This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language--English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture--specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words--evidence, experience, and sense--are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also English as a global language.
An interdisciplinary work, Experience, Evidence, and Sense will be of interest to both scholars and students in linguistics and English, as well as historians of ideas, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and scholars of communication.

This volume presents selected contributions to an annual symposium on metaphor and metonymy held at the English Department of Heidelberg University. It brings together papers by lecturers, PhD students and graduates from three universities - Heidelberg University, Eoetvoes Lorand University in Budapest, and the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The contributions illustrate the plurality of perspectives and methods in current cognitive-linguistic research on metaphor and metonymy and exemplify some of the ways in which they can be combined. The papers also attest to the wide range of domains and topics to which metaphor- and metonymy-based research can be applied, including emotion terms, political and scientific discourse, morphology, cross-cultural variation and internet communication.

This collective volume contains a selection of research contributions, presented at the 30th Deutscher Romanistentag [German Conference on Romance languages and literatures] in 2007 in Vienna in the section "Mood and Modality in Romance". The Romance languages studied here include Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and French. All contributions thematically explore the status and importance of modality and mood and their reciprocal relationships with reference to theoretical approaches.

In his fifth book Thomas Ogden, widely regarded as the most profound and original psychoanalytic writer of this decade, explores the frontier of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking: the experience of the analyst and patient in the dynamic interplay of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. A Jason Aronson Book

In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of "episodic genericity," existential presuppositions, and contextual restrictions of generics.

Examines how people develop their reading and writing skills during adolescence and adulthood. This collection is based on the premise that four basic stances (orientations) underlie the discourse practices: social, textual, institutional, and field. These four stances form the organizing rubric for

In this wide-ranging and original book, John J. Clancy examines the history and current state of corporate America from a new perspective, looking at business not as a matter of economics, marketing, and management, but as a cultural artifact. The Invisible Powers examines language, imagery, values, and deeply held beliefs and the impact they all have in determining the role business plays in society. Drawing from the writings and speeches of some of the most influential business leaders of the past two hundred years Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, Jay Gould, and Lee Iacocca, among others Clancy describes the evolution and transformation of influential metaphors and demonstrates the very real power the "invisible" forces of metaphor exercise in our world. Finding support in such diverse thinkers as Aristotle, Engels, and Darwin, Clancy then calls for a new set of images and paradigms that will enable us to deal more successfully with the economic, cultural, and environmental crises of our times."

In "Discursive Ideologies," C. H. Knoblauch argues that European rhetorical theory comprises several distinct and fundamentally opposed traditions of discourse. Writing accessibly for the upper division student, Knoblauch resists the conventional narrative of a unified Western rhetorical tradition. He identifies deep ideological and epistemological differences that exist among strands of Western thought and that are based in divergent "grounds of meaningfulness." These conflicts underlie and influence current discourse about vital public issues.

Knoblauch considers six "stories" about the meaning of meaning in an attempt to answer the question, what encourages us to believe that language acts are meaningful? Six distinctive ideologies of Western rhetoric emerge: magical rhetoric, ontological rhetoric, objectivist rhetoric, expressivist rhetoric, sociological rhetoric, and deconstructive rhetoric. He explores the nature of language and the important role these rhetorics play in the discourses that matter most to people, such as religion, education, public policy, science, law, and history.

Conflict plays a crucial role in social interactions, and representations of conflict are an important aspect of language. Stories and narratives involving everything from war to playground disputes generate, sustain, mediate, and represent conflict at all levels of social organization. Still, despite the vast amount of research on conflict and narrative in a number of disciplines, no one has yet examined how these play off of each other; in fact, most studies treat narrative merely as a source of information about conflict rather then as a part of conflict's process. The contributors to this collection argue that language consists of socially and politically situated practices that are differentially distributed on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other categories. Each of them, writing from the perspective of their own disciplines, challenges previous assumptions about narrative and social conflict as they interpret a range of disputes that emerge in a variety of settings. Taken in total, these essays substantially further our theoretical and methodological understanding of narrative and conflict and how they intersect.

The purpose clause is a common fonn of adverbial modification in English. The bracketed phrases below are purpose clauses, and they look and sound unremarkable. We hear and see these things all the time. John came [to play with the children] [to play with] I brought John along Insofar as purpose clauses appear to be adverbial, they frequently occupy a relatively low place on the scale of important things for syntactic theory to address itself to. In this book I assume the theoretical framework that has come to be known as 'Government-Binding' theory (GB), initiated in Chomsky (1981). The general fonn of the analyis of purpose clauses in GB dates roughly from Chomsky (1977). where several kinds of constructions akin to purpose clauses are identified. Within GB. this analysis is so widely accepted that it deserves to be considered the standard theory. This book, then. is about a few syntactically peripheral ell~ments that have enjoyed a relatively long-lived. virtually universally accepted. theoretical treatment What is perhaps an obvious question arises in this context. Why write a GB book about purpose clauses? This book. I hope, will supply an interesting answer. Simply put. purpose clause:;, and related constructions, have various properties that are not accounted for in the standard theory. In this book I propose an alternative analysis of purpose clauses, an analysis from which. I think. more of their properties follow more naturally.

This data-oriented study aims at providing an onomasiological account of the historical synonyms of the term fallen woman from Old English up to Early Modern English. It focuses on linguistic mechanisms which are at work in the formation of euphemisms and dysphemisms semantically linked to the conceptual category Fallen Woman. Additionally, the book highlights the historical and cultural variations in the approach to sex relations in different parts of the world and in different epochs. The cognitive methodological apparatus is the core of the analytical part of the work. The results of the axiologically oriented analysis point to the prevailing tendency of female-specific lexical items to undergo the process of pejoration with the passage of time.

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.

This important new study examines in detail a semantic-pragmatic pattern surrounding the basic verb 'acquire' in nearly 30 Southeast Asian languages, concentrating on Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer, Kmhmu, Hmong, and varieties of Chinese. The book makes a significant contribution to empirical work on semantic and grammatical change in a linguistic area, as well as representing theoretical advances in cognitive semantics. Gricean pragmatics, semantic change, grammaticalization, language contact, and areal linguistics. The book also examines how changes in the speech of individuals actually become changes in large-scale public convention, 'language contact' is reconsidered, and traditional distinctions such as that between 'internal' and 'external' linguistic mechanisms are challenged. This groundbreaking new book is for specialists in Southeast Asian linguistics as well as scholars of descriptive semantics and pragmatics, grammaticalisation, linguistic change and evolution, areal linguistics and language contact, history and linguistic anthropology.

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as interpersonality. This construct offers ample terrain for new research, since it can be viewed using a range of diverse theoretical frameworks, employing a variety of analytical tools and social perspectives. Studies on the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/audience in the legal field are still scarce, dispersed, and limited to a narrow range of genres and a restricted notion of interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. This volume is meant to help bridge this gap. Its chapters show the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal genres. The aim is to achieve an expansion of the concept of interpersonality, which besides modality, Grice's maxims and other traditionally interpersonal features, might comprise or relate to ideational and textual issues like narrative disclosure, typography, rhetorical variation, or Plain English, among others.

The book brings together a rich variety of perspectives on abstracts as an academic genre. Drawing on genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the studies collected here combine attention to generic structure with emphasis on language variation and change, thus offering a multi-perspective view on a genre that is becoming one of the most important in present-day research communication. The chapters are organized into three sections, each one offering distinct but sometimes combined perspectives on the exploration of this academic genre. The first section looks at variation across cultures through studies comparing English with Spanish, Italian and German, while also including considerations on variation across genders or the native/non-native divide. The second section centres on variation across disciplines and includes a wide range of studies exploring disciplinary identities and communities, as well as different degrees of centrality in the disciplinary community. The third and final section explores language and genre change by looking at how authorial voice and metadiscourse have changed over the past few decades under the influence of different media and different stakeholders.

This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole " in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.

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.

Functional Grammar is a linguistic theory in which language is regarded intrinsically as a vehicle of communicative interaction. As such it has a strongly pragmatic orientation, and this book presents the results of some of the most recent research into pragmatics within the Functional Grammar framework. A good deal of attention is paid, in particular, to the treatment of discourse-level phenomena. manifestations.

Philosophers and linguists have come together for this volume to provide a glimpse of current thinking about language in a semiotic mode and of the analyses that result from applying the theory of signs of the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) to subjects that Peirce himself did not explore in any depth. Contributors include Victor Friedman, Laura Janda, Tony Jappy, Dines Johansen, Dan Nesher, Joao Queiroz, Joelle Rethore, Michael Shapiro, and Nils Thelin.

A selection of papers presented at the conference Expert Systems, Culture and Semiotics, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, December 1990. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part is about signs and representations, the second about reasoning and search, and the third about communicat

This book collects 13 papers that explore Wittgenstein's philosophy throughout the different stages of his career. The author writes from the viewpoint of critical rationalism. The tone of his analysis is friendly and appreciative yet critical. Of these papers, seven are on the background to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Five papers examine different aspects of it: one on the philosophy of young Wittgenstein, one on his transitional period, and the final three on the philosophy of mature Wittgenstein, chiefly his Philosophical Investigations. The last of these papers, which serves as the concluding chapter, concerns the analytical school of philosophy that grew chiefly under its influence. Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations ignores formal languages while retaining the view of metaphysics as meaningless -- declaring that all languages are metaphysics-free. It was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Now it is passe. Wittgenstein had hoped to dissolve all philosophical disputes, yet he generated a new kind of dispute. His claim to have improved the philosophy of life is awkward just because he prevented philosophical discussion from the ability to achieve that: he cut the branch on which he was sitting. This, according to the author, is the most serious critique of Wittgenstein.

This is a methodical study of the material and mental limits and possibilities of transferring information and media traits among dissimilar media. Ellestroem proposes a model for pinpointing the most vital conceptual entities and stages in intermedial transfers involving different media types such as speech, writing, music, films, and websites.

This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Allais' story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.

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.

For the first time in English, Glyn Williams draws together current debates in linguistics and social theory, and provides the first study in English of the principles and theories of French discourse analysis.