Drawing ideas from the works of George Herbert Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and the American pragmaticism philosophers, Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions: Essays in Interactionist Sociology argues that the verbal interactions of human agents are characterized by addresses and rejoinders, which Bakhtin called dialogues. These moves conform to what Burke called dramatism. Robert Perinbanayagam uses examples both from dramatic literature and everyday conversations to demonstrate how everyday interactions are inescapably dramas, conducted through the use of dialogues in order to promote mutual understanding. Along with analyzing the dialogues themselves, the author also examines what comes to play in these interactions and shows the various consequences of these emotionalities in ongoing human relationships.

This compilation of invited contributions, gathering an international collection of cognitive and functional linguists, offers an outline of original empirical work carried out in grounding theory. Grounding is a central notion in cognitive grammar that addresses the linking of semantic content to contextual factors that constitute the subjective ground (or situation of speech). The volume illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to constructions establishing deixis and reference. It proposes a double focus on nominal and clausal grounding, as well as on ways of integrating analyses across these domains.

This volume aims to showcase research as to the study of perspectivization in English language academic articles in the field of tourism. A key aspect of this study is the way in which writers elaborate and organize information following their editorial traditions. Interestingly, complete scientific articles in the field have not received much scholarly attention. A first task, therefore, that this book undertakes is the characterization of the article in terms of unctional stages, according to a framework of functional linguistics. The methodology also involves the use of corpus linguistics tools to analyze linguistic stance devices and to draw data for their illustration. These linguistic stance strategies are examined by genre stage to highlight possible variation in these stages. The results of this research hopefully would impact on the study of specialized English for tourism and on the design of new teaching materials.

This volume explores the discursive nature of post-1989 social change in Central and Eastern Europe. Through a set of national case studies, the construction of post-communist transformation is explored from the point of view of accelerating and unique dynamics of linguistic and discursive practices.

One of the central issues in modern linguistics has been the relationship between syntax and semantics. Within the framework of generative grammar, established by Chomsky in the early 1960s, it has been assumed that syntax is distinct from, and independent of, semantics. This premise has been challenged recently by Chomsky himself; he now proposes semantics, and in particular thematic roles, as the basis for generating syntactic structures. Yael Ravin argues that thematic roles are not valid semantic entities, and that syntax and semantics are indeed autonomous and independent of one another. She advocates a Decompositional approach to lexical semantics, in the spirit of Katz's semantic theory. In the course of her argument she discusses theoretical issues such as indeterminacy and ambiguity, lexical configuration rules, and lexical projection, and analyses the semantic content of event concepts such as causation, action, and change.

Brian Loar (1939-2014) was an eminent and highly respected philosopher of mind and language. He was at the forefront of several different field-defining debates between the 1970s and the 2000s-from his earliest work on reducing semantics to psychology, through debates about reference, functionalism, externalism, and the nature of intentionality, to his most enduringly influential work on the explanatory gap between consciousness and neurons. Loar is widely credited with having developed the most comprehensive functionalist account of certain aspects of the mind, and his 'phenomenal content strategy' is arguably one of the most significant developments on the ancient mind/body problem. This volume of essays honours the entirety of Loar's wide-ranging philosophical career. It features sixteen original essays from influential figures in the fields of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including those who worked with and were taught by Loar. The essays are divided into three thematic sections covering Loar's work in philosophy of language, especially the relations between semantics and psychology (1970s-80s), on content in the philosophy of mind (1980s-90s), and on the metaphysics of intentionality and consciousness (1990s and beyond). Taken together, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the leading minds of the latter-20th century, and a timely reflection on Loar's enduring influence on the philosophy of mind and language.

This work supplies a concrete definition of Corporate Public Discourse, an idea that has always lacked true character. It explores how leading corporations use their own special language to define their cultures. The authors take this language, once considered a mere embellishment of speech, and use it to explore the inner workings of world-renowned organizations. This book bridges the gap between organizational studies and linguistics by analysing the communications of today's top companies. The book describes a weekly Saturday morning meeting at Wal-Mart, evaluates IBM's commitment to success, and looks into the social role of high-calibre CEOs. Broken into seven parts, including management, media, and analysis, the study efficiently frames the importance of corporate communication.

This volume aims to provide information about and interpretations of the concept of evidentiality lexically realized with certain verbs and applied to the genre of medical posters. More specifically, issues relating to how knowledge is conveyed through language will be discussed and how evidence for such knowledge is linguistically transmitted in a set of specialised texts. This study uses some of the possibilities offered by electronic corpora in conjunction with concordance tools, which allow quantitative analysis. Thanks to this quantitative analysis, followed by a qualitative interpretation of the findings, we could detect the pragmatic function these evidential items have in contextual use, allowing us to see that evidentiality in medical discourse is intended in a slightly different way from general discourse.

This book is a collection of papers by leading researchers in computational semantics. It presents a state-of-the-art overview of recent and current research in computational semantics, including descriptions of new methods for constructing and improving resources for semantic computation, such as WordNet, VerbNet, and semantically annotated corpora. It also presents new statistical methods in semantic computation, such as the application of distributional semantics in the compositional calculation of sentence meanings. Computing the meaning of sentences, texts, and spoken or texted dialogue is the ultimate challenge in natural language processing, and the key to a wide range of exciting applications. The breadth and depth of coverage of this book makes it suitable as a reference and overview of the state of the field for researchers in Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Intelligence. "

Fringe Rhetorics: Conspiracy Theories and the Paranormal identifies these rhetorical similarities of conspiracy theories and paranormal accounts by delving into rhetorical, psychosocial, and political science research. Identifying something as "fringe" indicates its proximal placement within accepted norms of contemporary society. Both conspiracy theories and paranormal accounts dwell on the fringes and both use surprisingly similar persuasive techniques. Using elements of the Aristotelian canon as well as Oswald's strengthening and weakening strategies, this book establishes a pattern for the analysis of fringe rhetorics. It also applies this pattern through rhetorical analyses of several documentaries and provides suggestions for countering fringe arguments.

The primary objective of this study is to propose a comparative analysis of the political TV interview with reference to two distinct approaches: the theory of discourse (dialogue) games (Carlson 1983), an extension of game-theoretical semantics (GTS) as proposed by Jaakko Hintikka, specifically his strategic paradigm (1973, 1979, 2000), and the strategic perspective adopted by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff (1991, 2010 for business games with roots in the mathematical theory of games). Text-forming strategies utilised by the selected British and Polish political figures have been presented and the strategic repertoire of politicians have been systematised following the five master strategies of: cooperation, co-opetition, conflict/competition, manipulation and persuasion.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism. Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy project, the book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the "twilight of neoliberalism" (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, the book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions, and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate. Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics.

This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary novels, the contributed chapters combine literary studies with corpus linguistics to analyse fantasy, romance, crime, historical and science fiction in French and English. The authors offer new insights into long-standing debates on genre distinction and the hybridization of genres by deploying a new, interdisciplinary methodology. Sitting at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a firm grounding in the digital humanities, this book will be of particular relevance to literary scholars, corpus stylists, contrastivists and lexicologists, as well as general readers with an interest in twentieth-century genre fiction.

This book provides a research-driven discussion of how the epistemic potential of multilingual writing strategies can be conceptualized, investigated, and leveraged in higher education. Research results are reported from an intervention study in two discipline-specific, writing-intensive HE content courses. The study triangulates survey data with think-aloud & screen-recording data and with product data in a pre/post design. Based on the research findings, the book details a multilingual teaching framework in which a translanguaging approach is enhanced with instructional practices from translation training.

The Oxford Reader offers a renewed emphasis on more traditional forms of literacy-sustained reading, writing, and thinking-which comes at a particularly urgent moment. In a world of alternative facts and fake news, the importance of a well and deeply educated citizenry is reinvigorated. Even within the multimodal classroom, many instructors have continued to introduce (or reintroduce) the modes to employ readings that direct students to read carefully, to respond and argue cogently and accountably, and to become nimble and ready writers, no matter what they're writing. The Oxford Reader distinguishes itself by offering not only an expected mix of classic and contemporary selections, but also a variety of genres to emphasize nonfiction, without excluding some literary works and prominent pieces from blogs and other online sources. This spectrum of voices, genres, and time periods illustrate that what is considered contemporary thinking often has its roots elsewhere.

Among the most prolifically treated topics in grammaticalization approaches to semantic change is the development of periphrastic past constructions, particularly the 'have'-perfects in Romance and other Indo-European languages. This issue is an intriguing one for language researchers since it offers the opportunity to observe language change both as an incipient process that involves the transition of some lexical element into a more 'grammatical' role as well as a process of semantic generalization without the necessity of overt structural reorganization. This book explores the development of the periphrastic past (or preterito perfecto compuesto) in Spanish, with special attention to its cross-dialectal distribution vis-a-vis the simple perfective past (or preterito), and assumes a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing on insights from semantic and pragmatic as well as sociolinguistic approaches to language change. The resulting proposals, developed on the basis of spoken language data from cross-dialectal samples of Spanish, address the nature of language change and the variable forces that shape it.