Linguistics

This is a compendium of work by scholars and activists involved in deaf matters. The introduction chapter sets up the global context; it is followed by twelve chapters, seven of which deal with the creation, context, and form of sign languages, and five of which deal with social issues and civil rights of Deaf communities. Each chapter has a response by one, or sometimes two pre-eminent people in the field, typically viewing the issue of the chapter from a different perspective or in a different geographic context. Luminaries shed light on issues and give histories and overviews that have not been written down anyplace else. The book addresses issues of interest in linguistics, psychology, economics, public policy, public health, cognitive science, anthropology, and education. The major thesis of the book is that the interaction of activists and scholars is synergistic: activists find support in the work of scholars and scholars both have a responsibility toward the community they study and do better work when they understand activists’ concerns. Thirty-one scholars and activists (sixteen deaf, one hearing of deaf parents, and fourteen hearing) contributed to this volume with the optimistic goal that the joint work can help improve our understanding of both deaf matters and the daily lives of deaf people. The chapters deal with gestures, sign languages, deaf issues, and deaf communities in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. The picture that emerges shows a great amount of similarity and continuity in the Deaf World.

The book offers an original theory of meaning in discourse that combines a dynamic representation of discourse with an intentional explanation of processing. It contains an exposition of a theory of default semantics and its application to a range of language constructions. Default semantics provides cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation and does so in a broadly conceived truth-conditional framework where truth conditions are applied to utterances. The theory combines the subject matter of post-Gricean ‘truth-conditional pragmatics’ with the formalism and semanticization of meaning found in discourse representation theory (DRT). It is assumed that pragmatic information can contribute to the truth-conditional representation of an utterance. This information can have the form of (i) conscious inference, or it can have a form of default interpretation conceived of as (ii) cognitive defaults and (iii) social-cultural defaults. From DRT, it borrows the idea of dynamic semantics as context change implemented in semantic representation and the idea that meaning in discourse will, somehow or other, turn out to be compositional, that is, it will turn out to be a function of the parts and the structure. In short, default semantics combines two seemingly incompatible assumptions that (i) pragmatic input contributes to the truth conditions and (ii) the theory of meaning of utterances and discourses is a compositional, semantic theory. Such semantic representations are called merger representations in that they combine (merge) information from word meaning, sentence structure, pragmatic inference, and various kinds of defaults. Predicating compositionality of such merger representations aided by using an extended and amended language of DRT allows for the semanticization of the account of discourse meaning. The book is divided into two parts. Part I contains theoretical foundations and addresses the questions of the semantics/pragmatics boundary, underspecification, logical form, levels of representation, default meanings, and ‘pragmatic’ compositionality of merger representations. Part II contains some applications of the theory, including definite descriptions, propositional attitude reports, temporality, presupposition, sentential connectives, and number terms.

This is a book about degrammaticalization, a rare type of linguistic change whereby grams become ‘less grammatical’, typical examples being shifts from affix to clitic, or from function word to lexical item. It discusses the alleged unidirectionality of semantic and morphosyntactic change, showing that change is in fact reversible on all levels. It also aims to classify degrammaticalization by examining primitive changes on several levels: semantics, pragmatics, morphology, syntax, and phonology. It is argued that there exist three separate types of degrammaticalization: degrammation, whereby a function word develops into a lexical item; deinflectionalization, whereby an inflectional affix becomes either derivational or enclitic, while gaining additional functions; and debonding, whereby a bound morpheme becomes a free morpheme, often without change on the semantic-functional level.

This book presents a detailed model of syntax-information structure interaction. It presents clear empirical arguments that this interaction takes place at the phase level, with a privileged role for the edge of the phase. The phenomena discussed in this book are mostly taken from the Romance languages: dislocations, focus fronting, p-movement, accusative A and clitic doubling, with some discussion of Germanic scrambling and object shift as well as other relevant phenomena. Careful analyses of these constructions show that notions such as “topic” and “focus”, as usually defined, yield no predictions and instead a feature system based on the notions “discourse anaphor” and “contrast” is proposed.

This book offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing technologies like instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates, and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, French, and English). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists and discourse analysts, including genre, style, stance, language ideology, and multimodality.

Building on Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, Foucault's theory of discourse, Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics and Martin's theory of activity sequences, this book defines discourses as frameworks for the interpretation of reality and presents detailed and explicit methods for reconstructing these frameworks through text analysis. There are methods for analyzing the representation of social action, social actors and the timings and spatial locations of social practices as well as methods for analyzing how the purposes, legitimations and moral evaluations of social practices can be, and are, constructed in discourse. Discourse analytical categories are linked to sociological theories to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis, and a variety of examples demonstrate how they can be used to this end. The final chapters apply aspects of the book's methodological framework to the analysis of multimodal texts such as visual images and children's toys.

This book examines discourse‐related features and their relevance for syntactic theory. This study adopts a cartographic approach to syntactic structures, and has two principal aims: (i) to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with these types of features and (ii) to account for the various types of fronting phenomena observed in the Romance languages. Based primarily on data from Sicilian and Sardinian, this book sets out to show that contrary to standard assumptions, Focus Fronting in Romance is not restricted to contrastive interpretations, but is also possible with non‐contrastive (‘informational’) Focus. The synthesis of existing analyses and new empirical data from other Romance languages show that non‐contrastive Focus Fronting is a fairly widespread property of Romance, involving quantifiers and quantified expressions (QP‐Fronting) as well as constituents expressing new and unexpected information (Mirative Fronting). Drawing on this empirical evidence, and with the support of further relevant syntactic, prosodic, and interpretive differences, it is claimed that Contrastive Focus and Informational Focus constitute separate categories related to independent features and encoded in distinct focus projections. It is further proposed that a direct parallelism holds between the two focus categories and the two types of wh‐expressions identified in the literature, i.e. D‐linked wh‐phrases and non‐D‐linked wh‐phrases. The analysis of the interplay between word order and of the extension of the focus in different types of sentences reveals novel evidence for the interaction between focus and illocutionary and clause‐type operators. The focus of the clause is also sensitive to overt operators such as wh‐phrases, quantifiers, and focalizing adverbs. The association of focus with both overt and covert operators is therefore a key factor for the interface between syntax and information structure.

This book adopts the strong Minimalist thesis that grammar contains no rules or principles specifically designed to account for anaphors and pronouns. Lexically, anaphors have unvalued φ-features, which need to be valued under Agree. This leads to the novel assumption that anaphors c-command their antecedents. This idea underlies the analysis of both simplex and complex reflexives. Simplex reflexives are merged in a configuration of inalienable possession, with the simplex reflexive c-commanding its antecedent inside a possessive small clause. Self-reflexives share the syntax of self-intensifiers and floating quantifiers, raising to a vP-adjoined position to c-command their antecedents. In contrast to anaphors, pronouns have lexically valued φ-features. Postsyntactic lexical insertion accounts for absence of Principle B effects observed in many languages. The behaviour of pronouns and self-forms in snake-sentences is related to the nature of the Axpart projection of the locative preposition. Semantically, the difference between simplex and complex reflexives derives from the way they refer to spatiotemporal stages of their antecedents.

In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English — the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education — that era's distance learning — to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands were ordering Sherwin Cody's 100% Self‐correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail‐order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people. This book tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early 20th century cultural history. The book recounts how Cody became a businessman — a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass‐marketer whose ads proclaimed “Good Money in Good English” and asked “Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?” and “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” Sherwin Cody's home‐study approach was perhaps the most widely‐advertised English education program in history, and it provides a unique window into popular views of language and culture and their connection to ideas of success. Cody's work was also part of a larger shift of attitudes about self‐improvement and success. Using Cody's course as a reference point, this book examines the self‐improvement ethic reflected in such products as the Harvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book‐of‐the‐Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self‐reliance evolved into self‐improvement.

This book aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries—their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English—have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. The book offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. It focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. The research carried out for this project comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses.