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.

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)

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.

In this book, Amos Kiewe explores the story of the 1824 Presidential election, when the House of Representatives elected the president after no candidate won outright the majority of the Electoral College. Though most in the nation assumed that Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote and the plurality of the Electoral College, would be elected the presidency by the House, Kiewe demonstrates how maneuvering, vote trading, and special favors dictated a different outcome. Through inspecting speeches, statements, private letters, and published accounts, Kiewe simultaneously intersects rhetoric, history, and politics as variables that help to tell the story of the 1824 presidential election. Scholars of communication, political science, and history will find this book of particular interest.

In recent years, text and media linguistics have focused on genres in the new media. This is almost always accompanied by the question of the establishment and development of such content. Due to the diversity of genres and their dynamic development one can speak of an almost inexhaustible field of research. The book is located in this field of research. Its goal is to examine the origin and nature of readers' comments by readers of French and English popular science magazines. Media content is dissected by using text linguistic tools. Transmedial cultures are explored across time, platforms, languages, and editing houses.

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.

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.

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

This volume is the first book-length collection of studies on the assessment of pragmatic competencies in a second or foreign language. Grounded in theoretical perspectives on communicative and interactional competencies, the first section of the book examines the reception and production of speech acts through a variety of assessment methods and a range of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The second section investigates interviewer and candidate interaction in different forms of oral proficiency interview.

This book presents a portrait of actively engaged young people representing four linguistic minorities in Europe: the Kashubs (in Poland), the Upper Sorbs (in Germany), the Bretons (in France), and the Welsh (in the United Kingdom). In numerous statements cited in the book, drawn from interviews conducted by the author, young people speak for themselves and serve as guides to their minority cultures. They draw attention to the difficulties and challenges they encounter in their day-to-day life and activism. Based on their statements, the book examines the sociolinguistic situation of each of the minorities, the prevailing linguistic ideologies and the role of minority education; it also distinguishes different types of minority language speakers. The analysis focuses on the cultural and identity-forming practices of young people in the context of different forms of community life and their different pathways to becoming engaged representing their cultures and languages.

Although the scarcity of public intellectuals among today's academic professionals is certainly a cause for concern, it also serves as a challenge to explore alternative, more subtle forms of political intelligence. Letters to Power accepts this challenge, guiding readers through ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of learned advocacy in search of persuasive techniques, resistant practices, and ethical sensibilities for use in contemporary democratic public culture. At the center of this book are the political epistles of four renowned scholars: the Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger, the late-medieval feminist Christine de Pizan, the key Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, and the Christian anti-philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Anticipating much of today's online advocacy, their letter-writing helps would-be intellectuals understand the economy of personal and public address at work in contemporary relations of power, suggesting that the art of lettered protest, like letter-writing itself, involves appealing to diverse, and often strictly virtual, audiences. In this sense, Letters to Power is not only a nuanced historical study but also a book in search of a usable past.

After everything that's happened, how is it possible that conservatives still win debates about the economy? Time and again the right wins over voters by claiming that their solutions are only common sense, even as their tired policies of budgetary sacrifice and corporate plunder both create and prolong economic disaster. Why does the electorate keep buying what they're selling? According to political communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio, it's all about language,and not just theirs, but ours.In Don't Buy It Shenker-Osorio diagnoses our economic discourse as stricken with faulty messages, deceptive personification, and, worst of all, a barely coherent concept of what the economy actually is. Opening up the business section of most newspapers or flipping on cable news unleashes an onslaught of economic doomsaying that treats the economy as an ungovernable force of nature. Alternately, by calling the economy unhealthy" or recovering" as we so often do, we unconsciously give it the status of a living being. No wonder Americans become willing to submit to any indignity required to keep the economy happy. Tread lightly, we can't risk irritating the economy!Cutting through conservative myth-making, messaging muddles, and destructive misinformation, Shenker-Osorio suggests a new way to win the most important arguments of our day. The left doesn't have to self-destruct every time matters economic come to the fore,there are metaphors and frames that can win, and Shenker-Osorio shows what they are and how to use them. Don't Buy It is a vital handbook for seizing victory in the economic debate. In the end, it convincingly shows that radically altering our politics and policies for the better is a matter of first changing the conversation,literally.

This book explores the ways in which professional groups develop specific interactional procedures for conducting and representing their activities, all of which contribute to a distinctive collaborative identity. It highlights the drawbacks as well as the advantages of collaborative talk, pointing to ways of improving professional performance. Its investigation of topics such as identity, argument, narrative, and metaphor means that it should appeal to researchers outside the fields of applied linguistics and professional communication, for whom it is primarily intended.

This book provides a stylistic and cognitive poetic account of ekphrastic poetry (poetry whose subject matter is predominantly artworks and images), examining the linguistic processes through which works of art can become literary objects. The author sheds light on the workings of ekphrasis at a textual level, while also considering the cognitive and psychological effects of reading ekphrastic poems, developing cognitive and stylistic analytical frameworks grounded on the four principles that govern ekphrasis: representation, narrativization, transposition, and collaboration. This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners in various fields, including literary critics, art critics, rhetoricians, poets, visual artists, and stylisticians.

The semantic behavior of words has been greatly neglected in current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. This textbook establishes the essential facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will encompass.

Many linguists and philosophers of language explain linguistic meaning in terms of truth conditions. This book focuses on the meanings of expressions that escape such truth-conditional treatment, in particular the concessives: "but," "even if," and "although." Corinne Iten proposes semantic analyses of these expressions based on the cognitive framework of relevance theory. A thoroughly cognitive approach to linguistic meaning is presented in which linguistic forms are seen as mapping onto mental entities, rather than individuals and properties in the real world. Researchers and advanced students in pragmatics will find this account lucid, clear and accessible.

The book presents a study into the trainee interpreters' and certified interpreters' subjective experience of psycho-affective factors in consecutive interpreting. In the form of four case studies, the book offers an insight in how the subjective experience of anxiety, fear, language ego/language inhibition/language boundaries, extroversion/introversion, self-esteem, motivation and stress conditions and affects consecutive interpreting performance. What emerges from the study is that the interpreter's psycho-affectivity is a continually operating and intricate mechanism which may impact on nearly all constituents of the consecutive interpreting process and that its potential causes may lie in virtually all - even the seemingly unimportant - aspects of the interpreting process.

This book explores the placement of human beings, a "betweenness" that elicits the fact that human communication is the mediation between one's intellectual, moral, and political experience. Aaron K. Kerr explores the relationship between nature and culture, exposing the obscurities caused by technology and economic dogmatism. A renewal of the mediatory role of human communication is juxtaposed to the immediacy of digital consumption. The author reveals that to redress ecological distress, there must be an equal awareness, sense of place, and regional responsibility for built environments which value nature. By situating philosophy and communication within the scientific consensus of the anthropocene, the author clearly indicates the necessary mediations between fact and value, science and religion, local and global, nature and culture. Scholars of philosophy, rhetoric, environmental ethics, and global bioethics will find this book of particular interest.

As cognitive scientists continue to probe into the nature of the human mind, it is increasingly clear that research into cognition cannot be dissociated from the context in which our mental activity occurs. The papers collected in this book testify to the growing interest in adopting a broad characterisation of what counts as relevant context. The vices of seeking essences behind complex phenomena should not go unnoticed, the primary, and possibly the most crucial, downside of this approach being a reductionist treatment of the human mind. With this book, the authors want to show that humans are not merely brains, minds, speakers, learners, readers, etc., but, first and foremost, complex beings who communicate within and beyond the contexts of their own cultures.

This book addresses the hasty development of modern logic, especially its introducing and embracing various kinds of artificial languages and moving from the study of natural languages to that of artificial ones. This shift seemed extremely helpful and managed to elevate logic to a new level of rigor and clarity. However, the change that logic underwent in this way was in no way insignificant, and it is also far from an insignificant matter to determine to what extent the "new logic" only engaged new and more powerful instruments to answer the questions posed by the "old" one, and to what extent it replaced these questions with new ones. Hence, this movement has generated brand new kinds of philosophical problems that have still not been dealt with systematically. Philosophy of Logical Systems addresses these new kinds of philosophical problems that are intertwined with the development of modern logic. Jaroslav Peregrin analyzes the rationale behind the introduction of the artificial languages of logic; classifies the various tools which were adopted to build such languages; gives an overview of the various kinds of languages introduced in the course of modern logic and the motifs of their employment; discusses what can actually be achieved by relocating the problems of logic from natural language into them; and reaches certain conclusions with respect to the possibilities and limitations of this "formal turn" of logic. This book is both an important scholarly contribution to the philosophy of logic and a systematic survey of the standard (and not so standard) logical systems that were established during the short history of modern logic.

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.

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof's analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems. This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy.

Of all the different sub-genres of oral prose fiction developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria, the trickster tale is the most popular, especially among the nonruling stratum of society. Sekoni describes and explains literally what makes the trickster tale a trickster tale. The focus is to establish the phenomenology of the trickster tale discourse from a sociosemiotic perspective. More specifically, Sekoni attempts to investigate the sociological and narratological conditions that govern the formation, transformation, and persistence of the trickster tale primarily among the Yoruba common people.

At the same time Sekoni shows the uses made of the trickster among such contemporary writers as Soyinka, Achebe, Osofisan, and others. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of African folklore and literature, cultural semiotics, anthropology, and African-American literature.

Speech practices as discursive practices for meaning-making across domains, genres, and social groups is an under-researched, highly complex field of sociolinguistics. This field has gained momentum after innovative studies of adolescents and young adults with mixed ethnic and language backgrounds revealed that they "cross" language and dialectal or vernacular borders to construct their own hybrid discursive identities. The focus in this volume is on the diversity of emerging hybridizing speech practices through contact with English, predominantly in Europe. Contributions to this collected volume originate from the DFG funded conference on language contact in times of globalization (LCTG4) and from members of the editor's funded research group "Discursive Multilingualism".