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This volume contributes to the fields of World Englishes, English Language Teaching and Second Language Acquisition, assessing the English(es) spoken in post-Independence Namibia beyond variety status. Based on questionnaires and corpus analysis, the author analyzes morphosyntactical structures, language use and attitudes towards English(es) in comparison to home languages. She gives new insights into the structure of spoken language and potential varieties of English in particular. Focus is put on a geographical area that only recently attracted increasing attention in the field of World Englishes. The author's work can be regarded as an attempt to bridge several aspects of the frequently discussed «paradigm gap» between World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition studies.

For decades, the focus of Metaphor Studies laid on Conceptual Metaphor and its role in the human conceptual system. This study, however, focuses on metaphor in communication. Its aim is to shed light on how commenters in online debates discuss EU-related topics via Scenario Negotiation, expressing and negotiating their points of view via Metaphorical Scenarios. The study offers a review of current metaphor theory and practical approaches and proposes an Integrated Model of Scenario Negotiation. The results are based on context-sensitive, qualitative analysis of data which stem from a corpus of online debates from the Guardian's Comment is free section. The discussion illustrates the genre-specific conceptual-communicative functions of Scenario Negotiation in naturally occurring discourse.

While the relatively recent notion of ?deliberate' metaphors ? metaphors that supposedly play a special role in communication ? is contested among researchers, the debate lacks empirical grounding. This book presents the first large-scale study of forms and functions of deliberate metaphors in authentic spoken academic discourse. The author's comprehensive qualitative analyses of 23 US-American college lectures from four different disciplines demonstrate that deliberate metaphors occur in various forms and fulfill important communicative functions. While these findings may indicate the value of deliberate metaphors, the author's critical discussions of both identification and application of deliberate metaphors in authentic discourse also point out issues with the very concept of ?deliberate' metaphor.

The present book is a collection of selected papers held at the 23rd International LAUD Symposium on «The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages» (26-31 March 1997) in Duisburg, Germany. The papers included in this volume highlight several aspects pertaining to the cultural dimension of foreign language teaching and learning. The topics covered range from theoretical accounts on text, language, and culture through to empirically-based aspects of non-native discourse as well as sociolinguistic and cultural awareness in foreign language teaching. Finally, the volume brings together contributions from a wide variety of languages and cultural settings. The Cultural Context in Foreign Language Teaching will interest students of educational linguistics and language pedagogy, intercultural communication and discourse analysis.

This volume grew out of the 36th International LAUD Symposium, which was held in March 2014 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. There is general consensus among language experts that slightly more than half of today’s 7,000 languages are under severe threat of extinction even within fifty to one hundred years. The 13 papers contained in this volume explore the dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why this matters, and what can be done and achieved to document and support endangered languages especially in the context of an ever increasing globalized world. The issue of vanishing languages is discussed from a variety of methodologies and perspectives: sociolinguistics, language ecology, language contact, language policy/planning, attitudes and linguistic inequalities.

After a period when the focus was essentially on mental architecture, the cognitive sciences are increasingly integrating the social dimension. The rise of a cognitive sociolinguistics is part of this trend. The article argues that this process requires a re-evaluation of some entrenched positions in linguistics: those that see linguistic norms as antithetical to a descriptive and variational linguistics. Once such a re-evaluation has taken place, however, the social recontextualization of cognition will enable linguistics (including sociolinguistics as an integral part), to eliminate the cracks in the foundations that were the result of suppressing the sociocultural underpinnings of linguistic facts. Structuralism, cognitivism and social constructionism introduced new and necessary distinctions, but in their strong forms they all turned into unnecessary divides. The article tries to show that an evolutionary account can reintegrate the opposed fragments into a whole picture that puts each of them in their ‘ecological position’ with respect to each other. Empirical usage facts should be seen in the context of operational norms in relation to which actual linguistic choices represent adaptations. Variational patterns should be seen in the context of structural categories without which there would be only ‘differences’ rather than variation. And emergence, individual choice, and flux should be seen in the context of the individual’s dependence on lineages of community practice sustained by collective norms.

We conducted a study to investigate effects of bilingualism on nonverbal and verbal cognitive performance. Here we report on the results from the first part of our study, in which 26 middle-aged (MA 46) and 26 elderly (MA 73.2) early bilingual speakers of Dutch and Frisian performed a verbal fluency test, a task switching test and a working memory (WM) test. In an analysis focusing on between- and within-group differences, we found that the age-groups differed significantly in the task switching and WM tests and in the category switching component of the verbal fluency task. With regard to other factors, we found that the higher the degree of balance between participants’ languages, the smaller their costs for switching between tasks.

This volume grew out of the 34th International LAUD Symposium, which was held in March 2010 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The symposium was dedicated to the ongoing convergence between the disciplines of Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, bringing together concepts and methods from both fields. The 15 studies contained in this volume explore the relations between linguistic (structural), socio-cultural and cognitive aspects involved in language variation. Methodologically, the contributions range from individual case studies to larger-scale corpus analyses and combine both qualitative and quantitative findings.

In this paper I pay a closer look at the use of the CENTRE-PERIPHERY schema in context. I address two specific issues: first, I show how the CENTRE-PERIPHERY schema, encoded in the DDAs, enters into discourses that conceptualize and characterize a local community as both CENTRE and PERIPHERY, i.e. the schema enters into apparently contradictory constructions of the informants’ local home-base and, possibly, of their identity (cf. Hovmark, 2010). Second, I discuss the status and role of the specific linguistic category in question, i.e. the directional adverbs. On the one hand we claim that the DDAs in question contribute to the socio-cultural construction of identity, i.e. that they play a rather specific role in discursive communication and socio-cultural meaning construction. On the other hand it is clear that the semantics of the DDAs in question, seen in isolation, is very abstract or general; furthermore, the DDAs are backgrounded in discourse. Is it reasonable to claim, rather boldly, that “the informants express their identity in the use of the directional adverb ud ‘out’ etc.”? In the course of this article, however, I suggest that the DDAs in question do contribute to the socio-cultural construction of identity, and, as a matter of fact, that their role might be quite important. I argue that the DDAs are backgrounded but not peripheral, i.e. marginal or insignificant. And I introduce the notion of “contextualization cue” in this argument (Levinson, 2003a, Gumperz, 1992).