Synopsis:

Machine Translation (MT) models knowingly suffer from gender bias, especially for genders beyond the binary. Since issues of non-binary representation and language use are still often neglected in both Translation Studies (TS) and MT, this book investigates the translation and post-editing of gender-fair language beyond the binary in a process and product-oriented study. Twelve language professionals were recruited and asked to either translate or post-edit three brief English texts into German. In each text, they had to use a different gender-fair language approach, i.e. (i) gender-neutral rewording, (ii) gender-inclusive characters, and (iii) neosystems.

Data on the translation and post-editing process were collected by combining non-participant observation, screen recordings, and interviews. The produced target texts were annotated to elicit product data. The focus of the study was not on translation quality but rather on the ease and success of integrating gender-fair language into the translation and post-editing process. Findings show that post-editing is generally faster than translation, and that the use of neosystems increases screen activity as well as perceived cognitive effort, which in turn reduces success in using gender-fair language. Finally, participants indicated a clear preference for a combination of gender-neutral and gender-inclusive strategies.

Synopsis:

The three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes 43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each, following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation, negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological knowledge is essential for language description as it helps descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand, typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive linguists for their data collection.

The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages are distributed across the three volumes according to geography, following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia, Australia, North America and South America.

Synopsis:

The three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes 43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each, following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation, negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological knowledge is essential for language description as it helps descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand, typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive linguists for their data collection.

The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages are distributed across the three volumes according to geography, following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia, Australia, North America and South America.

This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/495 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/497.

Synopsis:

The three-volume work Negation in the world's languages constitutes a major step forward in the comparative study of negation. It includes 43 chapters describing the negation system of one language each, following a typologically and functionally oriented questionnaire. The questionnaire is a comparative tool organized according to functional subdomains of negation. It highlights aspects of negation that have been found salient in typological research, such as standard negation, negation in non-declaratives, negation of stative predications and negative indefinite pronouns. At the same time it aims at a comprehensive coverage of the domain of negation and also allows room for language specific features to be highlighted. By using the questionnaire, the chapters have produced comparable datasets of the negation systems of a wide variety of languages from different families and areas. The contributions are also good examples of the fruitful cooperation between typologists and descriptive linguists in the context of diversity linguistics. On the one hand, typological knowledge is essential for language description as it helps descriptive linguists see their data in a broader perspective, ask new questions and come up with new analyses. On the other hand, typologists are crucially dependent on work done by descriptive linguists for their data collection.

The selection of languages is mainly a result of the response to an open call for papers, originally launched for the workshop on negation organized in connection with the Syntax of the World's Languages VIII conference in Paris in 2018. To balance the representation of different continents, authors working on languages from the areas that were initially least covered were invited to take part. The languages are distributed across the three volumes according to geography, following the macroareal divisions in the Glottolog. The first volume includes languages from Africa, the second one covers languages from Eurasia, and the third one brings together languages from Papunesia, Australia, North America and South America.

This book is complemented by volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/496 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/497.

Synopsis:

This book investigates the development of the indefinite cualquiera in European and Argentinian Spanish, tracing their path from modal meanings like free choice and random selection to evaluative and even pejorative uses. Drawing on corpus data, variation across dialects, and formal semantic tools, the study probes how transparent these shifts are and what they reveal about the mechanisms of meaning change. The findings will interest linguists working on indefinites, variation, or the interface between form and interpretation—whether in synchrony or diachrony.

Synopsis:

This collection of Kilmeri texts provides insight into the language and culture of the Kilmeri people in northern Papua New Guinea. Six narrators tell stories about their clans, their land, and its food supply during the ‘golden age’ as well as today. Life in the bush is never easy, as evil spirits often hinder people's efforts to find food. Readers will be introduced to a variety of genres, including legendary deeds of Kilmeri heroes, old village life, contemporary village life, and other oral traditions. All texts are presented in a parallel text version (Kilmeri-English) and in an interlinearised version. Each text is preceded by an introduction that describes the anthropological background and context of the story.

Synopsis:

Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has started reshaping what it means to work as a professional translator in an industry that is becoming increasingly automated. This prompts us to interrogate, once again, the role and agency of human translators in the translation process or, in other words, the intrinsically human value and values they add to it. A natural corollary is that GenAI forces us translator educators to (re-)interrogate what we do in our translation programmes. Whatever we may think or feel about GenAI, we owe it to our students to engage with it in our programmes. However, because GenAI is not just another tool in the translator’s toolkit, we must also to do so in a way that raises students’ awareness of some of the ethical and sustainability issues around it.

This is what Teaching Translation in the Age of Generative AI: New Paradigm, New Learning aims to do. Articulated around three main parts, Part 1 explores the new skills and competences translator educators need to help their students develop in the age of GenAI. In Part 2, the focus shifts to the new knowledge (such as data literacy and prompting) that students in translation programmes need to engage with in the age of GenAI. Finally, Part 3 puts some flesh on the bones, as it reviews some of the new teaching approaches adopted by colleagues since the advent of GenAI. It does so by introducing the reader to a series of vignettes taken from a variety of translation-related disciplines and contexts.

Throughout the entire edited volume, the ambition is to be as accessible as possible, so that this volume can be of help to as many of us in translation education as possible, as we all learn to negotiate the uncharted territory of GenAI.

Synopsis:

Digitale Ressourcen, Methoden und Werkzeuge sind heute in verschiedensten Bereichen von Translation und Translatologie anzutreffen. Es genügt also nicht mehr, in diesem Zusammenhang nur ganz allgemein von Maschineller Übersetzung, Korpora und Termdatenbanken zu sprechen. Diesem Umstand trägt der Band Rechnung: In Überblicksbeiträgen mit Handbuchcharakter wird ein Querschnitt des Digitalen in Translationsforschung, -praxis und -didaktik wiedergegeben. Dieser reicht von historischen und psychologischen Betrachtungen über Risikomanagement in digitalen Übersetzungsprozessen, Digitalisierung und KI im Dolmetschen, in der Audiovisuellen Translation und im Literarischen Übersetzen bis hin zur Skizze eines KI-Kompetenzmodells für die Translation und Fachkommunikation, um nur eine Auswahl aus der Themenvielfalt des Bandes zu benennen. Die einführend gehaltenen Texte eignen sich für Translationsstudierende ebenso wie für Lehrende und Forschende, die neue Bereiche der Digitalen Translatologie erkunden wollen, und nicht zuletzt für Praktizierende, die zugängliche Einblicke in den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zur Digitalen Translatologie erhalten wollen.

Der Preis dieses Buches wird auf 40,00€ in Deutschland festgesetzt.

Synopsis:

This collection contains ten folk stories in Modole, a Papuan language of the North Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. They were first published in 1916 by Dutch missionary G.J. Ellen and appear here re-edited, translated into English and with interlinear glossings.

In addition, the book offers the first grammatical description of Modole, as well as information on the Modole people and their culture and environment.

Synopsis:

This collection of Ende stories and songs contains 20 texts from the Ende Language Corpus, a repository of Ende language and culture. The texts were compiled by the Ende Language Committee and represent a diverse set of authors, illustrators, and translators from the community. Each text is accompanied by a summary, contextual background, and presented in two formats: a running text format in parallel with an English translation, and an interlinearized format with English translations at the morpheme and sentence levels. The texts cover a broad slice of Ende life and are organized into five thematic parts: Animal Tales and Origin Stories, Tales of Hunting and Survival, Heroic or Legendary Stories, Tales of Misbehavior and Consequence, and Odes and Reflections on the Natural World. Audio versions of all the texts are available online through the Ende Language Corpus.

Synopsis:

Japhug is a vulnerable Gyalrongic language, which belongs to the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. It is spoken by several thousand speakers in Mbarkham county, Rngaba district, Sichuan province, China. This grammar is the result of nearly 20 years of fieldwork on one variety of Japhug, based on a corpus of narratives and conversations, a large part of which is available from the Pangloss Collection. It covers the whole grammar of the language, and the text examples provide a unique insight into Gyalrong culture. It was written with a general linguistics audience in mind, and should prove useful not only to specialists of Trans-Himalayan historical linguistics and typologists, but also to anthropologists doing research in Gyalrong areas. It is also hoped that some readers will use it to learn Japhug and pursue research on this fascinating language in the future.

This book is a revised version of https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295

Synopsis:

This book investigates adjectival inflections and the article ein in many different contexts in German including in various non-canonical contexts. It pursues two goals. On the one hand, it strives to provide a more comprehensive description and account of adjectival inflections and the article ein. This includes an examination of the interaction of these two elements. On the other hand, it seeks to identify similarities between these different types of elements to address certain theoretical questions. It is argued that adjectival inflections are not a reflex of (in-)definiteness, (non-)restrictiveness of the interpretation of adjectives, or referentiality; ein is argued not to be a reflex of indefiniteness, emotiveness, or singular number/countability. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that these two elements indicate abstract structural differences: adjectival inflections in the higher portion of the noun phrase, ein in the lower part of the noun phrase. In addition, both types of elements make certain abstract elements visible: adjectival inflections make features for case, number, and gender visible; ein supports overt operators or flags the presence of covert ones. Overall, it is concluded that these two types of elements have neither semantics of their own nor do they make such features visible – they are semantically vacuous.

Synopsis:

This book is a collection of 15 narratives in Hewramî. It offers a unique window into the life of Hewramî speakers, including their oral and social history, social relations, recollections of past life, and storytelling traditions. The stories were told by five narrators. All the stories have been transcribed, translated, annotated, and analysed.

The volume contains an introduction that provides an overview of the language and speech community. The texts are presented in two formats: as parallel column texts (Hewramî/English) and as interlinearised glossed texts, containing detailed linguistic analysis. Many of the narratives contain elements of hagiographies, focusing on moral lessons. This book complements the Hewramî grammar.

This book presents the first grammatical description of Andakí, an extinct language and presumed isolate once spoken in southern Colombia. Written in an accessible style, this book is valuable to both linguists and scholars of South American indigenous cultures. Although Andakí was documented to some extent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, its grammar has never been systematically analyzed until now. Drawing on sometimes fragmentary data, all made available in an online database, the book offers the most complete grammatical description of Andakí to date and highlights connections to neighboring languages where relevant. This study provides essential groundwork for future comparative research and contributes to preserving the linguistic heritage of one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions

Synopsis:

This book is a comprehensive grammatical description of the Hewramî variety of Tekht, grounded in current linguistic methods. Hewramî is one of the most morphologically complex West Iranian languages. It is spoken by several thousand people in the high mountainous Hewraman region situated between Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan.

This work is primarily based on a corpus of 46 narratives, collected during several trips to the Hewraman region between 2016 and 2023. This corpus was supplemented by elicitation tasks to provide a detailed account of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Hewramî. Additionally, the grammar touches on prosody and information structure. The analysis is grounded in linguistic theory, particularly informed by the functional-typological approach.

This grammar is complemented by a text collection.

Synopsis:

Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the investigation is still on-going. The contributions in this volume all pertain to biased questions. They grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling, which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft as part of the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). The papers are written by mostly senior researchers of different expertise who have previously published on the same topic, and explore this fascinating linguistic phenomenon from a variety of theoretical angles: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, psychology, and acquisition. The languages under discussion include Chinese, English, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The collection provides the reader with a rich set of data and several open issues for future research.

Synopsis:

The Jarawaras are a small Amerindian community in lowland Amazonia, in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Their language is one of half a dozen languages of the Arawan family. Yowao and Siko, both now deceased, were elderly Jarawara storytellers. Their stories are valuable from several points of view. First is their literary value -- some of the stories are quite humorous, for example. Secondly, they are a window into the life of the Jarawaras -- their social relations, history, and traditional religion. Finally, the interlinear presentation of the texts will be of interest to linguists. The volume contains an introduction which gives some background on the language and the culture. This volume has English translations, but a version with translations in Portuguese for Brazilian readers is also being planned.

Synopsis:

In this book, feminisation – the marking of female sex on personal nouns – in Dutch and German is investigated contrastively, diachronically, and corpus-linguistically. The corpus-based approach entails a theoretical and methodological shift from a structuralist and essentialist approach to the interplay of language and sex to a poststructuralist, usage-based and holistic perspective, which has long been lacking from the scientific domain of Gender Linguistics.

Starting from the observation that feminising morphology seems less frequently used in Dutch than in German in the same contexts, the goal is to examine how intra- and extralinguistic factors influence the choice for or against the use of these morphological patterns. These (only partly consciously made) choices are called differentiation and neutralisation, respectively. On the intralinguistic level, the link between the use of feminising morphology and properties of the grammatical gender system is investigated contrastively and diachronically, as well as more generally various semantic and pragmatic factors (semantics of the personal noun, animacy, referentiality) that may contribute to a more or less stable feminisation system. On the extralinguistic level, the effect of diverging views on gender-fair language use in both language areas, and within the respective areas (North vs. South for Dutch, East vs. West for German), stands out.

Drawing on diachronic corpus data, the effects of these factors are investigated empirically in three case studies by focusing on the form (Case Study I) and function (Case Study II: feminisation in human reference and Case Study III: feminisation in nonhuman reference) of feminising morphology. Both formally and functionally, Dutch feminisation is a complex system, whereas the German one is more uniform and straightforward. The use of feminising morphology in Dutch has been restricted since at least the second half of the 20th century, but less so in Northern than in Southern (Belgian) Dutch. By contrast, the tendency in German goes toward the consolidation of the feminisation system in all semantically female contexts, with the exception of language use in former East-German newspapers. Furthermore, as opposed to the Dutch feminisation system, the German system has taken on inflectional properties known as inherent inflection, the marking of which is semantically motivated. Examples of the use of feminising morphology in nonhuman reference fit in this analysis as well (e.g., die Partei als Gewinnerin ‘the party as the winner.fem’).

Significant impacting factors in the reduction of a feminisation system are indeed the gender system (feminisation is connected with a preserved masculine/feminine gender distinction, present in German but not in Dutch), referentiality (feminisation is an important referent-tracking instrument and therefore more likely found in referential contexts), semantics (in the case of reduction of feminisation, remnants of the system are observed in semantic contexts which foreground social gender), the newness of a personal noun in a language (neutralisation of new nouns is more common than neutralisation of long-established nouns), and the influence of language policy: the Dutch feminisation system, as well as the use of feminising morphology in the former GDR, has been subject to a significant effect of conscious neutralisation strategies as a means of gender-fair language use.

Synopsis:

This volume contains a selection of papers that were originally presented at a workshop "Cross-disciplinary approaches to Information Structure in African languages", held in Porto-Novo, Benin in 2022. Eight papers explore information structure in Niger-Congo languages from different linguistic angles: phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics. The papers address a range of topics in different Niger- Congo languages from both junior and senior scholars in the field of linguistics, reflecting both the diversity of languages and scholarship in African linguistics.

Synopsis

Locative and existential predications are fundamental linguistic constructions that exhibit significant formal overlap while serving distinct communicative functions. Locative clauses typically anchor a definite referent to a spatial context, whereas existential clauses introduce new, often indefinite, referents into discourse. Despite their central role in syntactic and typological research, the cross-linguistic diversity of these predications remains largely underexplored. This collective volume originates from workshops held in 2023 at the Annual SLE Meeting in Athens and the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Heidelberg. It brings together in-depth analyses of locative and existential predications across a wide range of languages, drawing on diverse methodological and theoretical approaches. Rather than imposing a single framework, the volume deliberately allows for variation in how these constructions are defined and analyzed, reflecting the complexity and diversity of linguistic structures. A key theme of the book is the relationship between locative, existential, and possessive predication. Many of the included studies highlight the formal and functional connections between these domains, illustrating how different languages encode possession through structures that overlap with locative and existential constructions. The volume also challenges conventional assumptions about structural distinctions between these predications, showing that in many languages, such boundaries are blurred or even nonexistent. The introductory chapter reviews key findings from prior research and offers a refined typology of locative and existential predications. It also highlights the major insights from the remaining chapters, each of which provides a detailed empirical analysis of these constructions in one or several underdescribed languages. The contributions address (i) the structural and functional properties of locative and existential clauses, (ii) criteria for distinguishing these constructions in languages where formal differentiation is minimal, (iii) their frequency and usage in natural discourse, and (iv) grammaticalization pathways that link locative, existential, and possessive predication. By integrating data from a broad range of languages and perspectives, this volume advances our understanding of locative and existential predication and offers a foundation for future research in typology, syntax, and historical linguistics.