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.

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.

Essays in Modern Stylistics, first published in 1981, is a collection of essays in the application of modern linguistic theory to the study of literature. The essays reflect the development in stylistics away from programmic statements towards analysis of particular literary works and effects. This selection includes studies of the theory of stylistics, linguistic approaches to the poetry of John Keats, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, modern metrical theory and prose style. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.

All around the world women are presidents and prime ministers, yet in America, we have yet to elect the first woman president. When Barack Obama accepted the nomination as the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, the media were quick to point out that Hillary Clinton lost. Yet Clinton won almost 18 million votes and was the first front- runner woman candidate. Almost Madam President: Why Hillary Clinton 'Won' in 2008 argues that Hillary Clinton gained more than she lost in her bid for the presidency. This book takes the reader on a rhetorical journey through Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, focusing on Clinton's sophisticated 'You Tube' style announcement speech, the debates, and the many notable stump speeches and media events on the campaign trail. Along the way Gutgold examines the obstacles and opportunities of women as presidential candidates.

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.

This volume contains papers which reflect current discussions in the study of speech actions. The collection was inspired by the papers presented at Meaning, Context and Cognition, the first international conference integrating cognitive linguistics and pragmatics initiated by the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics of the University of Lodz (Poland) in 2011 and held annually. The necessarily heterogeneous field of research into speech actions is approached by the contributors from various perspectives and with focus on different types of data. The papers have been grouped into four sections which subsequently emphasise theoretical linguistics issues, lexical pragmatics, speech act-theoretic problems, and cognitive processes.

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.

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.

This is the first book on Japanese rhetorical style and strategy ever made available for English readers. Professor Maynard presents, in thirty entries, clear explication of Japanese discourse organization and detailed analysis of the rhetorical strategies used. Also included are practice readings selected from contemporary Japanese discourse, including essays, newspaper columns, a short story, a comic and an advertisement, with translations and wordlists. A helpful self-study guide, it is also an excellent reference source for students and instructors of Japanese.

A Rhetoric and Philosophy of Gifts synthesizes a scope of rhetorical and philosophical perspectives of the gift. Eberhardinger asks "What is the relationship between gifts and rhetoric?" She contextualizes the question throughout a review of related literature, analysis, examples, and personal anecdotes of overseas experiences. Eberhardinger concludes the book by offering implications and opportunities for interpreting gifts, thereby addressing why the question concerning the relationship between gifts and rhetoric matters for the larger landscape of international relations, intercultural friendship, and peace-making. Scholars of communication, rhetoric, and philosophy will find this book particularly interesting.

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)

Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) is a growing field in which discipline-based academics, writing developers, and learning technologists collaborate to help students succeed as subject specialists. This book places WiD in its theoretical and cultural contexts and reports on initiatives taking place at a range of UK higher education institutions. Also includes surveys of current developments and scholarship in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, making it of interest to both a UK and an international audience.

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.

Over the past century, the explosive growth of scientific, technical, and cultural disciplines has profoundly affected our daily lives. However, processes of enculturation in sites such as graduate education that have helped to form these disciplines have received very limited research attention. In those sites, graduate students write diverse documents, including course papers, departmental examinations, theses and dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, and disciplinary publications. Thus, writing is one of the central domains of enculturation--an activity through which graduate students and professors display and negotiate disciplinary knowledge, genres, identities, and institutional contexts. This volume explores this intersection of writing and disciplinary enculturation through a series of ethnographic case studies. These case studies provide the most thorough descriptions available today of the lived experience of graduate seminars, combining analysis of classroom talk, students' texts and professor's written responses, institutional contexts, students' representations of their writing and its contexts, and professors' representations of their tasks and their students. Given the complexities that the ethnographic data displayed, the author found that conventional notions of writing as a process of transcription and of disciplines as unified discourse communities were inadequate. As such, this book also offers an in-depth exploration of sociohistoric theory in relation to writing and disciplinary enculturation. Specific case studies introduce, apply, and further elaborate notions of: * writing as literate activity, * authorship as mediated by other people and artifacts, * classroom tasks as speech genres, * enculturation as the interplay of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, and * disciplinarity as a deeply heterogeneous, laminated, and dialogic process. This blend of research and theory should be of interest to scholars and students in such fields as writing studies, rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, applied linguistics, English for academic purposes, science and technology studies, higher education, and the ethnography of communication.

"English: One Language, Different Cultures" is an introduction to culturally determined aspects of communicating in British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and American societies. The focus is on effective communication with members of these societies, especially on correcting false stereotypes which may cause misunderstandings. The second edition of this popular textbook has been fully revised and updated throughout. A new chapter on New Zealand has been added, along with maps, exercises and suggestions for further reading. This is the essential textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students of language, culture and communication, future English language teachers, as well as translators and interpreters, who deal with texts originating from various English speaking countries.

This book is the first comparative study of the syntax of Arabic dialects, based on natural language data recorded in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Kuwait. These four dialect regions are geographically diverse and representative of four distinct dialect groups.

Kristen E. Brustad has adopted an analytical approach that is both functional and descriptive, combining insights from discourse analysis, language typology, and pragmatics -- the first time such an approach has been used in the study of spoken Arabic syntax. An appendix includes sample texts from her data.

Brustad's work provides the most nuanced description available to date of spoken Arabic syntax, widens the theoretical base of Arabic linguistics, and gives both scholars and students of Arabic tools for greater cross-dialect comprehension.

We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chavez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech.In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between "competing discourses", stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.

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.

Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider: exigency that brings people together; a sense of agency and capacity; a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena. Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called "service" organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy. Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts. But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed"

The volume discusses a multitude of ways in which CALL can serve to develop and support broadly conceived issues-of background in language education. The individual chapters explore a number of areas in which CALL techniques and tools enhance language instruction. The issues reported on comprise working with mature language learners, developing civic education, ICT affordances for ESP, professional training for translators, interpreters and crowdsourcing opportunities. Other contributions center around CALL-related resources, CAPT metacompetence and blended-learning paradigms as well as exploring cultural and linguistic issues in online exchanges.

The volume comprises papers that were presented at the 14th European conference on "Formal Description of Slavic Languages 10.5" at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. The conference focuses on formal approaches to Slavic phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The present contributions describe interesting data patterns found in Slavic languages and analyze them from the perspective of formal grammar, including generative syntax, Distributed Morphology, formal semantics and others.

The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, by Dalia Gavriely-Nuri opens a window to how Israelis talk, write, and think about war. In the post-World War II period, Israel has taken part in eight wars, more than almost any other western democracy. In addition to "official" wars, Israel has experienced two Intifadas and repetitive long periods of bombings of its border-settlements. This book argues that such an intensive involvement in military actions provides a natural arena for a uniquely fertile war discourse. Gavriely-Nuri identifies a special war discourse: a "war-normalizing discourse" (WND). WND as a set of linguistic, discursive, and cultural devices aims at blurring the anomalous character of war by transforming it into an event perceived as "natural"- a "normal" part of life. Moreover, the WND is served as a unique rhetorical compass and illuminates one basic organizing principle underlying the Israeli war discourse. WND has been in use throughout Israel's history, in periods of war as well as in periods of relative peace. It has become a fundamental part of the Israeli public discourse concerning both peace and war and an integral part of Israeli identity. The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, is an essential investigation into how nations use rhetoric and tactical discourse to normalize their conflicts.