinite number of expressions with finite means, has been noted for a long time, no general agreement seems to exist concerning the empirical status as well as mathematical formalization of this 'characteristic' of human languages or of the grammars that lie behind these utterances that make up these languages. Renewed interest in this subject was sparked by recent claims that 'recursion' is perhaps the sole uniquely human and as such universal trait of human language (cf. Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch 2000). In this volume, the issue of recursion is tackled from a variety of angles. Some articles cover formal issues regarding the proper characterization or definition of recursion, while others focus on empirical issues by examining the kinds of structure in languages that suggest recursive mechanism in the grammar. Most articles discuss syntactic phenomena, but several involve morphology, the lexicon and phonology. In addition, we find discussions that involve evolutionary notions and language disorders, and the broader cognitive context of recursion. 472 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware - While cognitive linguistics has become established as a comprehensive research paradigm over the last three decades, it has so far hardly contributed to investigations into processes of lexical creation as traditionally captured in research on word formation. In light of this, the volume at hand is the first one to take a step ahead towards illuminating diverse aspects of word formation from cognitive perspectives. The book combines contributions to the 2nd International Cognitive Linguistics Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association with a selection of invited papers by scholars working on issues of word formation and cognitive linguistics. This selection is guided by pluralism in both methodology and topics. Thus, some contributions are of a primarily theoretical nature discussing, for example, recombinance as a model of word formation and a taxonomy of word formation processes as construction types. Several articles address interface issues such as word formation and phrasal constructions, word formation and inflection, as well as phonology and word formational patterns. The majority of the studies focuses on individual types of word formation (compounding, affixation, and conversion), and they contribute to reframing our understanding of these processes. With a focus on mostly Germanic languages (Afrikaans, Dutch, English, German, Luxembourgish, and Norwegian), data-driven analyses include corpus linguistic investigations, elicited data, psycholinguistic experiments, and computational linguistic applications. A few contributions follow a mainly introspective path of reasoning based on the discussion of selected examples as in the analysis of creative compounds. Overall, the volume provides a rich array of topics emerging under the umbrella of cognitive linguistic thought and established patterns and processes of word formation. The various studies add to a yet marginal body of research in cognitive word formation and, thus, advance our awareness about the benefits of applying cognitive linguistic thoughts for investigating processes of lexical creation. 440 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Grounded primarily in the ethnography of communication and aligned with the multidisciplinarity of discourse analysis, the book examines the use of proverbs in the daily life of a social network of Mexican-origin transnational families in Chicago and Michoacán, Mexico. Various and detailed analyses of actual proverb use reveal that proverbs in this particular population function as a highly contextualized communicative strategy that serves four discrete social functions: to argue, to advise, to establish rapport, and to entertain. Proposing that the social and cognitive aspects of language use must be combined for a complete understanding of how such genres of language are actually used by regular people in daily life, the author shows how ordinary people use sophisticated cognitive processes to interpret the socially-relevant meanings of proverbs in everyday conversation. The book provides an unusual mix of contextualized discourse analysis that is ethnographic, linguistic, and cognitive, yielding much needed insight into a segment of the Mexican-origin population of the Midwestern U.S., a population whose increasing importance and size is often mentioned, but about which precious few linguistic studies have been conducted. The volume not only helps to fill this void but it is also one of the few studies that focuses on the impact of transnationalism on linguistic practices, regardless of cultural group. Departing from the conventional approach of ignoring the role of everyday-language use in order to focus exclusively on culture, economics, or migrant patterns, the book makes linguistic practice the central issue, and thus affirms that it is language that weaves together the two distant sites of transnational communities, providing a fertile area for understanding the perspectives of the transmigrants themselves. 200 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The book is concerned with the interaction of syntax, information structure and prosody in the history of English, demonstrating this with a case study of object topicalization. The approach is data-oriented, using material from syntactically parsed digital corpora of Old, Middle and Early Modern English, which serve as a solid foundation for conclusions. The use of object topicalization underwent a sharp decline from Old English until today. In the present volume, a basic prosodic well-formedness condition, the Clash Avoidance Requirement, is identified as the main factor for this change. With the loss of V2-syntax, object topicalization led more easily to cases in which two focalized phrases, the topicalized object and the subject, are adjacent. The two focal accents on these phrases would produce a clash, thus violating the Clash Avoidance Requirement. In order to circumvent this, the use of topicalization in critical cases is avoided. The Clash Avoidance Requirement is highly relevant also today, as experimental data on English and German show. Further, the Clash Avoidance Requirement helps to explain the well-known syntactic structure of the left periphery in Old English. An analysis positing two subject positions is defended in the study. The variation of these subject positions is shown to depend not on pronominal vs. lexical status of the subject but on information structural properties. 296 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The aim of this book is to demonstrate that, in a representation-based model, the phonological organization of speech sounds within a word is reducible to the licensing properties of nuclei with respect to structurally defined complexities which pose varying demands on the licenser. It is assumed that the primitive licensing relation is that between a nucleus and its onset (O N). There are two main types of complexities concerning the onset position. Substantive complexity is an important aspect of phonological organisation at the melodic level, while the syllabic configurations in which the onset may be found are referred to under the heading of formal complexity.At the melodic level, complexity is defined in terms of the number of privative primes called elements. The asymmetries in the subsegmental representations of consonants and vowels are shown to play a pivotal role in understanding a number of phenomena, such as typological patterns, markedness effects, phonological processes, segmental inventories, and, what is most important, the model allows us to see a direct connection between phonological representations and processes. For example, the deletion of [g] in Welsh initial mutations is strictly related to the fact that the prime which crucially defines this object also happens to be the target of Soft Mutation.The complexity at the syllabic level is defined in terms of formal onset configurations called governing relations, of which some are easier to license than others. The formal complexity scale is not rerankable, and corresponds directly to the markedness of syllabic types. Since each formal configuration requires licensing from the following nucleus, syllable typology can be directly derived from the licensing strength of nuclei. The interaction between the higher prosodic organisation, for example, the level of the foot, and the syllabic level is also easily expressible in this model because higher prosody is built on nuclei. Therefore, prosody may tamper with the status of nuclei as licensers by deeming some of them as prosodically weaker than others, thus producing a non-rerankable scale of nuclear licensers (a ' P). The inclusion of the empty nucleus as a possible licenser allows us to unify the scale of relatively marked contexts in segmental phenomena, and also to account for such problems as extrasyllabicity, complex clusters, super heavy rhymes, and other exceptional strings. The role of nuclei as licensers in unifying various levels of phonological representation from melody to word structure is unquestionable. There are other areas of phonological theory which can be expressed in this model. These include the role of nuclear strength scales in register switches, dialectal variation, historical development, language acquisition, and the interaction between phonology and morphology. 324 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The volume presents an up-to-date collection of methodologically sensitive contributions providing mainly enthusiastic, at times also critical support for the cognitive-linguistic enterprise. The book is important for the advancement of cognitive linguistics because the contributions demonstrate the seriousness of its ambitions to develop into a set of testable linguistic approaches. For the same reason, the volume is a contribution to our understanding of language in general, since it puts a promising modern approach on firmer ground. Assets of the book include the wide range of linguistic phenomena studied (individual concepts, fundamental semantic problems like vagueness and polysemy, grammatical issues incl. gender and tense, collocations, constructions and speech acts) and the scope of applied perspectives including lexicographical, computational, developmental and critical discourse ones. The languages investigated are English, German, Dutch, Polish and Italian. Common to the contributions is the desire to bring together observed patterns of linguistic usage with concepts and models established in cognitive linguistics. In addition, all contributions have an empirical basis and emphasize the need to rely on a sound methodology. The linguistic phenomena investigated span the range from the lexico-conceptual and collocational level to constructions, grammatical categories and functions. Two complementary perspectives of language and cognition are represented in the volume: In one group, the established methods of psycholinguistic experimentation, quantitative corpus analysis and computational simulation are exploited to demonstrate the viability and to increase the plausibility of cognitive-linguistic thinking. The second group tests well-known cognitive-linguistic approaches like Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the Theory of Idealized Cognitive Models and Construction Grammar against authentic data demonstrating their applicability and explanatory potential. Both groups include contributions reaching beyond the scope of traditional cognitive-linguistic topics, e.g. by taking a critical stance of reductionist cognitive thinking. The volume is of interest to cognitive linguists, psycholinguists, theoretical linguists, lexicologists, and lexicographers. 288 pp. Englisch.