Conference selection

HISON 2023

Brussels, 31 May - 2 June 2023

John Benjamins will be present at HiSoN. Check out our promotional material and discount order form through the links below. Or come and browse our books at the exhibit. If you wish to talk about our books, your work, and possible publishing projects please get in touch with Anke de Looper, anke.delooper at benjamins.nl.

Check out our selection of top titles for this conference!


Showing all 33 titles.

TAR 2
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Address Variation in Sociocultural Context

Region, power and distance in Italian service encounters

Agnese Bresin

This study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian—with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and... full description
February 2021. xxi, 290 pp.
AHS 5
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Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse

Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl

This volume explores the dynamics of genre conventions in historical English news discourse. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of news writing and publication formats: from corantos to modern tabloids, from prototypical hard news stories and crime reports to more specialised genres such as medical and scientific... full description
July 2015. xiv, 254 pp.
P&bns 330
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Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse

Edited by Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some... full description
July 2022. vii, 322 pp.
IVITRA 35
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Desired Language

Languages as objects of national ideology

Edited by Francesc Feliu

National linguistic ideology has been at the base of most historical processes that –whether they are complete or not – have brought us to the current reality: a world of languages that represent, with greater or lesser exactitude, the diversity – and convergences – of human groups. Various of today’s thinkers have... full description
January 2023. vi, 294 pp.
AHS 6
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Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse

Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen

The history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like sports reports,... full description
August 2017. vii, 301 pp.
CAL 33
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Discourse Structuring Markers in English

A historical constructionalist perspective on pragmatics

Elizabeth Closs Traugott

This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English... full description
March 2022. xviii, 274 pp.
VEAW G66
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Earlier North American Englishes

Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus... full description
July 2022. viii, 261 pp.
CILT 359
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English Historical Linguistics

Historical English in contact

Edited by Bettelou Los, Chris Cummins, Lisa Gotthard, Alpo Honkapohja and Benjamin Molineaux

This volume drawn from the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018) focuses on the role of language contact in the history of English. It showcases a wide variety of historical linguistic approaches, including ‘big data’ analyses of large corpora, dialectological methods,... full description
February 2022. vi, 185 pp.
CILT 358
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English Historical Linguistics

Change in structure and meaning

Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale

This volume contains a set of articles based on papers selected from those delivered at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018). It focuses on cutting-edge research in the history of English, while reflecting the diversity that exists in the current landscape of... full description
February 2022. viii, 349 pp.
AHS 7
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Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics

Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer

This volume explores potential paths in historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the inter-related areas of methodological innovations, hitherto un- or under-explored textual resources, and theoretical advancements and challenges. The individual chapters cover Dutch, Finnish and different varieties of... full description
December 2017. vii, 331 pp.
DAPSAC 95
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History, Discourse, and Policy in Modern Turkey

Alper Çakmak

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies, with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics. It offers an alternative way of... full description
October 2021. xvi, 212 pp.
IHLL 38
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Innovative Approaches to Research in Hispanic Linguistics

Regional, diachronic, and learner profile variation

Edited by Sara Fernández Cuenca, Tiffany Judy and Lauren Miller

This volume presents research from across the subdisciplines of Hispanic Linguistics in an attempt to showcase how new research methods, together with a renewed focus on language variation, have advanced our field. This volume is divided into three sections of original research, with the first describing regional... full description
June 2023. x, 250 pp.
TAR 1
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It’s not all about you

New perspectives on address research

Edited by Bettina Kluge and María Irene Moyna

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research, a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview,... full description
November 2019. vi, 447 pp.
AHS 10
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Keeping in Touch

Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world

Edited by Raymond Hickey

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of... full description
November 2019. x, 289 pp.
AHS 9
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Language Planning as Nation Building

Ideology, policy and implementation in the Netherlands, 1750–1850

Gijsbert Rutten

The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The linguistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers a unique example.... full description
February 2019. x, 312 pp.
SILV 25
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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII

Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019

Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen

This volume contains a selection of papers from the 10th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), which was organized by the Fryske Akademy and held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands) in June 2019. The editors have selected thirteen papers on a wide range of language varieties,... full description
June 2021. vi, 316 pp.
AHS 2
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Letters as Loot

A sociolinguistic approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der Wal

The study of letter writing is at the heart of the historical-sociolinguistic enterprise. Private letters, in particular, offer an unprecedented view on language history. This book presents an in-depth study of the language of letters focussing on a unique collection of Dutch private letters from the seventeenth and... full description
November 2014. xiii, 426 pp.
SLCS 218
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Lost in Change

Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical elements and constructions

Edited by Svenja Kranich and Tine Breban

While research on language change has formulated robust empirical generalisations about processes and motivations underlying the emergence and spread of linguistic elements, their decline and loss is less well understood. So far a systematic investigation into the processes and motivations of decline and loss in... full description
June 2021. vi, 366 pp.
TAR 4
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The Mysterious Address Term anata 'you' in Japanese

Yoko Yonezawa

The use of the second person singular pronoun anata ‘you’ in modern Japanese has long been regarded as mysterious and problematic, generating contradictory nuances such as polite, impolite, intimate, and distancing. Treated as a troublesome pronoun, scholars have searched for a semantically loaded meaning in anata,... full description
October 2021. xv, 208 pp.
TAR 3
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Nominal and Pronominal Address in Jamaica and Trinidad

Variation and patterns

Matthias Klumm

This book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the... full description
September 2021. xiv, 246 pp.
AHS 3
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Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900

A sociolinguistic and comparative perspective

Edited by Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters and Wim Vandenbussche

Historical sociolinguistics has successfully challenged the traditional focus on standardization in linguistic historiography. Extensive research on newly uncovered textual resources has shown the widespread variation in the written language of the past that was previously hidden or neglected. The time has come to... full description
December 2014. viii, 334 pp.
SLCS 226
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On Spoken French

An Ashby Reader

William J. Ashby

This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language, by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics, William J. Ashby, and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995), including two... full description
March 2023. xiv, 534 pp.
AHS 8
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Patterns of Change in 18th-century English

A sociolinguistic approach

Edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin and Tanja Säily

Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal... full description
September 2018. xi, 311 pp.
Impact 52
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Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages

A socially-anchored approach

Lenore A. Grenoble and Jessica Kantarovich

Focusing on language contact involving Russian, and the linguistic varieties that emerged from that contact in different social settings, this book analyzes issues and methodologies in reconstructing both the linguistic effects of language contact and the social contexts of usage. In-depth analyses of Odessan Russian,... full description
December 2022. xv, 354 pp.
AHS 11
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Records of Real People

Linguistic variation in Middle English local documents

Edited by Merja Stenroos and Kjetil V. Thengs

English local documents – leases, wills, accounts, letters and the like – provide a unique resource for historical sociolinguistics. Abundant from the early fifteenth century, they represent the language and concerns of people from a wide range of social, institutional and geographical backgrounds. However, as... full description
December 2020. ix, 310 pp.
SILV 26
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Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Acquisition across the Lifespan

Edited by Anna Ghimenton, Aurélie Nardy and Jean-Pierre Chevrot

This volume provides a broad coverage of the intersection of sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition. Favoured by the current scientific context where interdisciplinarity is particularly encouraged, the chapters bring to light the complementarity between the social and cognitive approaches to language... full description
August 2021. vi, 319 pp.
AHS 13
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Sociolinguistic Variation in Old English

Records of communities and people

Olga Timofeeva

This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of... full description
July 2022. xv, 204 pp.
P&bns 329
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The Sociopragmatics of Stance

Community, language, and the witness depositions from the Salem witch trials

Peter J. Grund

Anchored in historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, this book weaves together a powerful narrative of the significance of stance marking in the history of English. Focusing on the community of practice that developed during the witch trials in Salem (Massachusetts) in 1692–1693, it... full description
November 2021. ix, 246 pp.
AHS 12
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Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics

Isolation and contact

Edited by Whitney Chappell and Bridget Drinka

This interdisciplinary volume explores the unique role of the sociohistorical factors of isolation and contact in motivating change in the varieties of Spanish worldwide. Recognizing the inherent intersectionality of social and historical factors, the book’s eight chapters investigate phenomena ranging from forms of... full description
May 2021. v, 235 pp.
AHS 1
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Touching the Past

Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents

Edited by Marijke J. van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten

The study of ego-documents figures as a prominent theme in cutting-edge research in the Humanities. Focusing on private letters, diaries and autobiography, this volume covers a wide range of different languages and historical periods, from the sixteenth century to World War I. The volume stands out by its consistent... full description
July 2013. vii, 279 pp.
AHS 4
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Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English

Edited by Marina Dossena

The volume presents an innovative approach to studies in Late Modern English by giving attention to variation and change in varieties of English on both sides of the Atlantic. As new corpora become available, scholarly interests broaden their horizons to encompass varieties, the history of which has only just begun to... full description
February 2015. vii, 221 pp.
CoLL 59
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Variation Rolls the Dice

A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene

Edited by Enoch O. Aboh and Cécile B. Vigouroux

Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices, and the role of variation in determining... full description
October 2021. xiv, 330 pp.
Z 237
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“All families and genera”

Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts

Edited by Isabel Moskowich, Inés Lareo and Gonzalo Camiña

“All families and genera”: Exploring the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts aims at exploring scientific writing in late Modern English. This volume is the fourth of its kind devoted to the analysis of the relations between language and different scientific disciplines from 1700 to 1900. Here, forty texts on... full description
September 2021. xv, 310 pp.