Originating at an international forum held at the University of Vic (Spain), the twelve essays collected here attest to important changes in translation practice and the assumptions which underpin them. Leading theorists respond to the state of Translation Studies today, particularly the epistemological dilemma between theories that are empirically oriented and those that are inspired by developments in Cultural Studies.

This book collects the contributions presented at the international congress held at the University of Bologna in January 2007, where leading scholars of different persuasions and interests offered an up-to-date overview of the current status of the research on linguistic universals. The papers that make up the volume deal with both theoretical and empirical issues, and range over various domains, covering not only morphology and syntax, which were the major focus of Greenberg’s seminal work, but also phonology and semantics, as well as diachrony and second language acquisition.

 

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, perspectives, discourse context, social interaction, and communicative goals.

This volume, intended both for advanced students and scholars of linguistics, traces the many strands of study in the field of word formation that have developed since the seminal work of Marchand and Lees in the 1960s. In mapping the state of the art in the field of word formation, it avoids a biased approach by presenting different, but mutually complementary frameworks within which research into word formation has taken place. It covers the historical development of theories of word formation within generative grammar, and affords a solid introduction to the treatment of word formation in cognitive grammar, natural morphology, optimality theory, Lexeme Morpheme Base Morphology, onomasiological theory, and other recent frameworks.

This book is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences:

1) It's raining?
2) It's raining.

The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise--indicated by the question mark--while (2) ends with a fall.

Christine Gunlogson's central claim is that the meaning and use of both kinds of sentences must be understood in terms of the meaning of their defining formal elements, namely declarative sentence type and rising versus falling intonation.