This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies. This volume opens up new perspectives for the study of visual narrative, making it a key reference for anyone interested in the scientific study of art and literature as well as the digital humanities.

This book provides a comprehensive linguistic exploration of textism use by bilingual young adults, illustrating the function of alternative and creative linguistic features and their role in conveying tone through text. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 45,000 text messages donated by bilingual young adults in New York City, this volume explores the ways in which the use of texting features such as 'lol,' emojis, abbreviations, and acronyms is systematic and essential. In part, toward the aim of exposing the tensions bilinguals face navigating a platform that preferences monolingual language practices, the book highlights creativity as a means of both constructing meaning and performing identity for bilingual youths. These findings are extended to explore the role texting plays in communication and identity construction in contemporary society more generally. This volume extends the boundaries of emerging research on language and digital communication, and will be of particular interest to graduate students and scholars in computer-mediated communication, pragmatics, and new media.

What do different concepts like true lie, bad luck, honest thief, old news, spacetime, glocalization, symplexity, sustainable development, constant change, soft law, substantive due process, pure law, bureaucratic efficiency and global justice have in common? What connections do they share with innumerable paradoxes, like the ones of happiness, time, globalization, sex, and of free will and fate? Law in the Time of Oxymora provides answers to these conundrums by critically comparing the apparent rise in recent years of the use of rhetorical figures called "essentially oxymoronic concepts" (i.e. oxymoron, enantiosis and paradoxes) in the areas of art, science and law. Albeit to varying degrees, these concepts share the quality of giving expression to apparent contradictions. Through this quality, they also challenge the scientific paradigm rooted in the dualistic thinking and binary logic that is traditionally used in the West, as opposed to the East, where a paradoxical mode of thinking and fuzzy logic is said to have been cultivated. Following a review of oxymora and paradoxes in art and various scientific writings, hundreds of "hard cases" featuring oxymora and a comprehensive review of the legal literature are discussed, revealing evidence suggesting that the present scientific paradigm of dualism alone will no longer be able to tackle the challenges arising from increasing diversity and complexity coupled with an apparent acceleration of change. Law in the Time of Oxymora reaches the surprising conclusion that essentially oxymoronic concepts may inaugurate a new era of cognition, involving the ways the senses interact and how we reason, think and make decisions in law and in life.

This book explores the use of online and face-to-face interactions in language teacher education (LTE) by assessing the formation and practices of a community of practice (CoP), and evaluating the roles discussions between student teachers and a peer tutor can play in terms of identity formation, articulating narratives, reflective practices, and maintaining affective relationships. The specific context within which this is embedded is a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programme, often known as English Language Teaching (ELT), at a third-level Irish institution. The data drawn on come from student teachers on a master's (MA) programme who interacted with a peer tutor (the researcher) via a number of modes (face-to-face and online). The approach to data analysis is a corpus-based discourse analytical one, which examines the linguistic features of student teacher and peer tutor talk; the features of CoP practices in the discourse; and how different modes of communication shape the nature of this discourse. Perceptive data from the student teachers is used to outline their reactions to the modes of communication and the activities they participated in.

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

This book explores how the UK press constructs and represents women leaders drawn from three professional spheres: politics, business, and the mass media. Despite significant career progress made by women leaders in these professions, many British newspapers continue to portray these women in stereotyped and essentialist ways: the extent to which this occurs tending to correspond with the political affiliation and target readership of the newspaper. The author analyses news media articles through three fresh perspectives: first, Kanter's women leader stereotypes, second, a feminist agenda spectrum and third, a new 'reflexive' approach based on Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. This book will appeal strongly to students and scholars of discourse analysis and media studies, and anyone with an interest in language, gender, leadership and feminism.

This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood. Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.

Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts: A Discourse-Based Approach to English Grammar is a book for language teachers and learners that focuses on the meanings of grammatical constructions within discourse, rather than on language as structure governed by rigid rules. This text emphasizes the ways in which users of language construct meaning, express viewpoints, and depict imageries using the conceptual, meaning-filled categories that underlie all of grammar. Written by a team of authors with years of experience teaching grammar to future teachers of English, this book puts grammar in the context of real language and illustrates grammar in use through an abundance of authentic data examples. Each chapter also provides a variety of activities that focus on grammar, genre, discourse, and meaning, which can be used as they are or can be adapted for classroom practice. The activities are also designed to raise awareness about discourse, grammar, and meaning in all facets of everyday life, and can be used as springboards for upper high school, undergraduate, and graduate level research projects and inquiry-based grammatical analysis. Grammar, Meaning, and Concepts is an ideal textbook for those in the areas of teacher education, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, second language teaching, ESL, EFL, and communications who are looking to teach and learn grammar from a dynamic perspective.

In the last 15 to 20 years, writing centers have placed greater importance on tutor training, focusing on teaching tutors best practices in fostering student writers' engagement and writing skills. Writing Center Talk over Time explores the importance of writing center talk and demonstrates the efficacy of tutor training. The book uses corpus-driven analysis and discourse analysis to examine the changes in writing center talk over time to provide a baseline understanding of the very heart of writing center work: the talk that unfolds between tutors and student writers. It is this talk that, at its best, motivates student writers to continue to improve their writing and scaffolds their learning and that makes tutors proud of the service that they provide. The methods and analysis of this study are intended to inform other researchers so that they may conduct further research into the efficacy of writing center talk.

This innovative collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars highlighting the "appliability" of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the ways in which theoretical and analytical conclusions drawn from its applications can inform and advance the study of language. The book discusses SFL's theoretical foundations and development in recent years to demonstrate its evolution into a more effective analytical tool. Building on this theoretical framework, the volume showcases the theory's applications in case studies exploring four sub-disciplines of language study: multilingual studies; translation studies; language learning and language teaching; and genre analysis. This all-inclusive volume demonstrates both Systemic Functional Linguistics' efficacy as a means of theoretical analysis, but also its value as a unique approach to the study of language and meaning, making this an indispensable resource for researchers and scholars in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, genre studies, translation studies, and multilingualism.

How do we learn what it means to be a man? And how do we learn to question what it means to be a man? This collection comprises a set of original interdisciplinary chapters on the linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in a range of new and older media: television, film, online forums, news reporting, advertising and fiction. This innovative work examines new and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts including the role of EU institutions in ascertaining asylum seekers' sexual orientation, and the European laws on gender policy. The book employs numerous analytical approaches including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, literary criticism and anthropological and social research. The authors show how such texts can disrupt, question or complicate traditional notions of what it means to be a man, queering the idea that men possess fixed identities or desires, instead arguing that masculinity is constantly changing and negotiated through the cultural and political overlapping contexts in which it is regularly produced. These nuanced analyses will bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender, masculinity and queer studies, linguistics, anthropology and semiotics.

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists' failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine's arguments by proposing universal 'semantic primitives' or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch's 'family resemblance' account of the 'prototype' effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like 'action' and 'event' can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Kripke and Putnam on proper names and natural kind terms. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

First published in 1994, this book is concerned with certain kinds of wh-clauses, whose interpretations are easily and, the author argues, plausibly rendered by a logicosemantic analysis on which wh-phrases translate as open sentences, that is, as expressions of the semantically interpreted representation which contain free variables. After a review of influential contemporary analyses of the semantics of questions, concentrating on issues related to the truthconditional interpretation of these constructions, the author goes on to analyse logicosemantic similarities between wh-phrases and indefinite NPs. This analysis is extended in chapter V to account for asymmetries between wh-phrases and indefinites, but is preceded by the engagement and refutation of some of the challenges to it. The appendices discuss some peripheral points relating to the central points made by the author which are in need of further study.

First published in 1990, this dissertation presents an event-based model-theoretic semantics for plural expressions in English. The author defends against counterarguments the hypothesis that distributive predicates are predicates of groups, and not just individuals. By defining the collective/distributive distinction in terms of event structure, he solves formal problems with previous group-level analyses. The author notes that certain adverbials have a systematic ambiguity between a reading indicating collective action, and readings indicating spatial or temporal proximity; the event-based definition of collective action makes possible a parallel treatment of these readings. This book presents a formal proposal on the algebraic structure of groups and events, and a semantically based analysis of number agreement.

First published in 1987, this book is an attempt to re-establish semiotic on the basis of principles consistent with its past history, rather than the 'cultural semiotics' of the European tradition, and especially with the guiding ideas of Peirce and Morris. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters providing the background for the more systematic discussions of signs at different levels taken up in the last three. In the final chapter issues that have become the focus of recent philosophy of language regarding the reference, meaning, and truth of sentences are discussed in light of the analogies to more primitive signs developed in the preceding two chapters.

First published in 1982, this book looks at a wide variety of issues concerning the vast field of study that is 'semiotics. It begins by tracing the beginnings of modern semiotics in the works two pioneering figures - Saussure and Peirce - in order to present fundamental assumptions, notions and distinctions which provide an essential background to the more recent developments. The author then goes on to look at Behavioural Semiotics, Luis Prieto's idea of "l'Acte Semique", Austin's theory of 'Speech Acts' and Searle's elaborations, Barthes' move away from philosophical and scientific approaches in his ideology of Socio-Cultural Signification, Functionalism and Axiomatic Functionalism, style as a form of communication, semiotics of the cinema, and communicative behaviour in non-human species.

First published in 1983, this book represents an effort to lay the groundwork for a general approach to lexical semantics that pays heed to the needs of a theory of discourse interpretation, a theory of compositional semantics, and a theory of lexical rules. The first chapter proposes a basic framework in which to undertake lexical description and a lexical semantic analogue to the classical syntactic distinction between subcategorized for complement and adjunct. This apparatus for lexical description is expanded in the second chapter. A theory of the semantics of nuclear terms along with a proposed implementation is presented in chapter three. The fourth chapter argues that a number of regular, semantically governed valence alternations could be captured in frame representations that give rise to various kinds of realisation options. The final chapter examines interaction of these phenomena with a general account of prediction or control along with the general framework of lexical representation.

First published in 1997, this book focuses on the semantics of definite and indefinite descriptions - taking the presuppositional theory of definiteness and indefiniteness proposed by Heim as a starting point. It seeks to show that there exists a special type of indefinites that have an interpretation commonly associated with definites. It further argues that the felicity conditions associated with indefinite NP's can vary and develops a more fine-grained theory of novelty within the framework of File Change Semantics. More generally, this work can be seen as providing an empirical argument in favour of a dynamic theory of meaning and against the more traditional truth-conditional theory.

First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction before turning to the presupposition projection problem. The final two chapters discuss anaphora and its interactions with disjunction.

This book is about moral talk in contemporary British political discourse, drawing on speeches, debates and radio phone-ins. Using a critical sociolinguistic approach, Spencer-Bennett explores the language people use to communicate moral judgement and highlights the relations between the things that people say, the contexts in which they are said and the circulating ideologies about meaning and morality. This is key reading for students and scholars studying language, politics and critical discourse analysis, within linguistics and anthropology.

This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. 'Why do we have stories?', 'How do stories create meaning for us?', and 'How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?' are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience, Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

In this monograph, Chris Featherman adopts a discourse analytical approach to explore the ways in which social movement ideologies and identities are discursively constructed in new and old media. In the context of his argument, Featherman also considers current debates surrounding the role that technologies play in democracy-building and global activist networks. He engages these critical issues through a case study of the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, looking at both US legacy media coverage of the protests as well as activists' use of social media. Through qualitative analysis of a corpus of activists' Twitter tweets and Flickr uploads, Featherman argues that activists' social media discourses and protesters' symbolic and tactical borrowing of global English contribute to micronarratives of globalization, while also calling into question master narratives about Iran commonly found in mainstream Western media accounts. This volume makes a timely contribution to discussions regarding the relationship between cyber-rhetoric and democracy, and provides new directions for researchers engaging with the influence of new media on globalized vernaculars of English.

This book investigates linguistic strategies of threat construction and fear generation in contemporary public communication, including state political discourse as well as non-governmental, media and institutional discourses. It describes the ways in which the construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the public sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. Featuring a series of case studies in different domains, from presidential speeches to environmental discourse, it demonstrates how political and organizational leaders enforce the imminence of an outside threat to claim legitimization of preventive policies. It reveals that the best legitimization effects are obtained by discursively constructed fear appeals, which ensure quick social mobilization. The scope of the book is of immediate concern in the modern globalized era where borders and distance dissolve and are re-imagined. It will appeal to students and researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, media communication as well as social and political sciences.

The contributors of this text, first published in 1988, provide a dynamic view of the social functioning of texts, taking account of linguistic, literary and cultural elements. They bring together innovative perspectives on literary analysis and theory, on pragmatics and discourse analysis, as well as on text linguistics and reception theory. Various text types are examined, and the editor introduces each chapter in order to draw them all together to make a fascinating and cohesive whole.

The tie that binds all Americans, regardless of their demographic background, is faith in the American system of government. This faith manifests as a form of civil, or secular, religion with its own core documents, creeds, oaths, ceremonies, and even individuals. In The Rhetoric of American Civil Religion: Symbols, Sinners, and Saints, contributors seek to examine some of those core elements of American faith by exploring the proverbial saints, sinners and dominant symbols of the American system.