Austria does not often make political headlines. It has at least twice in recent years: in 1986, when the ""Waldheim Affair"" was debated worldwide, and in 1999, when the Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) under Joerg Haider received 27 percent of the vote in national elections. Established by former Nazis for former Nazis, the FPOe entered the mainstream of Austrian politics when it became part of a coalition government. This volume explores whether its rise is a uniquely Austrian phenomenon or corresponds to broader social and political changes in Europe.Parallels to Haider's party can be found in other European countries. Its anti-immigration agenda and rhetoric are similar to those of the French FN, the Belgian Vlaams Bloc, and the Italian Lega Nord. And its anti-European Union posture is similar to the sentiments of the ""anti-Maastrich"" wing of the British conservative party. However, European reaction to the FPOe's rise derives not only from its policies, but its linkage to past suspicions that the Austrians have not learned the lessons of history as had the Germans. The FPOe's success strengthened that impression. In response, 14 European Union governments downgraded their bilateral relations with the Austrian government to a purely technical level. Although the sanctions were lifted in September 2000, the spotlight is still very much on Austria, and concern about the FPOe remains high.This important volume contains eleven chapters by internationally prominent scholars from a broad spectrum of the social sciences. Its cross-disciplinary approach provides perspective on the Haider phenomenon, its rhetoric, and its impact on daily life in Austria. It also analyzes the influence of right-wing populism on politics, culture, and society, and its implications in Austria as well as elsewhere in Europe. The Haider Phenomenon will be of interest to historians, political scientists, those in European studies, and scholars in contemporary political extremism.

From the 16th century onwards, Europeans encountered languages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia which were radically different from any of the languages of the Old World. Missionaries were in the forefront of this encounter: in order to speak to potential converts, they needed to learn local languages. A great wealth of missionary grammars survives from the 16th century onwards. Some of these are precious records of the languages they document, and all of them witness their authors’ attempts to develop the methods of grammatical description with which they were familiar, to accommodate dramatically new linguistic features.This book is the first monograph covering the whole Portuguese grammatical tradition outside Portugal. Its aim is to provide an integrated description, analysis and evaluation of the missionary grammars which were written in Portuguese. Between them, these grammars covered a huge range of languages: in Asia, Tamil, four Indo-Aryan languages and Japanese; in Brazil, Kipeá and Tupinambá; in Africa and the African diaspora, Kimbundu and Sena (from the modern Angola and Mozambique respectively).Each text is placed in its historical context, and its linguistic context is analyzed, with particular attention to orthography, the parts of speech system, morphology and syntax. Whenever possible, pedagogical features of the grammars are discussed, together with their treatment of language variation and pragmatics, and the evidence they provide for the missionaries’ attitude towards the languages they studied.

Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative,perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, Modern Structuralist Approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Distributed Morphology, and Case Grammar have been applied by the different authors.

Offers an easily accessible specific methodology for describing the nuances of spoken and written texts, of any length, in meaning and manageable ways

This is the first of a series of 6 books dealing with case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European, resulting from work by a team of 20 specialists at the University of Leuven. It is the first time such a large-scale investigation into case has been undertaken, and a remarkable feature of the project is the use of computer corpora of authentic material. This bibliography presents the many dimensions involved in research into case and case-related phenomena. This includes not only morphological case markers, but also the crossconstituent (semantic and grammatical) relations expressed by morphological case or by its various counterparts; morpho-syntactic processes such as transitivity and passivization; and pragmatic and textual considerations. In addition, the bibliography reflects the implications of case research for other disciplines, such as foreign language teaching and artificial intelligence. More than 6000 publications are listed. An extensive Subject Index provides easy access to all the topics and major concepts covered. A Language Index and a Guide to Languages/Language Families conclude the book. The other volumes in the series include The Dative (2 vols), The Genitive, The Nominative and Accusative, and Non-nuclear Cases.

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 application levels. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of contemporary functionally oriented computational treatments of a variety of important language and linguistic issues. This book presents current research on functionally oriented computational models of grammar, language processing and linguistics, concerned with a broadly functional computational linguistics that also contributes to our understanding of languages within a functional and cognitive linguistic, computational research agenda.