Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. The book presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (the `relative tense theory') and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a de se analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (e.g. so-called double-access sentences), which invokes de re attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs. Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.

This volume contains a collection of papers which deal with Romance linguistics from the perspective of discourse and interaction. Some contributions cover areas such as spoken corpora, speech and linguistic description, and phonetic aspects of speech. Others focus on multimodality, pragmatics, and conversation and discourse, and there are also contributions which deal with speech and sociolinguistics, and speech in multilingualism/bilingualism. This volume is multilingual, containing as it does contributions written in English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Renaissance England was marked by a pervasive culture of courtesy. The research hypothesis of this book is that verbal courtesy, for historical and social reasons involving social mobility and the crisis produced by the clash between different systems of thought (Humanism, Catholicism, Protestantism, new scientific discourses), soon became strategic language, characterised by specific forms of facework detectable through the patterns of politeness and impoliteness employed by speakers. Adopting a historical pragmatic perspective, Using the Devil with Courtesy semantically and conceptually connects courtesy and (im)politeness to analyse Renaissance forms of (im)politeness through Shakespeare. Drawing on a methodological line of research running from Goffman (1967) and Grice (1967), to Brown and Levinson (1987), Jucker (2010) and Culpeper (2011), the book focuses specifically on Hamlet (c. 1601) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594) with three principal aims: 1) to survey the (im)polite strategies used by the characters; 2) to explore how this language connects to a specific Renaissance subjectivity; 3) to link language and subjectivity to extra-textual (historical and semiotic) factors.

Hdi is a hitherto undescribed language spoken in northern Cameroon. The language belongs to the Central Branch of Chadic. The aim of the book is to provide a fairly complete description of the grammar of this language. Consequently, the grammar describes the phonology, morphology and syntax of Hdi and the semantic and discourse functions coded in this language. Most clauses in Hdi are verb-initial, with the subject directly following the verb. The object is often marked by a preposition. What makes Hdi unusual is that the object-marking preposition is unique and does not function elsewhere as a locative preposition. Another interesting feature of Hdi is that there are two types of clauses, pragmatically independent and pragmatically dependent, and that the difference between these is coded by different tense and aspectual systems. In addition, there are two clausal orders for complex sentences: The order embedded clause-matrix clause codes one type of modality, while the order matrix clause-embedded clause codes another. The language also has a rich system of verbal extensions coding the semantic roles of arguments and adjuncts and the direction of movement. The grammar is of interest not only to linguists working in African, Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics, but also to general linguists, since it describes phenomena rarely seen in other languages of the world. The grammar is described in terms accessible to linguists working within various theoretical frameworks.

Semantics of Chinese Questions is the first major study of Chinese questions, especially wh-questions, within the framework of Alternative Semantics. It takes an interface approach to study the syntax, semantics, and phonology of questions and proposes a phonological scope-marking strategy in Chinese questions, based upon experimental data. It also incorporates historical linguistic data regarding the grammaticalization of sentence-final particles such as -ne and -ma to study the formal diachronic semantics of questions. Primarily suitable for scholars in the field of Chinese linguistics, this book makes new theoretical contributions to the study of questions.

This book addresses intensification and modal necessity in Mandarin Chinese. Intensification is used in this book to describe the speaker's emphasis on a proposition, because, by emphasizing on a proposition, the speaker intensifies the degree of his/her confidence and affirmativeness toward the truth of a proposition, cf. the distinction between 'weaker' and 'stronger'. Modal necessity discussed in this book refers either to the speaker's certainty regarding the truth of an inference, judgment or stipulation, that is, epistemic necessity or to the speaker's certainty concerning the obligatoriness of a proposition, based on rules or regulations, i.e., deontic necessity. This book examines a series of lexical items in Mandarin Chinese that express either intensification or modal necessity, provides a unified semantics and also presents how these lexical items are semantically distinct. Intensification and Modal Necessity in Mandarin Chinese is aimed at instructors, researchers and post-graduate students of Chinese Linguistics.

When data consist of grouped observations or clusters, and there is a risk that measurements within the same group are not independent, group-specific random effects can be added to a regression model in order to account for such within-group associations. Regression models that contain such group-specific random effects are called mixed-effects regression models, or simply mixed models. Mixed models are a versatile tool that can handle both balanced and unbalanced datasets and that can also be applied when several layers of grouping are present in the data; these layers can either be nested or crossed. In linguistics, as in many other fields, the use of mixed models has gained ground rapidly over the last decade. This methodological evolution enables us to build more sophisticated and arguably more realistic models, but, due to its technical complexity, also introduces new challenges. This volume brings together a number of promising new evolutions in the use of mixed models in linguistics, but also addresses a number of common complications, misunderstandings, and pitfalls. Topics that are covered include the use of huge datasets, dealing with non-linear relations, issues of cross-validation, and issues of model selection and complex random structures. The volume features examples from various subfields in linguistics. The book also provides R code for a wide range of analyses.

Pragmatics - the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say - is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

Literary Semiotics brings much needed revitalization to the conservatism of modern semiotic theory. Scott Simpkins' revisionist work scrutinizes the conflicting views on sign theory to identify new areas of development in semiotic thought and practice, particularly in relation to literary theory. Focusing on the idea of semiotics as a "conversation" about sign theory and practice, Simpkins principally looks at the work of Umberto Eco, while giving secondary attention to some of semiotics' most influential commentators: including Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, and Derrida. As an engaged interrogation of the restraints on the practice of semiotics, Literary Semiotics is a provocative study for semioticians, literary theorists, and scholars of cultural studies and a resource for students seeking a probing examination of the theory of signs.

The Sociolinguistics Reader presents a state-of-the-art account of the discipline in the closing years of the twentieth century. Volume 2: Gender and Discourse in the first section looks at patterns of language variation, examining how gender identities are accomplished through language, and the importance of gender in accounting for language behaviour. Section II, meanwhile, examines the sociolinguistic issues surrounding discourse, with reference to the communication of affective meaning, conversational routines, grammaticalisation and language change, intertextuality, cross-cultural discourse patterns and their social implications.

This study analyzes the use of conceptual metaphors on Polish and American internet forums for mothers. In order to achieve these objectives, the author compiled a corpus consisting of ten thousand posts from Polish internet forums and ten thousand posts from American ones. The topics of threads were various, ranging from giving advice on breastfeeding to sex during pregnancy. The study contributes to a better understanding of online discussions - this issue has not been frequently investigated, especially from a comparative perspective.

Bringing together papers written by Norman Fairclough over a 25 year period, Critical Discourse Analysis represents a comprehensive and important contribution to the development of this popular field. The book is divided into seven sections covering the following themes: language in relation to ideology and power discourse in processes of social and cultural change dialectics of discourse, dialectical relations between discourse and other moments of social life methodology of critical discourse analysis research analysis of political discourse discourse in globalisation and transition critical language awareness in education The new edition has been extensively revised and enlarged to include a total of twenty two papers. It will be of value to researchers in the subject and should prove essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Linguistics and other areas of social science.

This book is a scholarly work of forensic linguistics that demonstrates how the principles of Gricean pragmatics and their recent elaboration in Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) can be of use to courts faced with deciding cases of allegedly fraudulent disclosure documents. The usual goal of legal rules for disclosure documents is not merely to prevent lying but other forms of deception as well. In particular, the goal of these rules is to force the communicator to reveal information that could cause material harm to certain receivers, harms that the communicator, for various reasons of self-interest, might prefer to keep secret or hidden. Because IMT and the Gricean framework have seldom been used in published studies to investigate legally mandated disclosure documents aimed at laypersons, this book seeks to enrich current explications of the rhetorical "workings" of deceptive disclosures within the broader Gricean tradition of pragmatics. The book questions the fundamental relationships among Grice's maxims as well as the much circulated notion that violation of some maxims is more deceptive and more immoral than violations of others. In addition, the book also attempts to show how various other theories and research in discourse linguistics and reading comprehension can be used to support IMT analyses in addressing the discourse processing issues unique to legally required disclosure texts. In this way the book contributes to the larger dual mission of the field of forensic linguistics, which is both to understand and to improve courts' impact on social justice.

Despite the undeniably impressive achievements of the EU, forms of resistance to the European integration process remain strong in numerous quarters. Drawing upon a theoretical framework centred on the dimension of discourse as social practice, this book takes the literature on EU discourse a step further by integrating insights from discourse studies with key models derived from the domain of political science. The aim is to explore how recent socio-political transformations have affected the way in which the EU discursively represents itself as a legitimate political entity. The idea behind this cross-disciplinary approach is that discourse theory can contribute to a critical renewal of EU studies by drawing attention to the rhetorical aspects that are constitutive of social structures and identities. The analytical parts of this corpus-assisted study explore the evolution of discursive practices in various EU genres at two disruptive moments in the recent history of European integration: the rejection of the draft EU Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands and the UK referendum on EU membership.

This book offers in-depth qualitative case studies of 70 acts of quoting verbatim performed by 16 US speakers across a range of public settings. While their written versions unequivocally index the other voice via quotation marks, the video data drawn from the internet largely lack any non-verbal cues. Contrary to expectation, the quotations' verbatimness is hardly ever translated into the gradient media: It neither stands out by vocal parameters (pauses, pitch, or intensity) when analyzed acoustically with Praat; nor are (manual) gestures, shift of gaze or body posture called on to serve as regular discriminating quoting practices. In general, the other voice is effectively found backgrounded, if not suppressed, in its oral performance, unless explicitly introduced by a digital quotative.

This book aims at bridging language research and language teaching and contains four sections. It opens with two papers which relate language to literature: one exploring childlike language, the second investigating the distinction between literary and non-literary text categorization principles. Next are the papers on multicultural and sociolinguistic topics, including a paper on English as an international language, and two papers on the perception of bilingualism in education. The third thematic section explores semantics, with two papers on prefixes and one on metaphor. The final thematic section is dedicated to syntax, with one paper on complex predicates, one on syntactic complexity in spontaneous spoken language and one of Croatian null and overt subject pronouns.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

The volume deals with the topic of illocutionary shell nouns in English, i.e. nouns that encapsulate a content that is usually expressed in a complement or in a separate sentence or clause, and report or characterize it as a specific speech act. The book reports a usage-based study of the complementation patterns in a corpus of 335 illocutionary nouns distributed across the five Searlean classes of assertive, commissive, directive, expressive, and declarative nouns. The investigation aims to verify the association between the meaning of these nouns and their complementation patterns, and between their semantic similarity and the similarity in the distribution of complementation patterns.

Knowledge and Self-Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus advances a new explanation for the apparent failure of the Theaetetus to come to a satisfactory conclusion about the definition of knowledge. Tschemplik argues that understanding this aporetic dialogue in light of the fact that it was conducted with two noted mathematicians shows that for Plato, mathematics was not the paradigm for philosophy. She points out that, although mathematics is clearly an important part of the philosopher's training, as the educational outline of the Republic makes clear, the point on which the mathematician falls short is the central role that self-knowledge plays in philosophical investigation. Theaetetus betrays this deficiency and is led by Socrates to an understanding of the benefits of self-knowledge understood as the knowledge of ignorance. Tschemplik concludes that it is the absence of self-knowledge in the Theaetetus which leads to its closing impasse regarding knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in the history of philosophy with a special interest in ancient philosophy, and will also be accessible to upper-level undergraduates in ancient philosophy.