Creativity – Constructions – Emotions

The English and American Studies Library, in cooperation with the Department of English , cordially invites you to a book launch, celebrating new book publications by Marie-Luise Pitzl, Pia Resnik and Lotte Sommerer.

Short presentations by the authors will illustrate the range of topics currently researched in English linguistics.

A drinks reception will provide further opportunity for discussion.

Programme

Welcome and Opening

Karin Lach, Library Manager, Englisch and American Studies Library

Short presentation of books by the authors

Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca: Idiom an Metaphor
Marie-Luise Pitzl

Multilinguals' Verbalisation and Perception of Emotions
Pia Resnik

Article Emergence in Old English. A Construcionalist Perspective
Lotte Sommerer

Reception / Drinks and Snacks

References and Descriptions

Pitzl, Marie-Luise. 2018. Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca: Idiom and Metaphor. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton

This book investigates formal characteristics and discourse functions of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in spoken ELF as represented in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Building on the findings of previous ELF research, the book proposes that creativity might serve as a fundamental concept in accounting for the variation that seems to be central to describing and understanding English as a lingua franca.

Link to the book entry in u:search – The Vienna University Library Search Engine: print book and e-book.

Resnik, Pia. 2018. Multilinguals’ Verbalisation and Perception of Emotions. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

This book investigates the interplay of language, emotion and gender in a multilingual context and provides rich insights into the complexities of bilingualism and the field of emotion research, as well as the intersection of both. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of data, the book examines multilinguals’ verbalisation and perception of emotions in their first language and English, their second language (L2). The research looks at crosslinguistic, intercultural and gender-based differences, thereby highlighting the challenges faced by multilinguals in this context and the potential risks of miscommunication and misinterpretation. Results support the call for a change of paradigm towards a holistic approach to multilingualism and emotion research and highlight the similarities and differences in L2 users of English when expressing their emotions in the different languages.

Link to the book entry in u:search – The Vienna University Library Search Engine: e-book

Sommerer, Lotte. 2018. Article Emergence in Old English. A Constructionalist Perspective. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton

This book investigates nominal determination in Old English and the emergence of the definite and the indefinite article. Analyzing Old English prose texts, it discusses the nature of linguistic categorization and argues that a usage-based, cognitive, constructionalist approach best explains when, how and why the article category developed. It is shown that the development of the OE demonstrative 'se' (that) and the OE numeral 'an' (one) should not be told as a story of two individual, grammaticalizing morphemes, but must be reconceptualized in constructional terms. The emergence of the morphological category ‘article’ follows from constructional changes in the linguistic networks of OE speakers and especially from ‘grammatical constructionalization’ (i.e. the emergence of a new, schematic, mostly procedural form-meaning pairing which previously did not exist in the constructicon). Next to other functional-cognitive reasons, the book especially highlights analogy and frequency effects as driving forces of linguistic change.

Link to the book entry in u:search – The Vienna University Library Search Engine: e-book