Current Trends in Greek Linguistics is a collection of fifteen papers written by junior researchers of Greek linguistics, aiming to highlight the ongoing linguistic research on Greek. The collected papers present original research from a fresh perspective, and bring to the fore aspects of the Greek language that have not been extensively examined so far. The authors provide a concise overview of their field and address problems in a variety of theoretical frameworks, including cognitive linguistics, formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, variational sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. The volume comprises four sections: Aspects of Meaning, Textual and Sociolinguistic Approaches, Phonetics and Phonology, and Clinical Linguistics and Language Teaching. The first section includes chapters exploring lexical temporal expressions, the conceptualisation of time and the semantic properties of the subjunctive mood. The second section discusses issues relating to adjective evaluation, strategies of verbal humour, the role of social variables, media and political discourse. The section on phonetics and phonology includes three experimental studies that explore segmental and supra-segmental phenomena. The last section of the volume combines papers from two different fields, dealing with aphasic speech and the teaching of idioms. This collection of papers will appeal to researchers, students of linguistics and educators who are interested in Greek and/or the implications of its study for other languages and linguistic theory.

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.

This book reviews some current theories about the internal organization of written and oral discourse. The articles range from the theoretical to the highly practical, from the cognitive frameworks which make coherence in oral conversation to the structural and linguistic devices which create textuality in written language. Contextual issues such as ideology, topicality and topic management, thematicity and academic discourse are explored via a contemporary and authentic sample of written fragments and oral corpora. This accesible book will be useful to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and to teachers interested in Language and Linguistics.

The shift towards a sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of language in the last few decades has necessitated new definitions for a number of concepts that linguists have taken for granted for a long time. This volume attempts to demystify the important notions of ‘text’ and ‘context’ by providing clear definitions and examples within the assumptions of Systemic Functional (SF) linguistics. After a discussion of the role and significance of context by three eminent SF linguists in section one, the influence of context on text is dealt with in section two ‘From Context to Language’. Section three ‘From Language to Context’ considers textual features and their relationship to contextual factors. All the contributors base their analyses on data collected from a variety of spoken and written registers of contemporary English.

Text and Interpretation gives an insight into the many different approaches that more recent South African scholarship has adopted in the interpretation of the New Testament. While the number of approaches in New Testament interpretation has proliferated over the past few years, all the proposals still fall under one of the three traditional poles: sender (author) - text - receptor (reader). Classified according to this division each chapter has a twofold aim. Firstly, the perspective is situated within a wider framework of interpretation to illustrate the context out of which this approach emerges. Secondly, each article has selected a particular New Testament text to demonstrate this approach in practice. The authors of these chapters - the majority of which are South African scholars - were chosen because of their expertise in their specific fields. By presenting these studies together in one collection, the scholarship in these different areas will become more readily accessible to a wider group of scholars.

The book presents the state-of-the-art in major aspects of text analysis and cognitive text processing by some of the most well-known European and American researchers in the field of text-linguistics and cognitive psychology. Comprehensive views and new perspectives are proposed in the following topics: cognitive and metacognitive aspects of text processing, structures and processes involved in the construction of multi-level semantic representations in relation with text and reader characteristics, achievement of local and global coherence of meaning during reading and comprehension, assessment of knowledge, knowledge acquisition of concepts and complex systems by text, and cognitive and metacognitive aspects of text production.

Owing to the ever-increasing possibilities of communication, especially with the advent of modern communication technologies, register analysis offers a constantly widening range of research opportunities. Still, research has mainly concentrated on well-established and frequent registers such as newspaper articles, while many descriptive and theoretical issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated. This volume gives a state-of-the-art insight into register studies and points out emerging trends as well as new directions for future research. Furthermore, it provides a forum for the description and discussion of registers which have not received an appropriate amount of attention so far. In particular, it deals with specialized offline and online registers, cross-register comparison as well as regional, contrastive, and diachronic register variation. In parallel to the new discipline of variational pragmatics, this volume aims to foster the discipline of ‘variational text linguistics’ and to initiate fundamental investigations in this area. This field of research provides new insights into the concept of register, since it covers both functional and regional types of textual variation.