Books

Schulbücher haben innerhalb der Schule eine große Bedeutung für die Gestaltung des Unterrichts. Das Thema Subsahara-Afrika spielt sowohl in der hiesigen Gesellschaft als auch in Schulbüchern eine eher untergeordnete Rolle. Diese Erfahrung machte der aus Eritrea geflüchtete Autor in den 1980/90er Jahren als Lernender an einer Wuppertaler Gesamtschule. Im Rahmen seines Studiums der Sozialpädagogik stellte er fest, dass diese Problematik im universitären Kontext ebenfalls nur marginal behandelt wird. Auch außerhalb der Schule wird Subsahara-Afrika in der allgemeinen Medienberichterstattung als Krisen- und Katastrophenregion dargestellt, bei der insbesondere der Anteil europäischer bzw. westlicher Länder an dieser Situation weitgehend eine untergeordnete Rolle spielt und Initiativen aus Subsahara-Afrika zur Lösung von Problemen kaum Erwähnung finden.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the SPD made significant changes in women’s politics: reorienting its women’s and family policies, adopting feminist goals in the program of principles, and introducing a gender quota to increase the proportion of female party members in party functions and political offices. The study tells the story of this upheaval with the help of eyewitness interviews and a comprehensive review of the party documents.

Der Band widmet sich der Reflexion ausgewählter Aspekte von Bildung und Erziehung im Kontext globaler Transformationen. Die Beiträge untersuchen die Transformationsprozesse der Bildung für den globalen Süden sowie Europas Rolle im Kontext dieser Entwicklungen. Zudem zeigen sie, dass die globalen Herausforderungen nicht nur die Frage nach Normen und Werten für Bildung und Erziehung aufwerfen, sondern auch die nach der Veränderung der Erziehungswissenschaft selbst.

Wie sehen die Lebensrealitäten von Frauen und Männern in den Lebensbereichen „Erwerbssystem“ und „Familie“ aus? Welche Interdependenzen und damit möglicherweise einhergehenden Ungleichheiten im Geschlechterverhältnis ergeben sich hieraus? Das Heft präsentiert theoretische und empirische Beiträge, die sich mit der Auflösung und Neubestimmung der gesellschaftlichen Sphären ‚Erwerbsarbeit‘ und ‚private Lebensführung‘ auseinandersetzen. Dabei werden neben der Analyse des Bestehenden auch aktuelle Tendenzen und Perspektiven diskutiert.

This volume is now finally available in English, sixty years after the death of its author, Lucien Tesnière. It has been translated from the French original into German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and now at long last into English as well. The volume contains a comprehensive approach to the syntax of natural languages, an approach that is foundational for an entire stream in the modern study of syntax and grammar. This stream is known today as dependency grammar (DG). Drawing examples from dozens of languages, many of which he was proficient in, Tesnière presents insightful analyses of numerous phenomena of syntax. Among the highlights are the concepts of valency and head-initial vs. head-final languages. These concepts are now taken for granted by most modern theories of syntax, even by phrase structure grammars, which represent, in a sense, the opposite sort of approach to syntax from what Tesnière was advocating.

Cyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. It addresses a whole range of interactions that can be found on the Net: the web page, chat rooms, instant messaging, social networking sites, 3D virtual worlds, blogs, videoconference, e-mail, Twitter, etc. Of special interest is the role of intentions and the quality of interpretations when these Internet-mediated interactions take place, which is often affected by the textual properties of the medium. The book also analyses the pragmatic implications of transferring offline discourses (e.g. printed paper, advertisements) to the screen-framed space of the Net. And although the main framework is cognitive pragmatics, the book also draws from other theories and models in order to build up a better picture of what really happens when people communicate on the Net.

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. With the first part of the book providing an in-depth discussion and refinement of the pivotal theoretical positions of both fields of research, students as well as professionals are (re-)acquainted with the subject at hand. Thus supplying a framework for the ensuing case study, the empirical part displays the results of the analysis of 50 threads (ca. 300,000 words) of a popular British message board.

This collection of papers on phrasal compounding is part of a bigger project whose aims are twofold: First, it seeks to broaden the typological perspective by providing data for as many different languages as possible to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon itself. Second, based on these data which clearly show interaction between syntax and morphology it aims to discuss theoretical models which deal with this kind of interaction in different ways. Models like Generative Grammar assume components of grammar and a clear-cut distinction between the lexicon (often including morphology) and grammar. Other models, like construction grammar, do not assume such components and are rather based on a lexicon including constructs. A comparison of these models on the basis of this phenomenon on the morphology-syntax interface makes it possible to assess their descriptive and explanatory power.

The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the ‘Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis’, which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.

“[Political Landscapes of Capital Cities] is a welcome contribution to the study of the spatialization of society and suggests paths that anthropologists can take to analyze political space in urban and non-urban settings alike.” —Anthropology Review Database

“[O]utstanding contributions of an interdisciplinary group of authors trained in different methodologies. . . . offer[s] both scholarly and popular audiences wide-ranging perspectives in exploring, imagining, perceiving and experiencing capital cities.” —Journal of Urban Cultural Studies

Roth develops an argument that resolves disputes persisting since the 19th century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also develops a nonrealist/irrealist metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists not one fixed past but many. It includes a novel reading of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, displaying how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science, and situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework. The first 4 chapters defuse methodological and metaphysical objections to narrative explanations. The final 3 chapters explore how narrative explanations relate to other sciences. It will be of interest to researchers in historiography, epistemology, and philosophies of history, science, and social science.

Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial print technologies, the expansion of literacy, and the rise of professionalization. In Work Requirements Todd Carmody asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came to be seen as inherently meaningful during this era. He explores how the print culture of social welfare—produced by public administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in literature and the arts—tasked people on the social and economic margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity of work as such. He also outlines how disability itself became a tool of social discipline, defined by bureaucratized institutions as the inability to work. By interrogating the representational effort necessary to make work seem inherently meaningful, Carmody ultimately reveals a forgotten history of competing efforts to think social belonging beyond or even without work.

Eyetracking has become a powerful tool in scientific research and has finally found its way into disciplines such as applied linguistics and translation studies, paving the way for new insights and challenges in these fields. The aim of the first International Conference on Eyetracking and Applied Linguistics (ICEAL) was to bring together researchers who use eyetracking to empirically answer their research questions. It was intended to bridge the gaps between applied linguistics, translation studies, cognitive science and computational linguistics on the one hand and to further encourage innovative research methodologies and data triangulation on the other hand. These challenges are also addressed in this proceedings volume: While the studies described in the volume deal with a wide range of topics, they all agree on eyetracking as an appropriate methodology in empirical research.

Unfinished Revolution is the first study to gather nineteenth-century representations and performances of Haitian sovereignty in the Atlantic world. In assembling this undiscovered archive of black power, this book offers compelling evidence of the ways that sovereignty and blackness intersect with unstable processes of modernity to produce an articulation of black authority always, already under threat for eradication or ridicule. Undeterred, nineteenth-century Haitian leaders mounted a century’s-long battle to situate Haiti at the centre of the Atlantic world.

Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. This book explores at length for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The study breaks new ground in exploring the challenges inherent in defining and measuring begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland, as well as the disparate ways in which mendicants were perceived by contemporaries. A discussion of the evolving role of parish vestries in the life of pre-Famine communities facilitates an examination of corporate responses to beggary, while a comprehensive analysis of the mendicity society movement, which flourished throughout Ireland in the three decades following 1815, highlights the significance of charitable societies and associational culture in responding to the perceived threat of mendicancy. The instance of the mendicity societies illustrates the extent to which Irish commentators and social reformers were influenced by prevailing theories and practices in the transatlantic world regarding the management of the poor and deviant. Drawing on a wide range of sources previously unused for the study of poverty and welfare, this book makes an important contribution to modern Irish social and ecclesiastical history.

This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee’s intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and Hungarian) are grounded in the frameworks of functional grammar, facework and rapport management, classical rhetoric studies and multimodal discourse analysis and are linked to the constructs of (re)framing, conceptual metaphor and blending, mental space and viewpoint. In addition to traditional genres such as political speeches, news reporting, and advertising, the book also studies texts that examine book reviews, medieval medical recipes, public complaints or anonymous viral videos. Apart from discourse analysts, pragmaticians and cognitive linguists, this book will appeal to cognitive musicologists, semioticians, historical linguists and scholars of related disciplines.