NEW MEDIA THEORY Series Editor, Byron Hawk 327 pages, including photographs, bibliography, and index. (c) 2012 by Parlor Press AVATAR EMERGENCY is Gregory L. Ulmer's fourth book featuring the EmerAgency, an online virtual consultancy for the digital age. This time his point of departure is Paul Virilio's Generalized Accident from which he develops and theorizes the new concepts of Flash Reason, and specifically Avatar, which serves as the site for electrate identity formation in the twenty-first century. I have taught Ulmer's work on electracy for years, and his theoretical sophistication as well as the practical ambition and applicability of his work never ceases to amaze me. With Avatar Emergency, Ulmer shows once again that he is at the top of his game; I am positively thrilled to share this new and very timely treasure trove of a book with my students. -JAN RUNE HOLMEVIK, author of Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy Ulmer advances a ratio: "Avatar is to electracy what 'self' is to literacy, or 'spirit' to orality." He explores this "emergent logic through the invention of concept avatar." He begins, urgently, by asking: "What might wisdom be today, upon what authority might it be grounded, . . . what vision of well-being?" Perpetually asking the questions, Ulmer searches for "a vital anecdote" as an antidote to the "internet accident" by way of "flash reason." He claims, "Within this frame I present, in the genre of Mystory Internet Invention], what I have come to understand about living, my decision to become a professor of the Humanities and the lifestyle embraced as part of that choice." He invites his readers, thereby, to discover their own Mystory (mystery). Their own wisdom. After all, he explains: "Concept avatar must be not only understood, but undergone." My advice: Undergo the book -VICTOR J. VITANZA, author of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape GREGORY L. ULMER is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses in Hypermedia, E-Lit, and Heuretics. He is also the Joseph Bueys Chair in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Ulmer's books include Applied Grammatology (1985), Teletheory (1989), Heuretics (1994), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), and Miami Virtue (2011

This innovative volume testifies to the current revived interest in Shakespeare's language and style and opens up new and captivating vistas of investigation. Transcending old boundaries between literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeare's uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeare's multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.

Roberta Piazza's book is a linguistic investigation of the dialogue of Italian cinema covering a selection of films from the 1950s to the present day. It looks at how speech is dealt with in studies of the cinema and tackles the lack of engagement with dialogue in film studies. It explores the representation of discourse in cinema -- the way particular manifestations of verbal interaction are reproduced in film. Whereas representation generally refers to the language used in texts to assign meaning to a group and its social practices, here discourse representation more directly refers to the relationship between real-life and cinematic discourse. Piazza analyses how fictional dialogue reinterprets authentic interaction in order to construe particular meanings. Beginning by exploring the relationship between discourse and genre, the second half of the book takes a topic-based approach and reflects on the themes of narrative and identity. The analysis carried out takes on board the multi-semiotic and multimodal components of film discourse. The book uses also uses concepts and methodologies from pragmatics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis.

This volume is about the morphosyntactic encoding of feelings and emotions in Latin. It offers a corpus-based investigation of the Latin data, benefiting from insights of the functional and typological approach to language. Chiara Fedriani describes a patterned variation in Latin Experiential constructions, also revisiting the so-called impersonal constructions, and shows how and why such a variation is at the root of diachronic change. The data discussed in this book also show that Latin constitutes an interesting stage within a broader diachronic development, since it retains some ancient Indo-European features that gradually disappeared and went lost in the Romance languages.

Although the notion of procedural meaning is found in areas such as discourse markers, reference, tense, modality and intonation, until now there has been no single volume entirely devoted to it. Over 25 years, since the initial proposal by Blakemore, a number of refinements have been suggested, yet some criticisms have also been raised. The role and status of the conceptual / procedural distinction within a theory of human communication and the nature of procedural encoding were in need of reassessment in the light of current research in linguistic theory, cognitive science, experimental pragmatics and language acquisition. The papers collected here serve this general purpose from different standpoints. Some of them consider the topic from the angle of its theoretical foundations and put forth original proposals aimed at clarifying the most controversial issues. Others take a more data-driven orientation and offer novel analyses illustrating how encoded instructions work and how much can be gained from approaching certain linguistic phenomena in procedural terms. The contributions in this volume represent an inflection point in the delimitation and understanding of the notion of procedural meaning and open new paths for future research.

More emphasis is being placed on writing instruction in K-12 schools than ever before. With the growing number of digital tools in the classroom, it is important that K-12 teachers learn how to use these tools to effectively teach writing in all content areas. Digital Tools for Writing Instruction in K-12 Settings: Student Perceptions and Experiences will provide research about how students use digital tools to write, both in and out of school settings, as well as discuss issues and concerns related to the use of these learning methods. This publication is beneficial to educators, professionals, and researchers working in the field of K-12 and teacher education.

Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages-differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, 'weak' definiteness in Martinike and the special referring options made avilable by signing. Part Three examines the second-language acquisition of genericity in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language acquisition. Contributors include: Zeljko Boskovic, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Edit Doron, Nomi Erteschik Shir, Brigitte Garcia, Elaine Grolla, Tania Ionin, Loic Jean-Louis, Makoto Kaneko, Marika Lekakou, Silvina Montrul, Ana Muller, Asya Pereltsvaig, Marie-Anne Sallandre, Helade Santos, Serkan Sener, Rebekka Studler, Kriszta Szendroei, Anne Zribi-Hertz.

In this monograph, Caroline Laske traces the advent of consideration in English contract law, by analysing the doctrinal development, in parallel with the corresponding terminological evolution and semantic shifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an innovative, interdisciplinary study, showcasing the value of taking a diachronic corpus linguistics-based approach to the study of legal change and legal development, and the semantic shifts in the corresponding terminology. The seminal application in the legal field of these analytical methodologies borrowed from pragmatic linguistics goes beyond the content approach that legal research usually practices and it has allowed for claims of semantic change to be objectified. This ground-breaking work is pitched at scholars of legal history, law & language, and linguistics.

In Experiential Verbs in Homeric Greek:.A Constructional Approach Silvia Luraghi offers a comprehensive account of construction variation with two-place verbs belonging to different sub-domains of experience (including bodily sensation, perception, cognition, emotion and volitionality) in the Homeric language. Traditionally, variation is ascribed to the independent meaning of cases that mark the second argument, and explanations have focused on properties of the latter. By taking a constructional approach, the author shows that construction variation also brings about differences in the conceptualization of the subject/experiencer by pointing to different degrees of control and awareness. Variation is then shown to reflect the embodied construal of experience along with the social dimension of emotions.

This is the first cross-linguistic study of imperatives, and commands of other kinds, across the world's languages. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. The author discusses the role imperatives and commands play in human cognition and how they are deployed in different cultures, and in doing so offers fresh insights on patterns of human interaction and communcation.
Alexandra Aikhenvald examines the ways of framing commands, or command strategies, in languages that do not have special imperative forms. She analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of positive and negative imperatives and shows how these correlate with categories such as tense, information source, and politeness. She looks at the relation of command pragmatics to cultural practices, assessing, for example, the basis for Margaret Mead's assumption that the harsher the people the more frequently they use imperatives. Professor Aikhenvald covers a wide range of language families, including many relatively neglected examples from North America, Amazonia, and New Guinea. The book is accompanied by illustrations of some conventional command signs.
Written and presented with the author's characteristic clarity, this book will be welcomed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. It will appeal to social and cultural anthropologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists.

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to one of the world's leading and most influential linguists. Born in 1925, Halliday is the figure most responsible for the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics, into the study of stylistics, computation linguistics, visual narrative and multimodal communication. He is considered a founder of the field of social semiotics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of his early career, his most important theoretical findings and how his work has influenced linguistics as a discipline. From the publishers of his 'Collected Works' and 'The Essential Halliday', this is another must have book underlining Halliday's era-defining impact on the field of linguistics.

This book offers a comprehensive view of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of applicatives in Salish, a language family of northwestern North America. Applicative constructions, found in many polysynthetic languages, cast a semantically peripheral noun phrase as direct object. Drawing upon primary and secondary data from twenty Salish languages, the authors catalog the relationship between the form and function of seventeen applicative suffixes. The semantic role of the associated noun phrase and the verb class of the base are crucial factors in differentiating applicatives. Salish languages have two types of applicatives: relationals are formed on intransitive bases and redirectives on transitive ones. The historical development and discourse function of Salish applicatives are elucidated and placed in typological perspective.

A masterpiece in the art of clear and concise writing, and an exemplar of the principles it explains.

Laughter is pervasive in interaction yet often overlooked in the research. This volume presents a collection of original studies revealing the highly-ordered, complex, and important phenomenon of laughter in everyday interactions. Building on 40 years of conversation analytic research, the authors show how the design and placement of laughs contribute to unfolding sequences, social activities, identities, and relationships. In this revealing study leading experts investigate laughter in a range of different contexts and across a variety of languages. The research demonstrates that laughter is not simply a reaction to humour but is used in a fascinating array of different ways. Findings reported here include its use in clinics, employment interviews, news interviews, classrooms, the discourse of children with severe autism, and ordinary conversations. The acoustics of laughter and its relationship to movement, gaze and gesture are also explored. The volume brings together new and influential research into this phenomenon to present the state-of-the-art. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the study of interaction, conversation analysis, humour and laughter.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts and thinkers in stylistics. Stylistics is the study of the ways in which meaning is created and shaped through language, in literature and in other types of text. "Key Terms in Stylistics" provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the field, along with sections that explain relevant terms, concepts and key thinkers, listed from A to Z. The book comprises entries on different stylistic approaches to text, including feminist, cognitive, corpus and multimodal stylistics. There is coverage of key thinkers and their work as well as on central terms and concepts. It ends with a comprehensive bibliography of Key Texts. The book is written in an accessible manner, explaining difficult concepts in an easy to understand way. It will appeal to both beginner and upper-level students working in the interface between language and linguistics. The "Key Terms" series offers undergraduate students clear, concise and accessible introductions to core topics. Each book includes a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and texts in the area covered and ends with a guide to further resources.

A generic statement is a type of generalization that is made by asserting that a "kind" has a certain property. For example we might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the "kind" marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Almost all of our common sense knowledge about the everyday world is put in terms of generic statements. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are exceptions? A mass term is one that does not "divide its reference;" the word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. In a certain vicinity, one can count and identity how many dogs there are, but it doesn't make sense to do that for water--there just is water present. The philosophical literature is rife with examples concerning how a thing can be composed of a mass, such as a statue being composed of clay. Both generic statements and mass terms have led philosophers, linguists, semanticists, and logicians to search for theories to accommodate these phenomena and relationships.
The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume study the nature and use of generics and mass terms. Noted researchers in the psychology of language use material from the investigation of human performance and child-language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories, and to give credence to some of their earlier postulations--for instance, concerning different types of predications that are available for true generics and for the role of object recognitions in the development of count vs. mass terms. Relevant data also is described by investigating the ways children learn these sorts of linguistic items: children can learn how to sue generic statements correctly at an early age, and children are adept at individuating objects and distinguishing them from the stuff of which they are made also at an early age.

This book offers an introduction to the analysis of meaning. Our outstanding ability to communicate is a distinguishing features of our species. To communicate is to convey meaning, but what is meaning? How do words combine to give us the meanings of sentences? And what makes a statement ambiguous or nonsensical? These questions and many others are addressed in Paul Elbourne's fascinating guide. He opens by asking what kinds of things the meanings of words and sentences could be: are they, for example, abstract objects or psychological entities? He then looks at how we understand a sequence of words we have never heard before; he considers to what extent the meaning of a sentence can be derived from the words it contains and how to account for the meanings that can't be; and he examines the roles played by time, place, and the shared and unshared assumptions of speakers and hearers. He looks at how language interacts with thought and the intriguing question of whether what language we speak affects the way we see the world. Meaning, as might be expected, is far from simple. Paul Elbourne explores its complex issues in crystal clear language. He draws on approaches developed in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology - assuming a knowledge of none of them -in a manner that will appeal to everyone interested in this essential element of human psychology and culture.

First published in 2004, John Olsson's practical introduction to Forensic Linguistics has become required reading for courses on this new and expanding branch of applied linguistics. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, and includes new chapters on language in the justice system, forensic transcription, and expanded information on forensic phonetics. The book includes an appendix of forensic texts for student study, exercises and suggestions for further reading.This unique, hands-on introduction to Forensic Linguistics, based on Olsson's extensive experience as a practising forensic linguist, is essential reading for students, and researchers encountering this branch of applied linguistics for the first time.

This is the most comprehensive history of the Greek prepositional system ever published. It is set within a broad typological context and examines interrelated syntactic, morphological, and semantic change over three millennia. By including, for the first time, Medieval and Modern Greek, Dr Bortone is able to show how the changes in meaning of Greek prepositions follow a clear and recurring pattern of immense theoretical interest. The author opens the book by discussing the relevant background issues concerning the function, meaning, and genesis of adpositions and cases. He then traces the development of prepositions and case markers in ancient Greek (Homeric and classical, with insights from Linear B and reconstructed Indo-European); Hellenistic Greek, which he examines mainly on the basis of Biblical Greek; Medieval Greek, the least studied but most revealing phase; and Modern Greek, in which he also considers the influence of the learned tradition and neighbouring languages. Written in an accessible and non-specialist style, this book will interest classical philologists, as well as historical linguists and theoretical linguists.

Despite its centrality in mainstream linguistics, cognitive semantics has only recently begun to establish a foothold in biblical studies, largely due to the challenges inherent in applying such a methodology to ancient languages. The Semantics of Glory addresses these challenges by offering a new, practical model for a cognitive semantic approach to Classical Hebrew, demonstrated through an exploration of the Hebrew semantic domain of glory. The concept of 'glory' is one of the most significant themes in the Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God's self-disclosure in biblical revelation. This study provides the most comprehensive examination of the domain to date, mapping out its intricacies and providing a framework for its exegesis.

Our knowledge and understanding of organizations is both enabled and constrained by an invisible relationship of power that is embedded in the ways in which we act and speak. This book offers a succinct but comprehensive introduction to the vast field of organizational discourse analysis, the approach that studies organization as a linguistic phenomenon, and offers an original approach to investigate the relationship between materiality and discourse. Three original images of discourse are employed: discourse as a map, discourse as organizing and discourse as a mask. These metaphors are used as cognitive tools to highlight different implications and perspectives on discourse. The book critically compares and contrasts various linguistic-focused approaches to the study of organizations, and proposes the use of linguistic phenomena in connection with other methodologies. One section even offers an exemplification of the proposed approach to discourse analysis, presenting a map of discursive terrain, which plays a central role in the reproduction of local organizational and management discourses. This rich and approachable introduction is targeted at graduate and doctoral students, as well as non-specialist academics who want to familiarize themselves with the organizational discourse debate.