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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds. In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience index of gustatory terms in both American and British English. The second part of the book is an overview of the metaphorical extensions that motivate the polysemy of Taste terms, with the aid of corpus analysis methods and various texts. This book is the first to review systematically and in a usage-based perspective the role of the sensory domain of Taste in English, showing a more complicated picture and suggesting that its under-representation and difficulty of encoding does not correspond to lack of importance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this book, Monika Bednarek addresses the need for a systemic analysis of television discourse and characterization within linguistics and media studies. She presents both corpus stylistics and manual analysis of linguistic and multimodal features of fictional television. The first part focuses on communicative context, multimodality, genre, audience and scripted television dialogue while the second part focuses on televisual characterization, introducing and illustrating the novel concept of expressive character identity. Aside from the study of television dialogue, which informs it throughout, this book is a contribution to studying characterization, to narrative analysis and to corpus stylistics. With its combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the book represents a wealth of exploratory, innovative and challenging perspectives, and is a key contribution to the analysis of television dialogue and character identity. The volume will be of interest to researchers and students in linguistics, stylistics and media/television studies, as well as to corpus linguists and communication theorists. The book will be a useful resource for lecturers teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in media discourse and related areas.

Studies on discourse and language learning originated in the field of general education and they focused on first language learning environments. However, since 1980s research on discourse and language learning broadened the scope of investigation to respond to second and foreign language environments. Recently, the emergence of new language learning contexts such as computer mediated communication, multilingual settings or content and language integrated contexts requires further research that focuses on discourse and language learning. From this perspective, the present volume aims to broaden the scope of investigation in foreign language contexts by exploring discourse patterns in the classroom and examining the impact of factors such as gender, explicitness of feedback or L1 use on language learning through discourse. With that aim in mind, this volume will bring together research that investigates discourse in various instructional settings, namely those of primary, secondary and university L2 learning environments, content and language integrated contexts and other new language learning settings. The number and variety of languages involved both as the first language (e.g. English, Finnish, Basque, Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian, Catalan) as well as the target foreign language (e.g. English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish) makes the volume specially attractive. Additionally, the different approaches adopted by the researchers participating in this volume, such as information processing, sociocultural theory, or conversation analysis, widen the realm of investigation on discourse and language learning. Finally, the strength of the volume also lies in the range of educational settings (primary, secondary and tertiary education) and the worldwide representation of contributors across seven different countries, namely those of Spain, France, Austria, Finland, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States. The uniqueness of the volume is due to its eclectic and comprehensive nature in tackling instructional discourse. Worldwide outstanding researchers, like Julianne House, Carme Munoz, Ute Smit, Tarja Nikula or Roy Lyster, to quote but a few, adopt different perspectives in this joint contribution that will certainly broaden the scope of research on language learners' discourse.

This volume gathers nine contributions dealing with Aorists and Perfects. Drinka challenges the notion of Aoristic Drift in Romance languages. Walker considers two emergent uses of the Perfect in British English. Jara seeks to determine the constraints on tense choice within narrative discourse in Peruvian Spanish. Henderson argues for a theory based on Langacker's 'sequential scanning' in Chilean and Uruguayan Spanish. Delmas looks at 'Ua in Tahitian, a polysemic particle with a range of aspectual and modal meanings. Bourdin addresses the expression of anteriority with just in English. Yerastov examines the distribution of the transitive be Perfect in Canadian English. Fryd offers a panchronic study of have-less perfect constructions in English. Eide investigates counterfactual present perfects in Mainland Scandinavian dialects.

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 book presents a portrait of actively engaged young people representing four linguistic minorities in Europe: the Kashubs (in Poland), the Upper Sorbs (in Germany), the Bretons (in France), and the Welsh (in the United Kingdom). In numerous statements cited in the book, drawn from interviews conducted by the author, young people speak for themselves and serve as guides to their minority cultures. They draw attention to the difficulties and challenges they encounter in their day-to-day life and activism. Based on their statements, the book examines the sociolinguistic situation of each of the minorities, the prevailing linguistic ideologies and the role of minority education; it also distinguishes different types of minority language speakers. The analysis focuses on the cultural and identity-forming practices of young people in the context of different forms of community life and their different pathways to becoming engaged representing their cultures and languages.

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.