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 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.

"Discourse and Politeness" examines Japanese institutional discourse and attempts to clarify the relationship between politeness, facework and speaker identity. The book seeks to establish an empirically grounded analysis of facework as the basis for evaluating politeness, and describes facework in delicate situations such as disagreement, teasing and talking about troubles, which have rarely been discussed in politeness studies.Insightful and cutting-edge, this research monograph will be of interest to researchers in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and Japanese language.

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.

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 some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists.

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.

Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics, this study, anchored in Cognitive Semantics, offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy's groundbreaking model of linguistic attention, applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly complex patterns of interaction, convergence, and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic recombination, from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity, another fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions, interlocutors, in production and reception, will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.

Silly rabbit Your argument is ill-founded.

Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed dose of old-school logic (really old-school, a la Aristotle).

Here are cogent explanations of the straw man fallacy, the slippery slope argument, the ad hominem attack, and other common attempts at reasoning that actually fall short plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of animals who (adorably) commit every logical faux pas. Rabbit thinks a strange light in the sky must be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (the appeal to ignorance). And Lion doesn t believe that gas emissions harm the planet because, if that were true, he wouldn t like the result (the argument from consequences).

Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to YouTube comments which makes this geek-chic book a must for anyone in the habit of holding opinions. It s the antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals "

John Hawthorne and David Manley present an original treatment of the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. In Part I, they argue against the idea that either is tied to a special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance. Part II challenges the alleged semantic rift between definite and indefinite descriptions on the one hand, and names and demonstratives on the other-a division that has been motivated in part by appeals to considerations of acquaintance. Drawing on recent work in linguistics and philosophical semantics, Hawthorne and Manley explore a more unified account of all four types of expression according to which none of them paradigmatically fits the profile of a referential term. On the preferred framework put forward in The Reference Book, all four types of expression involve existential quantification but admit of uses that exhibit many of the traits associated with reference-a phenomenon that is due to the presence of what Hawthorne and Manley call a 'singular restriction' on the existentially quantified domain. The book concludes by drawing out some implications of the proposed semantic picture for the traditional categories of reference and singular thought.

An engaging introduction to the study of spoken interaction, this book provides a thorough grounding in the theory and methodology of conversation analysis. It covers data collection, techniques for analysis and practical applications, and guides students through foundational and new research findings on everyday conversations and talk in institutional contexts, from media, business, and education to healthcare and law. Now thoroughly updated to showcase contemporary developments in the field, this second edition includes: * New chapters on interaction in psychotherapy, educational settings and language learning and teaching * Expanded coverage of doctor-patient communications, customer service and business meetings workplace interviews and online interactions, including social media, video gaming and livestreams * A wider variety of research on other languages, including French, German, Italian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Japanese * Multimodal analyses of interaction, focusing on the integration of embodied action and talk Complete with student activities, recommended reading sections and a companion website featuring slides, quiz questions, and links to further transcripts, this book is an essential guide for doing conversation analysis and offers fresh insight into how we understand talk.

This volume integrates new studies by leading researchers in sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, and cultural theory. It explores the many interfaces of body and discourse, organized under three main themes: the body as an interactional resource, ideological representations of the body, and discursive constructions of the body in normal and pathological contexts.

Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom-being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth-have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature, political theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of language, this book introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. This concept combats polarization by inspiring us to feel freer the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others. To say that freedom is dialogic is to apply to it an idea about language. If you and I are talking, I anticipate from you a response that could be friendly, hostile, or indifferent, and this awareness helps determine what I say. If you look bored or give me a blank stare, I might not say anything at all. In this sense language is dialogic. The same can be said of freedom. Our decisions take into account the voices of others to which we feel answerable, and these voices coauthor our choices. In today's polarized world, prevailing concepts of freedom as autonomy and enlightenment have encouraged us to take refuge in echo chambers among the like-minded. Whether the subject is abortion, terrorism, or gun control, these concepts encourage us to shut out the voices of those who dare to disagree. We need a new way to think about freedom. Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World presents riveting moments of choice from Homer's Iliad, Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Milton's Paradise Lost, Melville's "Benito Cereno," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," and Morrison's Beloved, in order to advocate reading for and with dialogic freedom. It ends with a practical application to the debate about abortion and an invitation to rethink other polarizing issues. For more information, please visit: http://dialogicfreedom.weebly.com/.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science provides a state-of-the-art volume on the language of scientific processes and communications. This book offers comprehensive coverage of socio-cultural approaches to science, as well as analysing new theoretical developments and incorporating discussions about future directions within the field. Featuring original contributions from an international range of renowned scholars, as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research, this handbook: identifies common objects of inquiry across the areas of rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication studies, science and technology studies, and public understanding of science; covers the four key themes of power, pedagogy, public engagement, and materiality in relation to the study of scientific language and its development; uses qualitative and quantitative approaches to demonstrate how humanities and social science scholars can go about studying science; details the meaning and purpose of socio-cultural approaches to science, including the impact of new media technologies; analyses the history of the field and how it positions itself in relation to other areas of study. Ushering the study of language and science toward a more interdisciplinary, diverse, communal and ecological future, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in this area.

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.

Reading, like any human activity, has a history. Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice. The text format in which thought has been presented to readers has undergone many changes in order to reach the form that the modern Western reader now views as immutable and nearly universal. This book explains how a change in writing--the introduction of word separation--led to the development of silent reading during the period from late antiquity to the fifteenth century.
Over the course of the nine centuries following Rome's fall, the task of separating the words in continuous written text, which for half a millennium had been a function of the individual reader's mind and voice, became instead a labor of professional readers and scribes. The separation of words (and thus silent reading) originated in manuscripts copied by Irish scribes in the seventh and eighth centuries but spread to the European continent only in the late tenth century when scholars first attempted to master a newly recovered corpus of technical, philosophical, and scientific classical texts.
Why was word separation so long in coming? The author finds the answer in ancient reading habits with their oral basis, and in the social context where reading and writing took place. The ancient world had no desire to make reading easier and swifter. For various reasons, what modern readers view as advantages--retrieval of reference information, increased ability to read "difficult" texts, greater diffusion of literacy--were not seen as advantages in the ancient world. The notion that a larger portion of the population should be autonomous and self-motivated readers was entirely foreign to the ancient world's elitist mentality.
The greater part of this book describes in detail how the new format of word separation, in conjunction with silent reading, spread from the British Isles and took gradual hold in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The book concludes with the triumph of silent reading in the scholasticism and devotional practices of the late Middle Ages.

Phi-features, such as person, number, and gender, present a rare opportunity for syntacticians, morphologists and semanticists to collaborate on a research enterprise in which they all have an equal stake and which they all approach with data and insights from their own fields. This volume is the first to attempt to bring together these different strands and styles of research. It presents the core questions, major results, and new directions of this emergent area of linguistic theory and shows how Phi Theory casts light on the nature of interfaces and the structure of the grammar. The book will interest scholars and students of all aspects of linguistic theory at graduate level and above.

First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of language constructs its 'object' by separating 'relevant' from 'irrelevant' phenomena - excluding the latter. This leaves a 'remainder' which consists of the untidy, creative part of how language is used - the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully recognised by any true account of language and thus this book attempts the first 'theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an analysis of how all speakers are 'violently' constrained in their use of language by social and psychological realties.

This book argues that many of the most prominent features of oral epic poetry in a number of traditions can best be understood as adaptations or stylizations of conversational language use, and advances the claim that if we can understand how conversation is structured, it will aid our understanding of oral traditions. In this study that carefully compares the "special grammar" of oral traditions to the "grammar" of everyday conversation as understood in the field of conversation analysis, Raymond Person demonstrates that traditional phraseology, including formulaic language, is an adaptation of practices in turn construction in conversation, such as sound-selection of words and prosody, and that thematic structures are adaptations of sequence organization in talk-in-interaction. From this he concludes that the "special grammar" of oral traditions can be understood as an example of institutional talk that exaggerates certain conversational practices for aesthetic purposes and that draws from cognitive resources found in everyday conversation. Person's research will be of interest to conversation analysts as well as literary scholars, especially those interested in ancient and medieval literature, the comparative study of oral traditions and folklore, and linguistic approaches to literature. This volume lays the groundwork for further interdisciplinary work bridging the fields of literature and linguistics.

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be 'absurd'. Moore calls it a 'paradox' that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers and other students of language, logic, and cognition. Ludwig Wittgenstein was fascinated by Moore's example, and the absurdity of Moore's saying was intensively discussed in the mid-20th century. Yet the source of the absurdity has remained elusive, and its recalcitrance has led researchers in recent decades to address it with greater care. In this definitive treatment of the problem of Moorean absurdity Green and Williams survey the history and relevance of the paradox and leading approaches to resolving it, and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area. Contributors Jonathan Adler, Bradley Armour-Garb, Jay D. Atlas, Thomas Baldwin, Claudio de Almeida, Andre Gallois, Robert Gordon, Mitchell Green, Alan Hajek, Roy Sorensen, John Williams

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.

In this methodologically innovative study, Eskin construes Levinas's ethical philosophy in conjunction with Bakhtin's philosophy of the act and metalinguistics, as an interpretative framework for making sense of Celan's dialogue with Mandel'shtam. In so doing, he develops a sophisticated mode of reading poetry--poethics--which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy, and opens new vistas on to the workings of European modernist and post-World War II poetry.

Using a linguistic point of view, The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception is a practical explanation of how confessions work, written by the "father of forensic linguistics", Roger W. Shuy. Using his 1993 benchmark work, Language Crimes as his model, Shuy examines criminal confessions, the interrogations that elicit them, and the deceptive language that plays a role in the confession event. He presents transcripts from numerous interrogations and analyzes how language is used, how constitutional rights are not protected, consistency and truthfulness, suggestibility, written confessions, as well as unvalidated confessions. He concludes the volume with explicit advice on how to conduct interrogations that will yield credible evidence. A landmark volume with cross-disciplinary applications, The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception is useful for professionals and academics in linguistics, forensic linguistics, criminal justice, communication, and interpersonal violence.