Research on poverty in rich countries relies primarily on household income to capture living standards and distinguish those in poverty, and this is also true of official poverty measurement and monitoring. However, awareness of the limitations of income has been heightening interest in the role that non-monetary measures of deprivation can play. This book takes as starting-point that research on poverty and social exclusion has been undergoing a fundamental shift towards a multidimensional approach; that researchers and policy-makers alike have struggled to develop concepts and indicators...

Modern Irish is a VSO language, in common with the other Celtic languages, and the order of elements in the structure of transitive sentences is verb-subject-object. This book provides a characterisation of the nominal, verb, clause and information structure of the Irish language from a functional perspective based on Role and Reference Grammar. Included in this analysis are the layered structure of the noun phrase of Irish and the various NP operators, the layered structure of the clause and the verbal system at the syntax-semantic interface along with a number of verb valence behaviours as...

There is a growing awareness of the significance of constructions in grammar in the world s languages. To date there has not been a single volume that addresses the issues of constructions within a functional Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) account. The book is a collection of articles that will serve the scholarly community as a reference work on the role, place and significance of constructions within this functional model of grammar. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of cross-linguistic comparison of these important discourse and syntax-related phenomena. The articles...

There is a growing awareness of the significance and value that modelling using information technology can bring to the functionally oriented linguistic enterprise. This encompasses a spectrum of areas as diverse as concept modelling, language processing and grammar modelling, conversational agents, and the visualisation of complex linguistic information in a functional linguistic perspective. This edited volume offers a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of computational modelling of language and grammars, within a functional perspective at both the theoretical and...

This book offers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisation of the concepts of causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE, GET, TAKE, PUT, and LET verbs. This volume stands as the first systematic exploration of these verbs and concepts as they occur in complex events and clauses. This book brings together scholars and researchers from a variety of functionally inspired theoretical backgrounds that have worked on these verbs within one language or from a cross-linguistic...

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are:
- Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why?
- What are the social, cultural and political impacts of...