Gómez González María de los Ángeles, Lachlan Mackenzie J., González Álvarez Elsa M. (eds.) Languages and Cultures in Contrast and Comparison

Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. — 364 p. — (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 175). — ISBN 9027254192.This volume explores various hitherto under-researched relationships between languages and their discourse-cultural settings. The first two sections analyze the complex interplay between lexico-grammatical organization and communicative contexts. Part I focuses on structural options in syntax, deepening the analysis of information-packaging strategies. Part II turns to lexical studies, covering such matters as human perception and emotion, the psychological understanding of 'home' and 'abroad', the development of children's emotional life and the relation between lexical choice and sexual orientation.The final chapters consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning.Information structure
Theme zones in contrast: An analysis of their linguistic realization in the communicative act of a non-acceptance
Last things first: A FDG approach to clause-final focus constituents in Spanish and English
Contrastive perspectives on cleft sentences
The position of adverbials and the pragmatic organization of the sentence: A comparison of French and DutchLexis in contrast
Swedish verbs of perception from a typological and contrastive perspective
‘Abroad’ and semantically related terms in some European languages and in Akan (Ghana)
The expression of emotion in Italian and English fairy tales
The feminine stereotype in gaycharacterization: A look at English and SpanishContrastive perspectives on SLA
Communicative tasks across languages: Movie narratives in English, in English as a foreign language and in German
Linguistic theory and bilingual systems: Simultaneous and sequential English/Spanish bilingualism
Awareness of orthographic form and morphophonemic learning in EFL
Contrastive intonation and error analysis: Tonality and tonicity in the interlanguage of a group of Spanish learners of English