This book provides the first systematic description of the linguistic accommodation of Moravian migrants in Bohemia. By analyzing the linguistic behaviour of 39 university students from different parts of Moravia living at a hall of residence in Prague, the author investigates part of an unsubstantiated and ideologically motivated dialect contact hypothesis according to which in informal, everyday communication Moravians in Bohemia accommodate not in the direction of the standard dialect but to Common Czech, a non-standard interdialect that is spoken throughout Bohemia. The study combines a...

We live in a technologically mediated lifeworld and culture. Technologies either magnify or amplify human experiences. They can change the ways we live. Technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different cultures. German phenomenologist philosopher Bernhard Irrgang for than 2 decades engaging with the questions, what role does technology play in everyday human experience? How do technological artefacts affect people s existence and their relations with the world? And how do instruments, devices and apparatuses produce and transform human knowledge? Along with Albert...

This study, based on extensive and pioneering fieldwork done by the author between 1999 and 2002, provides a first account of Yinchia, a hitherto undescribed language in the southern Shan State of Myanmar (Burma). Using data collected from native Yinchia speakers in the Nam-San community, the author presents a comprehensive analysis of Yinchia phonetics and phonology (including tonology) in a framework that is essentially structuralist. Chapters on morphology and syntax remain more sketchy and tentative but discuss important issues such as the tense and aspect system of Yinchia as well as...

The growth experienced by Corpus Linguistics over the last two decades has complicated the definition of the discipline. There is at present no consensus as to what corpus linguistics exactly is. Is it a methodology, a theoretical framework, a research paradigm? The goal of this book is multi-purpose. It provides material for a discussion of the notion of -corpus linguistics-, an overt discussion of the limits of this discipline and a comparison of some of the main approaches. And at the same time it offers a collection of selected papers representative of a range of approaches and...

Different national varieties of Spanish, for instance Argentinian, Colombian and Mexican, use different address systems, with different numbers of pronouns, and also give pronouns a different social significance. For the first time, this study discusses and analyses these paradigms in the context of inter-varietal contact in a third country, with English as an additional contact language. A multiplicity of data collection methods made it possible to uncover many new insights into address behaviour. New definitions for address pronouns are proposed, and issues arising from address are...

The study won the 2008 Dr. Maria Schaumayer Foundation Award and the 2008 Award of Excellence of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research.
When older workers become unemployed, they face considerable obstacles in the labour market. Often they are depicted as too old to work but too young to retire. This study is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Public Employment Service Austria (AMS). By means of discourse analysis, the study shows the breadth of images available for older unemployed, ranging from unemployable -scrap iron- to savvy -old stagers-....

This book analyzes the determinants of national policy toward the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the course of a credit arrangement. It examines why national governments decide to enter into a credit arrangement with the IMF and under what circumstances they implement the conditions attached to such credit. Based on a political economy framework, various hypotheses on the determinants of national policy toward the IMF are elaborated. These include the influence of political and economic factors and also consider the behavior of the IMF. The author validates the hypotheses by analyzing...

This book attempts to analyse irony, paradox, oxymoron, overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism from the point of view of both Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. In order to do so, we have regarded each trope as a cognitive model, and observed that the various ICMs that resulted from this approach had in common an essential feature: they were all constructed around the creation of contrasts. Also, we have developed a common processing model for these ICMs, which shows that these so-called figures of speech can be fully considered conceptual mechanisms of meaning creation...

This book offers interpretations of different forms of political opposition in political theory and also in the contemporary development of politics and government in Central Europe. The problem is analyzed through a comparative approach. The first part of the book targets the question of definitions and typologies of political opposition, above all, in democratic, but partly also in non-democratic regimes. The second part deals with the question of models of political opposition in Central Europe after the fall of communism in the late twentieth century and in the present.

The main aim of this work is to examine whether Turkish accession to the EU will threaten EU cohesion or not. The evaluation of this process resulted in the formation of a set of factors-variables upon which a model of EU cohesion was established. Through the use of these factors-variables and having theories of International Relations as the theoretical carpet (Realism, Structural Realism, Functionalism, Neo-Functionalism), nine scenarios on Turkish accession to the EU in relation to EU cohesion were elaborated, ranging from best case to worst case scenario and also including the option of a...