Agency and Impersonality

Their Linguistic and Cultural Manifestations

 | Doshisha University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027230881 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027293282 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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In this monograph the author probes the fundamental nature of the concept of agency and its importance to human language and cognition. Whereas previous studies focused on grammatical manifestations this original work addresses such issues as the strong relationship between agency and responsibility, a philosophical interpretation of the concept of agency and a variety of epistemic attitudes towards agency that strongly influence our view of the world. Different cultures and languages process and express agency differently. To illustrate the co-relation between the linguistic expressions of agency and cultural stereotypes that lurk behind individual natural languages, the author analyses Japanese and English parallel corpora. It is shown that English tends to highlight agency in expressing actions and events, whereas Japanese largely obfuscates agency through impersonalising potential agents. Through the case studies on these languages this book sheds light on the close connection between language, thought and culture and contributes to the resurging interest in linguistic relativity.
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 78] 2006.  x, 152 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 1 July 2008
Table of Contents
“I found this book always interesting to read, due to the author's wit and entertaining style of writing, which is truly admirable.”
Cited by (22)

Cited by 22 other publications

Irmer, Marie, Tanja Mortelmans & Reinhild Vandekerckhove
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Lobben, Marit & Bruno Laeng
2024. Zooming in and out of semantics: proximal–distal construal levels and prominence hierarchies. Frontiers in Psychology 15 DOI logo
Qu, Jiashen & Koji Miwa
2024. Conceptualisation of event roles in L1 and L2 by Japanese learners of English: a cross-linguistic comparison of perspectives of event construal. Cognitive Linguistics DOI logo
Lin, Qiuming
2023. Introduction. In Agency Construction and Navigation in English Learning Stories,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Simchon, Almog, Britt Hadar & Michael Gilead
2023. A computational text analysis investigation of the relation between personal and linguistic agency. Communications Psychology 1:1 DOI logo
Toivonen, Heidi & Marco Caracciolo
2023. Storytalk and complex constructions of nonhuman agency. Narrative Inquiry 33:1  pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea & Barbara De Cock
2022. Taboo effects at the syntactic level. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)  pp. 113 ff. DOI logo
Toivonen, Heidi
2022. Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people construct agency in relation to climate change. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9:1 DOI logo
Conti, Luz
2020. La cortesía verbal en Sófocles: análisis del optativo potencial en actos de habla directivos. Emerita 88:2  pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
Lorés-Sanz, Rosa & Isabel Herrando-Rodrigo
2020. New concepts, different approaches: tackling e-visibility in research project websites. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas 15:1  pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Wolf, Oliver Olsen & Geraint A. Wiggins
2020. Look! It's Moving! Is It Alive? How Movement Affects Humans’ Affinity Living and Non-Living Entities. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 11:4  pp. 669 ff. DOI logo
杨, 格晴
2020. Why Is Life Special? The Animacy Effect on Memory and Its Underlying Mechanisms. Advances in Psychology 10:08  pp. 1274 ff. DOI logo
Vihman, Virve-Anneli & Diane Nelson
2019. Effects of Animacy in Grammar and Cognition: Introduction to Special Issue. Open Linguistics 5:1  pp. 260 ff. DOI logo
Gardelle, Laure & Sandrine Sorlin
2018. Introduction. International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2  pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
Nelson, Diane & Virve-Anneli Vihman
2018. Shifting perspective: noun classes, voice, and animacy type shifts. Theoretical Linguistics 44:1-2  pp. 57 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Weiwei, Dirk Geeraerts & Dirk Speelman
2018. (Non)metonymic Expressions for government in Chinese: A Mixed-Effects Logistic Regression Analysis. In Mixed-Effects Regression Models in Linguistics [Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ],  pp. 117 ff. DOI logo
Binder, Jeffrey R., Lisa L. Conant, Colin J. Humphries, Leonardo Fernandino, Stephen B. Simons, Mario Aguilar & Rutvik H. Desai
2016. Toward a brain-based componential semantic representation. Cognitive Neuropsychology 33:3-4  pp. 130 ff. DOI logo
Perera, C. K. & A. K. Srivastava
2016. Animacy-Based Accessibility and Competition in Relative Clause Production in Hindi and Malayalam. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45:4  pp. 915 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Yong
2016. Impersonal clauses in Chinese. Functions of Language 23:3  pp. 361 ff. DOI logo
Höglund, Mikko
2014. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready. In Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 63],  pp. 239 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Yong & Yingfang Zhou
2014. A functional study of event-existentials in Modern Chinese. Functional Linguistics 1:1 DOI logo
Livnat, Zohar
2010. Impersonality and Grammatical Metaphors in Scientific Discourse. Lidil :41  pp. 103 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
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U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2006047728 | Marc record