This work is essentially based on grammaticalization theory a branch of linguistics which has gained prominence since the 1980s. It focuses on the interaction between diachrony and synchrony, langue and parole or, for that matter, competence and performance, I language and ? language. It does not see these levels as distinct linguistic domains, as much structurally oriented work does. It is important for the present purposes that such an interactionist view entails that performance effects may over time cause new grammatical code relations. Hence the importance of statistical empirical research, which led the author to adopt a predominantly corpus-based approach."

This descriptive and comprehensive study on the discursive struggle over interpersonal relations in online message boards is located at the fascinating interface of pragmatics and computer-mediated discourse – a research area which has so far not attracted much scientific interest. It sets out to shed light on the question how interpersonal relations are established, managed and negotiated in online message boards by giving a valid overview of the entire panoply of interpersonal relations (and their interrelations), including both positively and negatively marked behavior.

Cohesive Profiling provides one of the first linguistic descriptions of blog discourse, focusing on the cohesive relations which enable users to construe blogs as compatible meaningful wholes. With a corpus-based analysis of cohesive relations in personal blogs, the study surprisingly reveals that there is only limited cohesive rapport between the textual contributions of blog authors and readers. The book retraces blogs’ technological, linguistic and generic evolution and describes how today’s blog genres are structured and composed.

This book is written for both linguists and computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence as well as to anyone interested in intelligent text processing. Lexical function is a concept that formalizes semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations which holds between the base and its partner in a collocation. Knowledge of collocation is important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together.

The Acquisition of Spatial Relations in a Second Language

This book is the third to appear in the SIBIL series based on results from the European Science Foundation's Additional Activity on the second language acquisition of adult immigrants. It analyses from a longitudinal and cross-linguistic perspective the acquisition of the linguistic means to express spatial relations in the target languages English, French and German.