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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
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.
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.
Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson's basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation.
This book presents the first detailed analysis of the mechanism of translating the Polish past tense into French. Grounded in the field of aspectual research, this study bridges the gap between theory and practice by presenting a set of equivalency rules for Polish past imperfective verb forms and French past tenses. Drawing on a wide selection of Polish literary texts and their translations into French, the author analyses the translation of Polish past imperfective verbs in factual contexts and their actual uses in narration. Using the semantic theory of aspect developed by Stanislaw Karolak, the author establishes rules of equivalency for imperfective uses in both languages as well as rules of equivalency between Polish past imperfective verbs and perfect tenses in French (passe compose, passe simple and plus-que-parfait). The translation rules developed in this study can be applied directly in translation practice as well as providing a resource for scholars of the French and Polish languages. Additionally, this book lays the foundation for future contrastive studies on aspect in languages from different language families.
The interface between syntax and meaning, both semantic and pragmatic, has emerged as perhaps the richest and most fascinating area of current linguistics theory. This study applies some of these ideas to hyperbaton, offering an original new theory with broad applications for our understanding of Greek syntax. Students of epic will find a fresh perspective on orality in Homer while the general classicist will discover a more precise and explicit framework for the analysis of textual meaning in literary research.
The analysis is a contribution to contemporary linguistics, particularly the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Within the theoretical framework of predicate-argument syntax (also known as semantic syntax), the author analyses the role of the adjective as an adjunctive predicative expression. The aim of the research is to create a description of an adjective which could be prospectively useful as a point of departure for analyses of phenomena analogous from the communication point of view in other languages. The book contains a rich text material and a large number of valuable pragmatic insights into Polish nominal syntagmas with an adjective.
Understanding Semantics, Second Edition, provides an engaging and accessible introduction to linguistic semantics. The first part takes the reader through a step-by-step guide to the main phenomena and notions of semantics, covering levels and dimensions of meaning, ambiguity, meaning and context, logical relations and meaning relations, the basics of noun semantics, verb semantics and sentence semantics. The second part provides a critical introduction to the basic notions of the three major theoretical approaches to meaning: structuralism, cognitive semantics and formal semantics. Key features include: A consistent mentalist perspective on meaning Broad coverage of lexical and sentence semantics, including three new chapters discussing deixis, NP semantics, presuppositions, verb semantics and frames Examples from a wider range of languages that include German, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. Practical exercises on linguistic data Companion website including all figures and tables from the book, an online dictionary, answers to the exercises and useful links at routledge.com/cw/loebner This book is an essential resource for all undergraduate students studying semantics. Sebastian Loebner is a Professor of Linguistics at the Institute for Language and Information at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany
Winner of the AIA Book Prize for a research monograph in the field of English Language and Linguistics (2016) Common patterns of interactions are altered in the digital world and new patterns of communication have emerged, challenging previous notions of what communication actually is in the contemporary age. Online configurations of interaction, such as video chats, blogging, and social networking practices demand profound rethinking of the categories of linguistic analysis, given the blurring of traditional distinctions between oral and written discourse in digital texts. This volume reconsiders underlying linguistic and semiotic frameworks of analysis of spoken and written discourse in the light of the new paradigms of online communication, in keeping with a multimodal corpus linguistics theoretical framework. Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume' s agenda. Sindoni analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. video chats, personal blogs or journals on social networking websites) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or media-sharing communities), shedding light on the rapidly changing global web scenario.
Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept akin to connotation but which connects crucially with typical lexical environment. For example, it has been claimed that the adverb 'utterly' is characterised by an unfavourable semantic prosody on account of its habitual co-occurrence with words denoting unfavourable states of affairs such as 'ridiculous', 'disgraceful' and 'miserable'. Primarily for this reason, semantic prosody has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. However, the overall picture is complex, and this book offers a much-needed review of how semantic prosody has been described and approached in contributions on the subject, as well as a critical analysis of those contributions and a number of case studies. It discusses the relevance of the theory of priming in this area, and whether semantic prosody has cogency as a theoretical concept. Lastly, it points the way for future research. Since work on semantic prosody so far has been occasional, brief, and distributed across a range of monographs, articles and conference papers, this book, which does not assume previous knowledge of the subject, will constitute a fundamental work of reference for scholars, teachers and students alike. At the same time, Semantic Prosody goes beyond the central topic of the work, with wide-reaching implications for both corpus linguistics and linguistics overall. In this sense the concept of semantic prosody is used as a springboard for investigations into issues of vital importance for corpus studies such as the structuring and presentation of text in a corpus, the varying methodologies adopted by analysts to approach and interpret corpus data, as well as broader issues such as the role of intuition, introspection and elicitation in empirical language studies.
In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.
Evaluation, from connotations to complex judgements of value, is probably the most neglected dimension of meaning. Calling for a new understanding of truth and value, this book is a comprehensive study of evaluation in natural language, at lexical, syntactic and discursive levels. Jean Pierre Malrieu explores the cognitive foundations of evaluation and uses connectionist networks to model evaluative processes. He takes into account the social dimension of evaluation, showing that ideological contexts account for evaluative variability. A discussion of compositionality and opacity leads to the argument that a semantics of evaluation has some key advantages over truth-conditional semantics and as an example Malrieu applies his evaluative semantics to a complex Shakespeare text. His connectionist model yields a mathematical estimation of the consistency of text with ideology, and is particularly useful in the identification of subtle rhetorical devices such as irony.
'Mythologies' is a series of essays on the codings that command our daily life, from hairstyles in the film 'Julius Caesar' to glossy photographs of gourmet cooking, to the cult of foam in detergents.
Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth. Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking. Enriching our understanding of women's oratorical education and practice, this cutting-edge work makes an important contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and communication.
Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in order to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science.
This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. Evaluative language indicates opinions, attitudes, and judgments. It is an important part of activities such as persuading someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, or in constructing knowledge from a different number of theories. This book argues that phraseology--regularities or patterns in language identifiable from corpus studies--is important to the study of evaluative language. It makes a number of more specific arguments: that modal meaning is expressed through particular phrases and not only through modal verbs; that figurative phrases are used to intensify evaluation; and that patterns of use may be exploited to achieve an automatic identification of evaluations. It also builds on the author's previous work in exploring how films and journalism use language and images to build knowledge from ideas.
This major work from renowned scholars in the field, analyzes the role of language and symbolic media and shows how this enables us to move to new levels of understanding of contemporary organizational issues. An introductory chapter examines the role and growing importance of discourse in the study of organizations. It critically evaluates the contributions of various disciplines and defines organizational discourse as a subject area. The chapters in the first section, Talk and Action, explore the relationship between discourse, action and interaction and their impact on organizational structure and behaviour. Stories and Sensemaking focuses on the analytical potential of the `story' as a means of illuminating the ways in which organizational members make sense of their experience of organization. Discourse and Organization includes contributions which demonstrate the fundamental significance of linguistic uSAGE and discursive construction to the ontologies of `organization'. Finally, a concluding discourse explores the claims and limitations of organizational discourse as a means of enriching our understanding of organization.
This volume contains selected papers from an international conference of the same name held at Queen Mary, University of London, on 10-11 November 2010. The contributions from scholars working in the fields of modern political and cultural history, political science, modern European literature and linguistics provide interdisciplinary perspectives on nationalism and anti-Semitism in English- and German- language contexts from the beginning of the German Second Reich (1871) to the end of World War II (1945). Some articles examine critically theoretical constructs used to justify and defend anti-Semitism in Germany, focusing on the realms of science, music, the press and film. Others discuss the role of anti-Semitism in constructing voelkisch-nationalist notions of 'German' identity, as well as discourses of German colonialism. As a counterpart to German perspectives, several articles chart contemporary British reactions to German anti-Semitism and radical nationalism.
This book presents a detailed analysis of structural as well as pragmatic aspects underlying the phenomenon of noun ellipsis in English. Here Gunther examines the structure of elliptical noun phrases to account for the conditions on noun ellipsis and those on one-insertion, with special emphasis on the (oft-neglected) parallels between the two. She also examines the use of noun ellipsis with adjectives in order to shed light on this under-researched phenomenon, drawing on data from the British National Corpus.
This book expands the theoretical foundations of modern public relations, a growing young profession that lacked even a name until the twentieth century. As the discipline seeks guiding theories and paradigms, rhetorics both ancient and modern have proven to be fruitful fields of exploration. Charles Marsh presents Isocratean rhetoric as an instructive antecedent. Isocrates was praised by Cicero and Quintilian as "the master of all rhetoricians," favored over Plato and Aristotle. By delineating the strategic value of Isocratean rhetoric to modern public relations, Marsh addresses the call for research into the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical origins of the field. He also addresses the call among scholars of classical rhetoric for modern relevance. Because Isocrates maintained that stable relationships must solicit and honor dissent, Marsh analyzes both historic and contemporary challenges to Isocratean rhetoric. He then moves forward to establish the modern applications of Isocrates in persuasion, education, strategic planning, new media, postmodern practices, and paradigms such as excellence theory, communitarianism, fully functioning society theory, and reflection.
Bringing together 50 key readings on rhetorical criticism in a single accessible format, "The Rhetorical Criticism Reader" furnishes instructors with an ideal resource for teaching and practicing the art of rhetorical criticism. Unlike existing readers and textbooks, which rely on cookie-cutter approaches to rhetorical criticism, "The Rhetorical Criticism Reader "organizes the field conceptually, allowing teachers and students to grapple with the enduring issues and debates surrounding criticism over the past 50 years. The readings are organized into four sections, each representing key conceptual issues and debates in rhetorical criticism: critic/purpose, object/method, theory/practice, and audience/consequentiality. Each section is preceded by an introductory essay that puts the readings into context. For added flexibility, an alternative table of contents is also included for instructors and students to customize their teaching and reading. Intended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical criticism, "The Rhetorical Criticism Reader "uniquely lends itself to thoughtful discussion of the role of the critic in the critical process. It assists readers not only in learning the tools of criticism, but also in reflecting on the values that underlie the critical endeavor.
"Discourse and Creativity" examines the way different approaches to discourse analysis conceptualize the notion of creativity and address it analytically. It includes examples of studies of creativity from a variety of traditions and examines the following key areas, how people interpret and use discourse, the processes and practices of discourse production, discourse in modes other than written and spoken language, and the relationship between discourse and the technologies used to produce it. "Discourse and Creativity "combines a forward-thinking and interdisciplinary approach to the topic of creativity; this collection will be of great value to students and scholars in applied linguistics, stylistics, and communication studies.
This book argues that language systems determine language use to a greater extent than is generally assumed. The author demonstrates how the typological characteristics of a language determine even the most general aspects of our stylistic preferences. Through extensive analysis of examples in German and English, the author demonstrates how analogous options of sentence structure must be surrendered in order to achieve felicitous translations. Two major aspects that determine the appropriateness of language use are examined: language processing and discourse-dependency. Essential reading for translation scholars and linguists involved in the comparative study of English and German, this book will also be of interest to scholars of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, as well as translators and linguists more generally.
This study presents a semantic framework for analysing all aspectual constructions in terms of the event state distinction, and describes the grammatical expression of aspectual meaning in terms of a theory of grammatical constructions. In this theory, grammatical constructions, like words, are conventionalized form-meaning pairs, which are best described not only with respect to their intrinsic semantic values, but also with respect to the functional oppositions in which they participate.
Semantic priming has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than thirty years and is commonly used as a tool for investigating other aspects of perception and cognition, such as word recognition, language comprehension, and knowledge representations. Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition examines empirical and theoretical advancements in the understanding of semantic priming, providing a succinct, in-depth review of this important phenomenon, framed in terms of models of memory and models of word recognition. The first section examines models of semantic priming, including spreading activation models, the verification model, compound-cue models, distributed network models, and multistage activation models (e.g. interactive-activation model). The second section examines issues and findings that have played an especially important role in testing models of priming and includes chapters on the following topics: methodological issues (e.g. counterbalancing of materials, choice of priming baselines); automatic vs. strategic priming; associative vs. "pure" semantic priming; mediated priming; long-term semantic priming; backward priming; unconscious priming; the prime-task effect; list context effects; effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and stimulus repetition; and the cognitive neuroscience of semantic priming. The book closes with a summary and a discussion of promising new research directions. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in the cognitive sciences and neurosciences.
A pioneering collection of new research that explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of the English language. The volume, with contributions by world-renowned scholars as well as some emerging scholars in the field, covers a wide variety of approaches to grammatical categories and categorial change, constructions and constructional change, and comparative and typological research. Each of the fourteen chapters, based on the analysis of authentic data, highlights the wealth and breadth of the study of English syntax (including morphosyntax), both theoretically and empirically, from Old English through to the present day. The result is a body of research which will add substantially to the current study of the syntax of the English language, by stimulating further research in the field. |
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