The sixteen chapters comprising this book on the Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project offer over twenty-five years of research into the changing language of native speakers and first-generation American-German speakers residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1984 the principal project investigator, Irmengard Rauch, together with students of Germanic linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has elicited and analyzed an array of linguistic phenomena that include politically correct (PC) German, the German language of vulgarity and civility, and the grammar of e-mailing and texting German as well as that of snail-mail German. Comparison data were also gathered from Berlin in the case of the PC German and from Bonn in the case of the vulgarity/civility project. In recording the sounds of spoken German in the Bay Area, the BAG fieldworkers interviewed not only German-speaking adults but also first-generation German-speaking children (yielding a "Kinderlect") to compare with the spoken English of both of these groups. Still other studies focus on the interplay among gesture, emotion, and language; canine-human communication; the architecture of the lie; and the architecture of the apology. Chapter one details the modus operandi of the BAG research project. This book is useful for the study of the sociolinguistics of German, English-German bilingualism, general linguistics, and the methods of linguistic fieldwork.

Pullum examines the rhetorical genre of 20th-century American faith healing. He first analyzes respectively the rhetoric of Aimee Semple McPherson, William Branham, Oral Roberts, Asa Alonzo Allen, Ernest Angley, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Benny Hinn--the most prominent American faith healers of this century. For each, he discusses their background, the nature of the audiences to whom they preached, and why they were so successful. Pullum concludes by drawing together the major rhetorical features of faith-healing discourse.

Pullum shows that faith-healing discourse follows the strategy of offering hope to the hopeless, giving God the glory, articulating humble beginnings, offering testimony of past personal afflictions overcome, and drawing on scripture to bolster their claims. This discourse is often presented in dynamic fashion, making it not only credible, but entertaining as well. After elucidating the rhetorical patterns of faith healers, Pullum evaluates claims of the miraculous in light of the standard that they set for themselves. In other words, miracles as presented by faith healers are juxtaposed to the types one reads about in the Bible. Pullum also attempts to account for why people claim miraculous cures in spite of the fact that nothing miraculous has occurred in the services of faith healers.

Terrorism, jihad, fundamentalism, blowback. These and other highly charged terms have saturated news broadcasts and everyday conversation since September 11th. But to keen ears their meanings change depending upon who's doing the talking. So what do these words really mean? And what are people trying to say when they use them?

Each of the thirteen essays in Collateral Language offers an informed perspective on a particular word or phrase that serves as a building block in the edifice of post-World Trade Center rhetoric. In some cases this involves a systematic examination of the term in question (e.g. "anthrax" or "unity")its historical roots, the development of its meaning and usage in the U.S. over time, and its employment in the current context. In other cases authors provide a set of more philosophical or autobiographical reflections on a particular idea (e.g. "vital interests" or "evil"), suggesting a need to consider the ethical and moral implications of using the concept uncritically. In every instance, however, the overriding goal is to give the reader a set of practical tools to analyze the political language that surrounds all of us at this critical point in our nation's history.

Witty, informative and highly readable, Collateral Language is a lexicon of political terminology and an indispensable tool for understanding the current conflict.

Tuvaluan is a Polynesian language spoken by the 9,000 inhabitants of the nine atolls of Tuvalu in the Central Pacific, as well as small and growing Tuvaluan communities in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This grammar is the first detailed description of the structure of Tuvaluan, one of the least well-documented languages of Polynesia. Tuvaluan pays particular attention to discourse and sociolinguistics factors at play in the structural organization of the language.

This volume contains 21 new and original contributions to the study of formal semantics, written by distinguished experts in response to landmark papers in the field. The chapters make the target articles more accessible by providing background, modernizing the notation, providing critical commentary, explaining the afterlife of the proposals, and offering a useful bibliography for further study. The chapters were commissioned by the series editors to mark the 100th volume in the book series Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. The target articles are amongst the most widely read and cited papers up to the end of the 20th century, and cover most of the important subfields of formal semantics. The authors are all prominent researchers in the field, making this volume a valuable addition to the literature for researchers, students, and teachers of formal semantics. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang-and all forms of nonstandard English-as integral parts of the American language. Why is an expression like "bed head" lost in a lexical limbo, found neither in slang nor standard dictionaries? Why are snow-boarding terms such as "fakie," "goofy foot," "ollie" and "nollie" not considered slang? As he addresses these and other lexical curiosities, Adams reveals that slang is used in part to define groups, distinguishing those who are "down with it" from those who are "out of it." Slang is also a rebellion against the mainstream. It often irritates those who color within the lines-indeed, slang is meant to irritate, sometimes even to shock. But slang is also inventive language, both fun to make and fun to use. Rather than complain about slang as "bad" language, Adams urges us to celebrate slang's playful resistance to the commonplace and to see it as the expression of an innate human capacity, not only for language, but for poetry. A passionate defense of slang, jargon, argot and other forms of nonstandard English, this marvelous volume is full of amusing and even astonishing examples of all sorts of slang. It will be a must for students of language and a joy for word lovers everywhere.

In this book Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter describe the discoursal properties of language and demonstrate what insights this approach can offer to the student and teacher of language. The authors examine the relationship between complete texts, both spoken and written, and the social and cultural contexts in which they function. They argue that the functions of language are often best understood in a discoursal environment and that exploring language in context compels us to revise commonly-held understandings about the forms and meanings of language. In so doing, the authors argue the need for language teachers, syllabus planners and curriculum organisers to give greater attention to language as discourse.

This book deals with expressions like English myself, yourself, himself and so on, and German selbst from a perspective of language comparison. It is the first book-length study of intensifiers ever written. The study investigates the syntax and semantics of these expressions and provides a thorough account of a much neglected grammatical domain. Given that the approach is both descriptive and analytic, the book will be of interest to linguists, grammar writers and teachers of English and German alike.

Focus particles (words such as even, only, also) play an important role in English, in various syntactic and semantic domains, but their characteristics pose numerous problems for current syntactic frameworks and semantic theories. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the syntax, meaning and use of focus particles and related function words in English and many other languages. It also provides a historical perspective on their development.

Focusing on language and the assessment of its meaning, this volume concentrates on a method of content analysis developed by the author and Goldine Gleser. Applicable to transcripts of speech or verbal texts, this method uses the grammatical clause as its smallest unit of communication, considers whether or not a verb is transitive and involves an object, or is intransitive and describes a state of being. It derives scores on many scales that have been tested for reliability of scoring and for construct validity with concurrently administered measures, such as rating and self-report scales as well as biochemical and pharmacological criteria. Finally, this volume provides detailed descriptions of the clinical and basic research establishing the validity of these scales, so that a reader can locate studies that have pertinence to any special interest area. A major achievement described in this book is the development of computer software that understands grammar and syntax, can parse natural language, knows most of the words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, has been taught to identify idioms and slang, and is capable of continuing to learn. The program can score all the scales, report whether the scores obtained from a verbal sample are one to three standard deviations from the norms, and suggest APA DSM-IIIR diagnostic classifications the clinician might consider in assessing the patient.

Semantics is an accessible and practical introduction to formal semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, for students new to the subject. Semantics: * shows how meanings are built up and interrelated * presupposes very little prior knowledge of grammar or linguistic terminology * includes a glossary of technical terms * provides a progression of exercises with answers given at the back * backs up the activities with short, clear explanations * includes an appendix on sets and functions.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics. Using examples from personally recorded conversations, she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the `tellability' of jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a particular culture.

This study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents - Focus and Topic - is developed. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montogovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.

In The Rhetoric and Medicalization of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Horror Films, Courtney Patrick-Weber argues that the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth traumatizes pregnant people in a number of ways, even as many people believe the shift toward medicalization has improved conditions for pregnant people. Patrick-Weber analyzes a selection of horror films, including The Void and Black Christmas, to demonstrate not only evidence of this trauma on a visceral level, but also how horror films can reflect and contribute to cultural conversations surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. While horror films are often neglected as vital sources of intellect and analysis, many of these films use their subversive viewpoints on cultural issues to offer a unique perspective that can ultimately help to shape the way society views them. Patrick-Weber reminds us that pregnancy and childbirth can be traumatic events, both physically and emotionally, as she discusses the current conversations surrounding the issue and critiques the "advancement" of medicalization. Scholars of film studies, gender studies, rhetoric, and medicine may find this book particularly useful.

What is it about the rhetoric of one the most influential and powerful religious leaders in the world and in history-Pope Francis-that is so engaging and yet so challenging to the Church writ large, the American Congress, the news media, and the world? The Rhetoric of Pope Francis: Critical Mercy and Conversion for the Twenty-first Century provides extensive insight into this question through a close, in-depth rhetorical analysis of Pope Francis's visual, spatial, tactile, written, and oral discourse. This analysis reveals how the interrelated topoi of illness, space, mercy, and conversion converge to articulate Francis's vision for the Church. Under Francis, the Catholic Church's virtue of mercy gets renewed and redeployed to papal, pastoral, and political sites for the purpose of conversion. Each chapter identifies several of Francis's dominant rhetorical strategies. These "pope tropes" take the form of existing and widely held Catholic beliefs that, while stable, still invite interpretation, disputation, and open dialogue. Studying Francis's various discourses provides us with an exemplary paradigm from which we can learn much about faith, humility, love, and papal rhetoric's transformative capacity to help us live more compassionate lives.

Saussure as a linguist and Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century linguistic thought. By pointing out what their ideas have in common, in spite of emanating from very different intellectual sources, this study breaks new ground.

Although Portuguese is one of the main world languages and researchers have been working on Portuguese electronic text collections for decades (e.g. Kelly, 1970; Biderman, 1978; Bacelar do Nascimento et al., 1984; see Berber Sardinha, 2005), this is the first volume in English that encapsulates the exciting and cutting-edge corpus linguistic work being done with Portuguese language corpora on different continents. The book includes chapters by leading corpus linguists dealing with Portuguese corpora across the world, and their contributions explore various methods and how they are applicable to a wide range of language issues. The book is divided into six sections, each covering a key issue in Corpus Linguistics: lexis and grammar, lexicography, language teaching and terminology, translation, corpus building and sharing, and parsing and annotation. Together these sections present the reader with a broad picture of the field.

This original and intriguing collection explores the pressures exerted upon language in the expression of romantic and sexual desire. Simultaneously, it reveals the ways in which language itself exerts its own constraints on the subject's capacity to express desire. The contributors, while using the approaches and methods of empirical linguistics, engage directly with issues of relevance in gender studies and cultural studies. They examine and probe: * language used to mediate romantic and sexual desire * language used by the media to represent intimacy and desire * attitudes and assumptions about romantic and sexual desire embodied in English * implications for the construction of romantic and sexual identity

Over the years, pragmatics - the study of the use and meaning of utterances to their situations - has become a more and more important branch of linguistics, as the inadequacies of a purely formalist, abstract approach to the study of language have become more evident. This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. In this respect, Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric. He does not reject the Chomskvan revolution of linguistics, but rather maintains that the language system in the abstract - i.e. the 'grammar' broadly in Chomsky's sense - must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. There is therefore a division of labour between grammar and rhetoric, or (in the study of meaning) between semantics and pragmatics. The book's main focus is thus on the development of a model of pragmatics within an overall functional model of language. In this it builds on the speech avct theory of Austin and Searle, and the theory of conversational implicature of Grice, but at the same time enlarges pragmatics to include politeness, irony, phatic communion, and other social principles of linguistic behaviour.

Fuery explores the relationship between post-structuralism and absence. In order to understand the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (and Freud), the deconstructionalist methodology of Derrida, Foucault's studies of systems of thought, and Kristeva's socio-cultural and psychoanalytic interests, Fuery believes it is necessary to take into consideration the function and operation of absence. He shows how post-structuralist theory can be seen as a system of studies of subjectivity in terms of absence, and how desire is based almost entirely on the precondition of absence. The study is divided into sections on subjectivity. desire, and meaning, with the final section working toward a hermeneutics and semiotics of absence.

Antonymy is the technical name used to describe 'opposites', pairs of words such as rich/poor, love/hate and male/female. Antonyms are a ubiquitous part of everyday language, and this book provides a detailed, comprehensive account of the phenomenon. This book demonstrates how traditional linguistic theory can be revisited, updated and challenged in the corpus age. It will be essential reading for scholars interested in antonymy and corpus linguistics.

This collection reviews 20 years of research into Spoken Discourse by the Birmingham group, allowing, for the first time, a developmental perspective. It combines previously published but unavailable work with new research. Bringing together recent theories of discourse structure, with a new and detailed analytic framework, the book emphasises both historical context and new developments. The articles are comprehensive, ranging from the theoretical to the highly applied. Practical applications include language teaching, literary stylistics and forensic linguistics with examples taken from literature and language classrooms, telephone conversations, disputed witness statements and corpuses of spoken English.

Translation Studies and linguistics have been going through a love -hate relationship since the 1950s. This book assesses both sides of the relationship, tracing the very real contributions that linguists have made to translation studies and at the same time recognizing the limitations of many of their approaches. With good humour and even handedness, Fawcett describes detailed taxonomies of translation strategies and deals with traditional problems such as equivalence. Yet he also explains and assesses the more recent contributions of text linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics. This work is exceptional in that it presents theories originally produced in Russian, German, French and Spanish as well as English. Its broad coverage and accessible treatment provide essential background reading for students of translation at all levels.