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.

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.

This volume contains a detailed, precise and clear semantic formalism designed to allow non-programmers such as linguists and literary specialists to represent elements of meaning which they must deal with in their research and teaching. At the same time, by its basis in a functional programming paradigm, it retains sufficient formal precision to support computational implementation. The formalism is designed to represent meaning as found at a variety of levels, including basic semantic units and relations, word meaning, sentence-level phenomena, and text-level meaning. By drawing on fundamental principles of program design, the proposed formalism is both easy to read and modify yet sufficiently powerful to allow for the representation of complex semantic phenomena. In this monograph, the authors introduce the formalism and show its basic structure, apply it to the analysis of the semantics of a variety of linguistic phenomena in both English and French, and use it to represent the semantics of a variety of texts ranging from single sentences, to textual excepts, to a full story.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

Reflections in Communication is a response and guide to the need for productive and effective communication and is designed for readers who have had little or no formal instruction in the field of speech communication. Dealing with cultural, critical and contextual issues, the text provides a comprehensive coverage. With an outstanding collection of chapters to develop knowledge and skills, this book uses an array of resources for communicating effectively in democratic societies. An added emphasis is the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches in dealing with principles, concepts, activities and theories of communication with research evidence. Based on the author's background as a communication generalist, this perceptive volume has broken ground because it applies communication study to a wide variety of situations, such as self concept, perception, listening, interpersonal, interviewing, cultural, small group, speaking to inform and persuade, and addressing freedom and responsibility issues in democratic societies.

Vale's Technique of Screen and Television Writing is an updated and expanded edition of a valuable guide to writing for film and television. Mr. Vale takes the aspiring writer through every phase of a film's development, from the original concept to the final shooting script. Teachers of the craft as well as writers and directors have acclaimed it as one of the best books ever written on how to write a screenplay. This book combines practical advice for the aspiring or established writer with a lucid overview of the unique features of this most contemporary art form, distinguishing film and video from other media and other kinds of storytelling. It teaches the reader to think in terms of the camera and gives practical advice on the realities of filmmaking. At the same time, Vale, who began his own career as a scriptwriter for the great French director Jean Renoir, provides a solid grounding in the history of drama from the Classical Greek theater through the great cinematic works of the twentieth century. Both philosophical and pragmatic, this is a very readable book for students and active professionals who want to improve their writing skills, and for film enthusiasts interested in knowing more about what they see on the screen. Mr. Vale is that rare combination, a practitioner of great experience who can offer a lucid explanation of his craft. Eugene Vale was born in Switzerland and began his career in France in the 1930s. He was an award-winning novelist, film and TV scriptwriter and teacher, whose works include the bestselling novel The Thirteenth Apostle and the scripts for Francis of Assisi, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Second Face. He also worked in many other areas of the motion picture industry, including directing, producing, cutting, distribution and finance. His archives are held by Boston University and University of Southern California. Mr. Vale died in 1997, shortly after he completed the updated version of this handbook.

Moving beyond ecocomposition, this book galvanizes conversations in ecology and writing not with an eye toward homogenization, but with an agenda of firmly establishing the significance of writing research that intersects with ecology. It looks to establish ecological writing studies not just as a legitimate or important form of writing research, but as paramount to the future of writing studies and writing theory. Complex ecologies, writing studies, and new-media/post-media converge to highlight network theories, systems theories, and posthumanist theories as central in the shaping of writing theory, and this study embraces work in these areas as essential to the development of ecological theories of writing. Contributors address ecological theories of writing by way of diverse and promising avenues, united by the underlying commitment to better understand how ecological methodologies might help better inform our understanding of writing and might provoke new theories of writing. Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media fuels future theoretical conversations about ecology and writing and will be of interest to those who are interested in theories of writing and the function of writing.

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 edited book provides cutting edge contributions from an international array of prominent experts who discuss the relevance of pedagogical stylistics in relation to diverse contexts and areas, including empirical approaches, corpus stylistics, creative writing, literary-linguistic criticism, students as researchers, critical discourse, academic register, text-world pedagogy, cognitive stylistics, classroom discourse, language of literary texts, L1/L2 education, EFL learners, and multimodal stylistics. Intended as a follow-up to Watson and Zyngier (2007), this volume situates the reader by offering a broad assessment of how the field has developed during the past 15 years and where it stands now. By examining both contemporary research and future challenges, it should be regarded as essential reading for all teachers, researchers, scholars, and students interested in understanding language and how to apply stylistics in educational settings. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in stylistics, cognitive linguistics, language teaching, applied linguistics, literary studies, and materials development.

In this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase "natural syntax," he means that physical nature enters human communication literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency.
This premise addresses a central question about symbolism in this century: How are our ideas symbolically related to physical reality? The author outlines a theory of communication in which nature is not reached by reference to an object; rather, nature is part of the message known only tacitly as the wavy carrier of a sign or signal. One doesn't refer "to" nature, even though one might be aiming to; one refers "with" nature as carrier vehicle.
The author demonstrates that a natural language of transmission has an inherent physical syntax of patterned wave forms, which can also be described as certain "laws of form"--a phrase used by D'Arcy Thompson, L. L. Whyte, Noam Chomsky, and Stephen Jay Gould. He describes a syntax inherent in natural languages that derives from the rhythmic form of a propelling wave. Instead of the "laws" of a wave's form, however, the author speaks of its elements of rhythmic composition, because "rythmos" means "wave" in Greek and because "composition" describes the creative process across the arts. In pursuing a philosophy of rhythmic composition, the author draws on cognitive science and semiotics. But he chiefly employs symmetry theory to describe the forms of art, and especially the patterns of poetry, as structures built upon the natural syntax of wave forms. Natural syntax, it turns out, follows a fascinating group of symmetry transformations that derive from wave forms.

In this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase "natural syntax," he means that physical nature enters human communication literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency.
This premise addresses a central question about symbolism in this century: How are our ideas symbolically related to physical reality? The author outlines a theory of communication in which nature is not reached by reference to an object; rather, nature is part of the message known only tacitly as the wavy carrier of a sign or signal. One doesn't refer "to" nature, even though one might be aiming to; one refers "with" nature as carrier vehicle.
The author demonstrates that a natural language of transmission has an inherent physical syntax of patterned wave forms, which can also be described as certain "laws of form"--a phrase used by D'Arcy Thompson, L. L. Whyte, Noam Chomsky, and Stephen Jay Gould. He describes a syntax inherent in natural languages that derives from the rhythmic form of a propelling wave. Instead of the "laws" of a wave's form, however, the author speaks of its elements of rhythmic composition, because "rythmos" means "wave" in Greek and because "composition" describes the creative process across the arts. In pursuing a philosophy of rhythmic composition, the author draws on cognitive science and semiotics. But he chiefly employs symmetry theory to describe the forms of art, and especially the patterns of poetry, as structures built upon the natural syntax of wave forms. Natural syntax, it turns out, follows a fascinating group of symmetry transformations that derive from wave forms.

The Language of Politics: * examines how both politicians and commentators describe political stances * explores some of the most common linguistic features to be found in political speeches * analyses electioneering through various written texts including manifestos, posters and pamphlets * looks at how politicians answer questions both in the media and in parliament * includes examples of political discourse from Britain, America and Australia * has a comprehensive glossary of terms.

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.

This state-of-the-art account of research and theorizing brings together multimodality, learning and communication through detailed analyses of signmakers and their meaning-making in museums, hospitals, schools and the home environment. By analyzing video recordings, photographs, screenshots and print materials, Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress go well beyond the comfortable domains of traditional sites of (social) semiotic and multimodal research. They steer away from spurious invention and naming of ever more new and exciting domains, focusing instead on fundamentals in assembling a set of tools for current tasks: namely, describing and analyzing learning and communication in the contemporary world as one integrated field. The theory outlined in the book is grounded in the findings of the authors' wide-ranging empirical investigations. Each chapter evaluates the work that is being done and has been done, challenging accepted wisdom and standing much of it on its head. With extensive illustrations and many examples presented to show the reach and applicability of the theory, this book is essential reading for all those working in multimodality, semiotics, applied linguistics and related areas. Images from the book are also available to view online at www.routledge.com/9780415709620/

"Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory" brings together twenty exploratory studies on important subjects of research in contemporary argumentation theory. The essays are based on papers that were presented at the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) in Amsterdam in June 2010. They give an impression of the nature and the variety of the kind of research that has recently been carried out in the study of argumentation.

The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of 'dissensus' and 'deep disagreement'. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse.

The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of 'dissensus' and 'deep disagreement'. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse.

The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of 'dissensus' and 'deep disagreement'. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse."

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.

This accessible satellite textbook in the Routledge Intertext series offers students hands-on practical experience of textual analysis of conversation. Written in a clear, user-friendly style by an experienced teacher, it combines practical activities with texts, accompanied by commentaries and suggestions for further study. It can be used individually or in conjunction with the series core textbook Working With Texts Aimed at A-Level and beginning undergraduate students, The Language of Conversation: * Analyses exactly what happens during conversation and why * Discusses the structure, purpose, and features of conversation * Explores the relationship between speaker and listener * Examines different kinds of conversation, such as chatroom conversations, extracts from chatshows and everyday conversation * Provides a clear introduction to technical terms.

Using a wide range of twentieth-century literary prose Laura Wright and Jonathan Hope provide an `interactive' introduction to the techniques of stylistic analysis. Divided up into five sections; the noun phrase, the verb phrase, the clause, text structure and vocabulary, the book also provides an introduction to the basics of descriptive grammar for beginning students. * Presumes no prior linguistic knowledge * Provides a comprehensive glossary of terms * Adaptable: designed to be used in a variety of classroom contexts * Introduces students to an enormous range of 20th century literature from James Joyce to Roddy Doyle A practical coursebook rather than a survey account of stylistics as a discipline, the book provides over forty opportunities for hands-on stylistic analysis. For each linguistic feature under discussion the reader is offered a definition, a text for analysis, exercises and tasks, in addition to a suggested solution. Stylistics: A Practical Coursebook is genuinely `student friendly' and will be an invaluable tool for all beginning undergraduates and A-level students of language and literature.

The Educator's Guide to Writing a Book is for educators who dream of sharing their knowledge and skills with a broader audience. This exciting resource provides step-by-step guidance on how to set publishing goals, create well-written content and resource material, develop an informative yet accessible writing style, prepare professional level manuscripts, and anticipate each stage in the publishing process. Chapters include authentic writing examples, tips from veteran authors and publishing professionals, and supportive resources. The Educator's Guide to Writing a Book is an invaluable guide that helps aspiring and novice authors move publishing goals from dreams to reality. .

This collection introduces and develops Lacanian thought concerning the relations among language, subjectivity, and society. Lacanian Theory of Discourse provides an account of how language both interacts with and constitutes structures of subjectivity, producing specific attitudes and behaviors as well as significant social effects.

Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics is a comprehensive introductory text which discusses the development of pragmatics - its aims and methodology - and also introduces themes that are not generally covered in other texts. Jenny Thomas focuses on the dynamic nature of speaker meaning, considering the central roles of both speaker and hearer, and takes into account the social and psychological factors involved in the generation and interpretation of utterances. The book includes a detailed examination of the development of Pragmatics as a discipline, drawing attention to problems encountered in earlier work, and brings the reader up to date with recent discussion in the field. The book is written principally for students with no previous knowledge of pragmatics, and the basic concepts are covered in considerable detail. Theoretical and more complicated information is highlighted with examples that have been drawn from the media, fiction and real-life interaction, and makes the study more accessible to newcomers. It is an ideal introductory textbook for students of linguistics and for all who are interested in analysing problems in communication.