Language Arts & Disciplines

This book explores a type of bilingual acquisition – early sequential bimodal bilingual acquisition – in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) and oral Cantonese, by adopting data from a deaf child who acquired HKSL from birth and Cantonese from around age 2 after cochlear implantation. One main goal of this book is to verify if the developmental trajectories and acquisition processes such as crosslinguistic interaction resemble those documented in monolingual acquisition. The associated acquisition processes are accounted for with reference to the Language Synthesis Model (Lillo-Martin et al 2016) which is built upon the theory of Distributed Morphology.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

How does an utterance with a specific syntactic structure fit into the discourse context? Information Structure and Discourse in Generative Grammar presents a landmark collection of articles that reframe this central question, offering compelling insights into the theory of information structure as a bridge between sentence grammar and discourse. In investigating different focus structures, such as focus operators, wh-questions, ellipsis, anaphora and adjuncts, the contributions provide new empirical corpus-based and experimental evidence and identify novel information structural mechanisms and processes that are at work in connecting the grammatical components proper with discourse grammar and common ground.

Swedish computational lexicography has a long history at the University of Gothenburg, both in its primary role as a central aspect of the scientific study of vocabulary and also as an infrastructural component for conducting research based on language data. Starting in the 1960s, the Språkdata research group pioneered corpus-supported lexicography for Swedish, forming the basis for successive editions of two main descriptive dictionaries of contemporary Swedish, SAOL and SO. Language technological lexical resources for Swedish have been developed by the research unit/research infrastructure Språkbanken Text since the turn of the millennium, most recently in the framework of the Swedish FrameNet++ initiative. After two decades of separation, these two largely mutually independently developed strands of computational lexicography have now joined forces under the umbrella of Språkbanken’s lexical research infrastructure to advance the field technically, methodologically, and scientifically. The result is a vibrant and multifaceted research environment intertwined with and supported by a closely integrated cutting-edge computational infrastructure for working with lexical data

Specialized corpora of the language of Computer-mediated Communication and Social Media are increasingly vital for the analysis of the "unparalleled and rapidly evolving diversity in terms of speakers and settings" in digital contexts, as well as of "language evolution seen through the lens of user-generated content, which gives access to a number of variants, socio- and idiolects" (Barbaresi 2019: 29–30).

This volume brings together corpus-based, language-centered research on CMC and social media in linguistics, philologies, communication sciences, media, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, text technology, and machine learning. It features research in which computational methods and tools are used for language-centered empirical analysis of CMC and social media phenomena as well as research on building, processing, annotating, representing, and exploiting CMC and social media corpora, including their integration in digital research infrastructures.

Sprache im Kontext / Language in Context assembles contributions from the field of Applied Linguistics, construed as a problem oriented, socially rooted, critical form of linguistics. At the focus of analysis is language (use) in the context of social and political processes and discourses. The contributions of the series provide critical analyses and potential solutions, and they engage in discursive negotiations. Particularly (though not exclusively) the following topics are covered by the series:

• Language use in politics
• Language policy and linguistic rights
• Language (use) in organizations and institutions
• Migration, globalization and multilingualism
• Language teaching and learning in formal and informal contexts
• Language use in the classroom
• Language teaching methodology
• Language perception, language ideologies and metapragmatic discourse
• Language, social inequality and discrimination
• Language and/as empowerment
• Language and gender
• Mediality, multimodality and materiality of communication

Drawing on a dynamic and interactional notion of context, Sprache im Kontext / Language in Context also means that language and language use are themselves a constitutive part of context (i.e., they are contextualizing factors). The series thus collects particularly monographs and collected volumes that demonstrate how language and language use (as practice or object of discourse) are part and motor of social and political processes, and how it frames (and delimits) the agency and action of social actors.

Advisory Board

Marietta Calderón Tichy (Salzburg, Austria)
Rudolf de Cillia (Vienna, Austria)
Ursula Doleschal (Klagenfurt, Austria)
Daniel Green (Vienna, Austria)
Helmut Gruber (Vienna, Austria)
Ulrike Jessner (Innsbruck, Austria)
Verena Krausneker (Vienna, Austria)
Benedikt Lutz (Krems, Austria)
Anh Kho Nguyen (Vienna, Austria)
Hermine Penz (Graz, Austria)
Daniel Pfurtscheller (Innsbruck. Austria)
Marie-Luise Pitzl (Linz, Austria)
Claudia Posch (Innsbruck, Austria)
Barbara Seidlhofer (Vienna, Austria)
Martin Stegu (Vienna, Austria)
Ruth Wodak (Lancaster, UK and Vienna, Austria)

This volume is intended as an assessment of the situation of the specialized world of parliamentary and public authority libraries. It brings together contributions from libraries of various sizes, sponsors (federal, state) and institutions (parliaments, ministries, courts, authorities) and describes their current challenges as well as their approaches to address them.

Its central theme is digital change. How does it affect parliamentary and public authority libraries, which business areas are affected?

What adjustments are there, e.g. in acquisitions with regard to print vs. online? Are there any new services being offered in terms of use/customer acquisition and others that have been abolished because there was no longer any demand for them?

How do parliamentary and government libraries function in the "post-COVID" period, what effects do the home office regulations of the institutions have on the internal organization and the relationship between online vs. face-to-face use?

The articles in this volume are based on these and similar key questions. Taken together, they provide an insight into the structural challenges facing parliamentary and public authority libraries and the possibilities for successfully addressing them.

Explores the connection between language and trauma to demonstrate how language interacts with healthcare, education, interpreting, narrative construction and mental health.

This edited volume brings together scholars in applied linguistics who use trauma-informed theories and practices. Organized across three themes – narrative, interpreting and language education – the chapters examine the relationship between language and trauma, with particular attention to multilingual and migrant communities in Western contexts. 

The chapter authors collate research to date and present new findings on topics such as narrating traumatic experiences, trauma-informed interviewing and interpreting, trauma-informed teaching and pedagogy, vicarious trauma among practitioners, and the relationship between trauma and language learning.

As global displacement and migration continue to rise, this volume offers timely insights and practical recommendations for more trauma-informed policies and practices. It will be of interest to educators, interpreters, researchers and professionals in law, healthcare and social services. 

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future.

The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU).

Watch our book talk with the editors Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt here: https://youtu.be/ZOoiGbmMbxI

Reclaiming Liberal Democracy in the Postfactual Age is a systematic exploration of the many ways in which post-truth politics constitutes a fundamental challenge and, indeed, an existential threat to liberal democracy as we know it.

The book addresses this existential threat by exploring the dynamic interplay of the various phenomena that constitute the post-truth condition, while also exploring possible responses aimed at reclaiming liberal democracy. The book's guiding assumption is that post-truth politics must be conceptualized as the ideal-typical endpoint of ongoing developments of liberal-democratic political culture. These developments are intimately connected to the ongoing transformation of the information environment, brought about by social/digital media and the recent rise of artificial intelligence. But they are also connected to the resurgence of populism and decreasing trust in once-trusted sources of information, in particular mainstream quality journalism, exacerbated by targeted disinformation campaigns at the hands of foreign powers.

This book examines how programs of deliberate government and corporate disinformation, and deception have led to an alarming state of confusion within society about what is true and what is not. Focused on America, the book posits that it is now essential for political and corporate interests to feed that confusion in order to survive. Written by award-winning journalist Peter Charley, whose previous book topped the Amazon bestseller lists in 2020, this book is essential reading in the era of alternative facts and at a time when media manipulation has reached unprecedented levels.

Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung ist die Bedeutung des Lateinischen für die deutsche Sprachgeschichte, konkret die Frage, ob und wie sich der in der Forschung immer wieder betonte sog. Einfluss des Lateinischen im Werk eines Autors manifestiert. Mit den Partizipialphrasen wird ein syntaktisches Phänomen herausgegriffen, systematisch erfasst und in deutschen sowie lateinischen Texten Sebastian Brants analysiert.

Die grammatische Analyse ist in eine größere Auseinandersetzung mit Brants Sprachgebrauch und Umgang mit der Volkssprache und dem Lateinischen eingebettet, die neben sprach- auch literaturgeschichtliche Aspekte enthält. Dafür werden zwei der Textensembles untersucht, die Brant zum selben Gegenstand auf Latein (in elegischen Distichen) und auf Deutsch (in Reimpaaren) verfasste und als Flugblatt oder ‑schrift publizierte (das Donnerstein-Blatt sowie die Somnia- und Traum-Schrift). Verglichen werden sie auf fünf Ebenen: Layout, Intentionsprofil (bes. Äußerungsformen direktiver Sprechakte), Archive, Syntax und Stil.

Mit dem Nachweis u. a. der eigenständigen syntaktischen Gestaltung der deutschen und lateinischen Textfassungen leistet die Arbeit einen weiterführenden Beitrag zur Diskussion des Verhältnisses von Latein und Volkssprache.

The central idea underlying the studies in this volume is that when speakers act in social context language acquires a social signature whose details have not yet been fully understood. This volume brings together eleven original, empirical studies in the fields of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and syntax whose central theme is the interplay of interacting speakers and linguistic structures within the world of social interaction. The studies fall into three topical categories: Interaction and Social Behavior (Part I), Interaction-structuring expressions (Part II), and Grammar in Interaction (Part III).

The book covers a research gap in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics about co-production and the emerge of syntactical structures in multiperson talk-in-interaction. The findings have theoretical and empirical implications for our understandings of the relationship between turns and clauses, and for studies on collaborative turns in spoken Italian. From the research, grammar emerges as a pragmatic matter, situated in the interactional settings that participants co-build. The book innovatively introduces collaborative grammar, a set of grammatic, embodied, prosodic and interactional resources that participants mobilise in accountable ways, becoming a visible product in interaction: the epiphenomenon of their collaborative achievement.

Lexicographica. Series Maior features monographs and edited volumes on the topics of lexicography and meta-lexicography. Works from the broader domain of lexicology are also included, provided they strengthen the theoretical, methodological and empirical basis of lexicography and meta-lexicography.

The more than 160 books published in the series since its founding in 1984 clearly reflect the main themes and developments of the field. The publications focus on aspects of lexicography such as micro- and macrostructure, typology, history of the discipline, and application-oriented lexicographical documentation.

Standards function as safeguards to ensure that data remains interpretable, uniformly queryable, and archivable over time – a critical challenge for digital humanists working with complex linguistic resources. This book provides an overview of essential standards for ensuring the sustainability of data in the Digital Humanities (DH). It addresses the selection of data encoding formats, methods of annotating primary data, and approaches to making resources findable and accessible. The focus is on various forms of linguistic data, such as texts, lexicons, or parallel arrangements (e.g., translations or transcribed recordings). The work explains the role of annotations and metadata in structuring and contextualizing data and examines the influence of diverse data formats, shaped by local academic or industrial practices. In contrast to neural language models, which often yield impressive but opaque results, DH projects aim for transparency, reproducibility, and sustainability. Achieving these goals requires interoperability – the seamless interaction between data and tools. The book demonstrates how clear guidelines and best practices help ensure the long-term usability of data. It offers digital humanists practical approaches and well-founded standards to sustainably archive and efficiently utilize their data, making it an indispensable resource for the field.

Mitbegründet von Klaus-Peter Konerding und Susanne Günthner

Die Buchreihe Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen (LIT) ist ein attraktives Forum für hochwertige Arbeiten zur Sprachwissenschaft – insbesondere zur germanistischen Linguistik. Sie sucht aktuelle Tendenzen aufzunehmen und widerzuspiegeln, gleichzeitig aber wegweisende Impulse für das Fach und seine weitere Entwicklung zu geben.

Ihr Fokus ist die synchrone Sprachwissenschaft mit all ihren Facetten. Die Reihe versammelt ebenso Arbeiten zur Pragmatik, Computerlinguistik und Grammatiktheorie wie zur Soziolinguistik, Fachsprachenforschung oder Textlinguistik. Ihre Leitlinien sind Innovativität, Transdisziplinarität und qualitative Exzellenz. Sie steht Monographien ebenso offen wie systematisch angelegten Sammel- und Tagungsbänden.

On the basis of a corpus of Old Irish texts justified and described in the introductory chapter, this monograph considers cases of variation in the expression of clausal subordination: a pair of synonymous light heads, a pair of synonymous temporal conjunctions ‘when’, a pair of paronymous final consecutive markers ‘so that’, as well as the difference between the latter and a marker of purpose subordinate. Each analysis counts with a sufficient number of cases, and deals with descriptive and diachronic issues. This work contributes to the study of the Old Irish syntax and is also of interest for the investigation of clause subordination in both the typological and diachronic perspectives.

Mitbegründet von Klaus-Peter Konerding und Susanne Günthner

Die Buchreihe Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen (LIT) ist ein attraktives Forum für hochwertige Arbeiten zur Sprachwissenschaft – insbesondere zur germanistischen Linguistik. Sie sucht aktuelle Tendenzen aufzunehmen und widerzuspiegeln, gleichzeitig aber wegweisende Impulse für das Fach und seine weitere Entwicklung zu geben.

Ihr Fokus ist die synchrone Sprachwissenschaft mit all ihren Facetten. Die Reihe versammelt ebenso Arbeiten zur Pragmatik, Computerlinguistik und Grammatiktheorie wie zur Soziolinguistik, Fachsprachenforschung oder Textlinguistik. Ihre Leitlinien sind Innovativität, Transdisziplinarität und qualitative Exzellenz. Sie steht Monographien ebenso offen wie systematisch angelegten Sammel- und Tagungsbänden.

This volume posits that evidentials and other types of epistemic marking (i.e. epistemics) are deictic forms, indexing knowledge representation and attribution, and need to be analysed in context. The volume adopts an interaction- and discourse-based perspective to the study of meaning and distribution of epistemics in a varied sample of languages. Its primary aim is to further our understanding of epistemics by addressing three main analytical challenges: (1) the context-sensitivity of epistemic forms, (2) comparability of forms and systems across languages, and (3) linking data-driven analyses of epistemics focusing on interaction and discourse to traditional analyses of similar forms.

Could learning to read and write affect speakers’ mental grammars? This book explores how literacy (or the lack thereof) shapes the comprehension and production of complex syntax among literate and illiterate speakers. Through innovative research, it reveals that native speakers do not always converge on the same grammatical structures, highlighting the pivotal role of written language in facilitating this acquisition. For those without literacy experience, nonverbal reasoning ability plays a crucial role in compensating for the lack of literacy when dealing with (complex) syntax. Literacy at Work challenges conventional views and offers fresh insights into the nature of linguistic competence.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impersonal uses of ‘you’, ‘one’, ‘they’, and ‘people’ in English. The corpus-based study examines shifts in use from the 17th century to today, discusses further impersonalization strategies, such as passives, and compares impersonal ‘you’ with second-person pronouns in other languages. It highlights key innovations such as the rise of simulating ‘you’ – where the addressee is not a member of the group generalized over – and considers language-external as well as language-internal motivations for these changes. Combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives, the book is a valuable resource for scholars in historical linguistics, pragmatics, and syntax.