Redefining the Hypernym Mensch:in in German: Gender, Sexuality, and Personhood examines how the verbalization of ‘human’ in gender normative terms results in implicit exclusion. Situated in the tension between traditional rules and progressive language use, this book criticizes the heteronormativity of masculine hypernyms and argues for the adoption of gender-inclusive linguistic practices.
Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv makes the case for a two-pronged approach to past urban multilingualism in East-Central Europe, one that considers both historical and linguistic features. Based on archival materials from late-Habsburg Lemberg––now Lviv in western Ukraine––the author examines its workings in day-to-day life in the streets, shops, and homes of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The places where the city’s Polish-Ukrainian-Yiddish-German encounters took place produced a distinct urban dialect. A variety of south-eastern “borderland” Polish, it was subject to strong ongoing Ukrainian as well as Yiddish and German influence. Jan Fellerer analyzes its main morpho-syntactic features with reference to diverse written and recorded sources of the time. This approach represents a departure from many other studies that focus on the phonetics and inflectional morphology of Slavic dialects. Fellerer argues that contact-induced linguistic change is contingent on the historical specifics of the contact setting. The close-knit urban community of historical Lviv and its dialect provide a rich interdisciplinary case study.
The dual number in Slavic has always puzzled linguists. While some Slavic languages, such as Slovenian, have three distinct categories of number--singular (1), dual (2), and plural (3 or more) –other Slavic languages, such as Russian, have no dual number. Considering that all Slavic languages have evolved from a common Proto Slavic language, it is puzzling that there is such a difference in the category of number. In The Evolution of the Slavic Dual: A Biolinguistic Perspective, with the aid of tools from biolinguistics, Tatyana G. Slobodchikoff develops a new theory of Morphosyntactic Feature Economy within the distributed morphology framework. Using newly digitized corpora of Old East Slavic, Old Slovenian, and Old Sorbian manuscripts spanning from the eleventh century through the present time, this book presents a thorough analysis of the evolution of dual number in Slavic languages.
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.
This book presents a contrastive analysis of various forms of address used in English and Italian from the perspective of cultural semantics, the branch of linguistics which investigates the relationship between meaning and culture in discourse. The objects of the analysis are the interactional meanings expressed by different forms of address in these two languages, which are compared adopting the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The forms analyzed include greetings, titles and opening and closing salutations used in letters and e-mails in the two languages. Noticeably, the book presents the first complete categorization of Italian titles used as forms of address ever made on the basis of precise semantic criteria. The analysis also investigates the different cultural values and assumptions underlying address practices in English and Italian, and emphasizes the risks of miscommunication caused by different address practices in intercultural interactions. Every chapter presents numerous examples taken from language corpora, contemporary English and Italian literature and personal e-mails and letters. The book encourages a new, innovative approach to the analysis of forms of address: it proposes a new analytical method for the analysis of forms of address which can be applied to the study of other languages systematically. In addition, the book emphasizes the role of culture in address practices and takes meaning as the basis for understanding the differences in use across languages and the difficulties in translating forms of address of different languages. Combining semantics, ethnopragmatics, intercultural communication and translation theory, this book is aimed at a very broad readership which includes not only scholars in linguistics, second-language learners and students of cross-cultural communication, but virtually anyone interested in Italian and English linguistics as well as in cultural semantics. The approach taken is interdisciplinary and brings together various fields in the social sciences: linguistics, anthropology, cross-cultural studies and sociology.
Hoewel enorm invloedrijk in Duitstalig Europa, heeft de conceptuele geschiedschrijving (Begriffsgeschichte) tot nu toe weinig aandacht in het Engels gekregen. Dit genre van intellectuele geschiedschrijving verschilt van zowel de Franse geschiedschrijving van mentalités als de Engelstalige geschiedschrijving van verhandelingen door het concept. Aan de hand van practische voorbeelden in de geschiedschrijving wordt deze vorm toegelicht door Bram Kempers, Eddy de Jongh en Rolf Reichardt.
The landscape of broadcast news media is constantly changing, partly under the influence of changing technology but also due to changes in the social role of television journalism. The Political Interview: Broadcast Talk in the Interactional Combat Zone takes a sociological and linguistic approach to examining these changes, focusing on the discourse practices that are associated with them. Tracing contemporary developments in the ways that interviews with politicians are conducted in a range of televised formats, Ian Hutchby analyzes increasing tendencies toward conflictual interactions that may fundamentally impact the nature of political communication and the role of news interviews in the democratic process. Training the sharp analytical lens of conversation analysis on the actual discourse of live broadcast news, Hutchby’s book is both timely—addressing academic and populist concerns about infotainment, dumbing down, and political mistrust among the electorate—and relevant to a range of specialists in sociolinguistics, communication studies, political studies, journalism and media studies, and sociology.
This book focuses on a century of language change, starting early in the 20th century when Standard Afrikaans first emerged. Different areas of language use are explored, such as pronoun use, tenses, possession, and connectives. The changes in these areas are divided into three categories of types of change: paradigmatic changes, grammaticalization, and discursive and socio-cultural changes. The book also includes a short history of the standardization of Afrikaans and brief discussions of some relevant ideological issues. The second and final chapters include an in-depth discussion of the theory of language change and language evolution, as well as reflections on what language change is and how it proceeds. The role of language contact in language change, and language-external influences, are also considered.
This book examines the role of complaining in conversation and online interaction in Korean society. Kyung-Eun Yoon examines patterns of formulating complainability, linguistic resources for complaints, organizational features of complaining discourse, and the ways in which the participants construct social identities and cultural norms through complaining. Yoon analyzes real language use in various contexts, including everyday face-to-face and phone conversations with family members and friends, social media posts, online customer reviews, news articles, and formal complaints posted on the websites of local governments in Korea. The analysis in this book ties together the relationship among language, interaction, and social organization as well as the relationships between participants and sociocultural norms, using Korea as a case study. Scholars of interactional linguistics, Korean language pedagogy, and intercultural studies will find this book particularly useful.
This volume examines mutual ethnic and national perceptions and stereotypes in the Middle Ages by analysing a range of historical sources, with a particular focus on the mutual history of Germany and Poland.
