This book defends a version of linguistic idealism, the thesis that the world is a product of language. In the course of defending this radical thesis, Gaskin addresses a wide range of topics in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and syntax theory. Starting from the context and compositionality principles, and the idea of a systematic theory of meaning in the Tarski-Davidson tradition, Gaskin argues that the sentence is the primary unit of linguistic meaning, and that the main aspects of meaning, sense and reference, are themselves theoretical posits. Ontology, which is correlative with reference, emerges as language-driven. This linguistic idealism is combined with a realism that accepts the objectivity of science, and it is accordingly distinguished from empirical pragmatism. Gaskin contends that there is a basic metaphysical level at which everything is expressible in language; but the vindication of linguistic idealism is nuanced inasmuch as there is also a derived level, asymmetrically dependant on the basic level, at which reality can break free of language and reach into the realms of the unnameable and indescribable. Language and World will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and linguistics.

The activities in How to be Brilliant at Writing Poetry are open-ended and focus on the process of writing - from initial idea gathering to redrafting and the final product. They recognize that a sense of audience and a purpose for writing are crucial. The 40 photocopiable worksheets aimed at 7-11 year olds (KS2) pupils provide models for different forms of poetry. Activities include: finding a beginning, using words to paint a picture, making up similes and rhyming.

In North America, Africa, and across the globe, many societies are deeply divided along racial, ethnic, political, or religious lines as a result of violent/oppressive histories. Bridging such divides requires symbolic action that transcends, reframes, redeems, and repairs-often drawing upon resources of faith. Speaking to Reconciliation showcases this tradition through speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Ireland's President Mary McAleese, and others. Some of these speeches set forth principles or spiritual practices of reconciliation. Others acknowledge injustice, make apologies for historical wrongs, call for reparations, or commend the power of forgiveness. Speaking to Reconciliation presents a conceptual framework for doing analysis and critique of reconciliation discourse and applies this framework in introductions to the speeches, offering readers a springboard for further study and, potentially, inspiration to promote justice and reconciliation in their own spheres.

In North America, Africa, and across the globe, many societies are deeply divided along racial, ethnic, political, or religious lines as a result of violent/oppressive histories. Bridging such divides requires symbolic action that transcends, reframes, redeems, and repairs-often drawing upon resources of faith. Speaking to Reconciliation showcases this tradition through speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Ireland's President Mary McAleese, and others. Some of these speeches set forth principles or spiritual practices of reconciliation. Others acknowledge injustice, make apologies for historical wrongs, call for reparations, or commend the power of forgiveness. Speaking to Reconciliation presents a conceptual framework for doing analysis and critique of reconciliation discourse and applies this framework in introductions to the speeches, offering readers a springboard for further study and, potentially, inspiration to promote justice and reconciliation in their own spheres.

This book shows how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can benefit from the cooperation with a variety of other language-related disciplines, such as cognitive linguistics, appraisal theory, corpus stylistics and cultural studies. From different perspectives, each chapter will contribute to the understanding of the importance of corpus linguistics as an outstanding tool for the study of language, both alone and in combination with other academic and scientific disciplines.

Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and philosophy.

This book broadens the scope of the subject of rural education and enlivens the ways in which the subject may be studied. Through textual and visual analysis of a range of sources - including young adult novels, the farming simulation game 'Hay Day' and reality television programs - the contributors investigate how the lives of young people in rural spaces are mediated by a range of social locations including class, ethnicity and sexuality. Additionally, through rich and detailed ethnographic work, the book explores the complicated and multifaceted meanings of rural places and examines how these meanings shape experiences of schooling for teachers and students. In doing so, the book embeds the study of rural education in explorations of patrilineal inheritance on family farms, international migration, globalisation and economic restructuring. It aims to start a conversation about the robust and complex ways in which the confluence between 'rural' and 'education' may be imagined, experienced and researched. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research on metaphor and language. Featuring 35 chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume takes a broad view of the field of metaphor and language, and brings together diverse and distinct theoretical and applied perspectives to cover six key areas: Theoretical approaches to metaphor and language, covering Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Relevance Theory, Blending Theory and Dynamical Systems Theory; Methodological approaches to metaphor and language, discussing ways of identifying metaphors in verbal texts, images and gestures, as well as the use of corpus linguistics; Formal variation in patterns of metaphor use across text types, historical periods and languages; Functional variation of metaphor, in contexts including educational, commercial, scientific and political discourse, as well as online trolling; The applications of metaphor for problem solving, in business, education, healthcare and conflict situations; Language, metaphor, and cognitive development, examining the processing and comprehension of metaphors. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Metaphor is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in language and metaphor.

"The contributors to the volume, coming from different areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, address several timely and important issues that bring together richly diverse perspectives and advance current debates in a range of fields, by carefully decoding literary texts covering a large timespan, as well as political discourse, the discourse of advertising, the discourse of education, and transpersonal discourse." -Professor Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Every transdisciplinary study on voyage and/or emotion will offer new insights into the multifarious facets of these two concepts. Taking a sociolinguistic turn, this volume prompts the audience to cross the borders of a variety of genres in order to discover new strands of thought. While the first part highlights the multiple facets of the voyage as initiatory journey, as a quest for an existence code, as a spiritual passage that the traveller experiences in search for the Self or for the Other, the second part of the volume seeks to address the temporality and spatiality of emotions, the ideological dimension of the public and private space, outlining at the same time the perception of the voyage as an intercultural and interlinguistic exchange.

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.

This book provides a summary of Radical Minimalism, putting forth a neurocognitively implementable theory of grammar as I-language. Radical Minimalism tries to give a 'fully explicit' description of syntactic structures mapped into cognitive frames of thought. It focuses on the division of labor between Narrow Syntax and Meaningful Units of the sentence and also on the role of Mental Lexicon (understood as a selection of Roots and Labels), the Labeling Mechanism, and the participation of the Senso-Motoric and Conceptual-Intentional Interfaces within a Crash-proof Grammar of Human Language. The data are taken from the languages of different genetic origins and types. The book is based on the idea that language and thought are closely connected and must be studied within the physical laws of the Anti-Entropy and Dynamical Frustration theory. Peter Kosta's new book touches on an exceptional range of subjects in theoretical syntax and the philosophy of grammar, bearing ample proof of his lifelong engagement with these vital disciplines within the humanities of the 20th/21st centuries. His acute awareness of important insights and discussions in current day minimalism is evident from every page, informing his treatment of a wide diversity of problems in the morphosyntax of Slavic languages and beyond. (Jan-Wouter Zwart, University of Groningen) This book provides a breath of fresh air in linguistic theorising by combining empirically based syntactic innovations with original discussions of long-standing semantic puzzles and a revised architecture of the Faculty of Language. Foundational notions in generative theory are thoroughly revised in the light of detailed comparative analyses. This remarkable work represents the culmination of years of research on what meaning is, how it is structured, and to what extent syntax encodes meaning. (Diego Gabriel Krivochen, University of Verona)

The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between an institutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These roles dictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collected volume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a range of methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-and using as data not just medical, legal, and educational environments, but also less-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism (i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing.
An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issues as: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discourse function; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degree to which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; and how questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and to serve the institutional goals of speakers.
Why Do You Ask? will appeal to linguists and others interested in institutional discourse, as well as those interested in the grammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.

Today's leading theories of meaning, chiefly those of Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, depend crucially upon Gottlob Frege's distinctions between sense and reference, sense and utterance-force, and sense and tone. But while the notions of reference, sense, and force have dominated the discussion, the subtle workings of tone have received scant attention. Long overdue, this is the first comprehensive study of tone. Careful analysis of the more than two dozen varieties identified by Frege and Dummett reveals serious weaknesses in their explanatory framework. The author sketches a broader conception in terms of speakers correctly making things out to be a certain way, a formulation that avoids the demonstrated shortcomings of Fregean truth-conditional accounts while capturing the representational character of meaning as this applies right across the language-not only to words and sentences, but to discreet linguistic components such as word-order, mood of the verb, and patterns of intonation and stress.

This title explores the roles and discursive strategies that politicians enact in political discourse in order to achieve their specific goals. Politicians enact three main roles in political discourse - narrator, interlocutor and character - to achieve specific goals. This book explains these roles and how they constitute discursive strategies, correlating with political aims. In short, politicians evoke voices in discourse to strategically position themselves in relation to social actors and events. The book describes these strategies and analyzes the manner in which they are employed by three very different politicians - Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and George W. Bush. The roles are studied cross-culturally and from different ideological backgrounds. This book explains how political ideologies are constructed, defined and redefined by linguistic means, showing specific ways in which politicians manipulate language to achieve the goals on their political agenda. It applies new methodological approaches to the analysis of political discourse and also contributes to the sparse literature on political discourse analysis of Spanish-speaking politicians.

Der mit der Digitalisierung der Kommunikation einhergehende Wandel von Kommunikations- und Medienkulturen beeinflusst die Produktionsbedingungen und den Rezeptionsrahmen von Texten sowie kommunikative Praktiken und kommunikatives Handeln. Um kommunikative Praktiken zu vollziehen und kommunikatives Handeln möglichst effektiv zu gestalten, entstehen vielfältige diskursive Kommunikationsräume, in denen mediale Akteure zu verschiedenen Zwecken miteinander agieren. Mit der Verlagerung der kommunikativen Praktiken in die digitale Welt kommt es zur Verlinkung von Texten zu Diskursen, die multisemiotisch und multimedial geprägt und auf Interaktion ausgerichtet sind. Dieses Buch ist solchen diversen textuellen und diskursiven Erscheinungsformen der massenmedialen Kommunikation gewidmet, die auf der Grundlage erschlossener Textkorpora interdisziplinär untersucht werden. Gegenstand der breit gefächerten Diskussion sind hier einzelne Texte und zusammenhängende Textformate in verschiedenen Medien sowie diskursiv organisierte Textwelten diverser multimodaler und -medialer Ausgestaltung.

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication? Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

This book documents changes and trends in English predicate complementation. In-depth case studies of grammatical patterns presented here uncover new links between form and meaning in these constructions, offering fresh insights into explanatory principles to account for variation and change in the system of English predicate complementation.

A major premise of this book is that language use is critically conditioned by affective content and cognitive factors rather than being a case of objective computation and manipulation of structures. The 21 chapters of this book deals with how language interacts with emotion, and with mind and cognition, from both intralingual and cross-linguistic perspectives. The second major focus is the theoretical framework, best-suited for research relationships between language, cognition, and emotion as well as the effect that emotion has on the conceptualizer who constructs meanings based on language stimuli. Furthermore, the authors investigate how emotion and rational projections of events interact and what their consequences are in the conceptual world, media discourse, and translation.

Like many other human activities, translation is related to different forms of power. It can be the ability to control and set the rules. With written translations of significant works of culture, it has often been the powerholders who supported and promoted or impeded them, depending on their own preferences or their understanding of the actual sociopolitical needs. The powerholders in question are individual or collective decision-makers at various levels of the sociopolitical hierarchy who determine policies and allocate funds for approved projects. This book focuses on the possiblities of various approches to translation and power as a research topic within Translation Studies.

This is the first textbook that approaches natural language semantics and logic from the perspective of Discourse Representation Theory, an approach which emphasizes the dynamic and incremental aspects of meaning and inference. The book has been carefully designed for the classroom. It is aimed at students with varying degrees of preparation, including those without prior exposure to semantics or formal logic. Moreover, it should make DRT easily accessible to those who want to learn about the theory on their own. Exercises are available to test understanding as well as to encourage independent theoretical thought. The book serves a double purpose. Besides a textbook, it is also the first comprehensive and fully explicit statement of DRT available in the form of a book. The first part of the book develops the basic principles of DRT for a small fragment of English (but which has nevertheless the power of standard predicate logic). The second part extends this fragment by adding plurals; it discusses a wide variety of problems connected with plural nouns and verbs. The third part applies the theory to the analysis of tense and aspect. Many of the problems raised in Parts Two and Three are novel, as are the solutions proposed. For undergraduate and graduate students interested in linguistics, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Suitable for students with no previous exposure to formal semantics or logic.

This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.

This book offers an interdisciplinary conversation on utopia clustered around cultural and communication practises in terms of political and ethical projects. It sheds light on cultural and discursive aspects characterising the polysemous concept of utopia conceived as an ongoing process that is put into practice in the present. Against this backdrop, the book raises questions for intellectual work, seeks out an enlightening breach in academic field boundaries, invites a revision of the forms of knowledge production, and encourages pedagogical actions for the development of critical thinking.

The topic of the book is the relationship between mind and language on all levels of linguistic research. Over the past decade, the cognitive approach to language and its methodology have started to permeate other areas of linguistic study, which, in turn, is opening up room for new types of research and resulting in new knowledge that contributes to explaining not only the linguistic phenomena, but also how they function in a linguistic community and contemporary society. The book tries to reflect these new developments. It consists of 11 chapters organized into three thematic sections: language and mind from linguistic perspective, the language and mind of the translator, and language and mind from the teacher's perspective.