Sixteen years after her father was killed by an IRA bomb, Jo Berry had her first conversation with the man responsible. She had made a long journey, 'walking the footsteps of the bombers' as she put it, determined not to give in to anger and revenge but to try to understand his motivations and perspective. Her preparedness to meet Pat Magee opened up a path to empathy that developed through their conversations over the following years. This book studies their growing understandings of each other by focusing on the rich networks of metaphors that appear in their conversations, and how these evolve in the process of reconciliation. The innovative research method, reported in a rigorous but accessible style, together with the rich and often poignant data, make this book a valuable addition to the study of metaphor and discourse. In uncovering the development of empathy between these two extraordinary people, Cameron illuminates the moral necessity, and the potential rewards, in trying to imagine the world and mind of the Other. Implications are drawn for how mediators in reconciliation contexts might make positive use of metaphor in supporting the dynamics of empathy.

Since the modern founding of the theory of signs by the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the field of semiotics has become increasingly prominent as a method of interdisciplinary research and study, bridging the humanities, the fine arts, and the natural and social sciences. It is also truly international, with faculty representation at many universities, research institutes, and scholarly societies throughout the world. These two volumes reflect the continuing appeal of Peirce's sign theory bringing together as they do a great variety of authors from all over the world whose aim is to set the stage for a productive collaboration among linguists and cognitive scientists.

Goodall portrays a world caught up in the middle of a narrative arms race, where the message of the political right has outflanked the message of the political left. It is a world where narratives used by the far right inch ever closer to those employed by right-wing extremists in the Muslim world. Rather than dismiss the use of political narratives as a shallow tactic of the opposition, Goodall promotes their usefulness and outlines a number of ways that liberal academics can retake the public discourse from the extremist opposition. This is an essential text for the aspiring public intellectual and will appeal to students and scholars of qualitative methods, communications and media, and political science alike.

Just as a distinctive literary voice or style is marked by the ease with which it can be parodied, so too can specific aspects of humor be unique. Playwrights, television writers, novelists, cartoonists, and film scriptwriters use many special technical devices to create humor. Just as dramatic writers and novelists use specific devices to craft their work, creators of humorous materials--from the ancient Greeks to today's stand-up comics--have continued to use certain techniques in order to generate humor.

In The Art of Comedy Writing, Arthur Asa Berger argues that there are a relatively limited number of techniques--forty-five in all--that humorists employ. Elaborating upon his prior, in-depth study of humor, An Anatomy of Humor, in which Berger provides a content analysis of humor in all forms--joke books, plays, comic books, novels, short stories, comic verse, and essays--The Art of Comedy Writing goes further. Berger groups each technique into four basic categories: humor involving identity such as burlesque, caricature, mimicry, and stereotype; humor involving logic such as analogy, comparison, and reversal; humor involving language such as puns, wordplay, sarcasm, and satire; and finally, chase, slapstick, and speed, or humor involving action.

Berger claims that if you want to know how writers or comedians create humor study and analysis of their humorous works can be immensely insightful. This book is a unique analytical offering for those interested in humor. It provides writers and critics with a sizable repertoire of techniques for use in their own future comic creations. As such, this book will be of interest to people inspired by humor and the creative process--professionals in the comedy field and students of creative writing, comedy, literary humor, communications, broadcast/media, and the humanities.

Literature happens in the mind. Literary texts are the product of an intentional mind addressing another mind, and language is the instrument in this cognitive mediation. This work emerges in the confluence of three different research areas: literary studies, cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. Its object is a selection of prose works by Peter Weiss, covering three different subgenres: experimental, autobiographical, and historical prose. Within this research framework this study addresses the question of how we make sense of literary text, i.e., how literary texts become semantically and existentially meaningful and what cognitive processes are involved in this task. One second question explored is how mental processes such as perception, attention or memory are represented in the selected texts, and how this conveyance confirms or differs from the cognitive study of these processes. The main aim of this work is thus not to provide an alternative interpretation for the selected texts, but to explain how the existing ones are made possible on account of the present knowledge about the human mind.

Lesbian Discourses is the first book-length treatment of lesbian text and discourse. It looks at what changing images of community American and British lesbian authors have communicated since 1970, how this change can be traced in texts such as pamphlets, magazines and blogs, and why this change has taken place. At the heart of the book is a detailed linguistic analysis, which is embedded in a discussion of the relevant socio-political contexts and discourse practices, and supplemented by interview data. The book can more generally be read as an example of how to do textual analysis in social research, in particular how to engage in the discourse-historical and socio-cognitive study of collective identity. Despite its text-centered approach, the book avoids being overly technical and will therefore be of interest not only to postgraduate students and researchers in linguistics but also to those in anthropology, history and sociology, especially women's/gender studies.

This is a collection of papers that resulted from the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Shanghai International Studies University in September 2005. Their common focus lies in aspects of the contrastive semantics and pragmatics in a wide variety of languages. These aspects include several themes that arise from Gricean and neo-Gricean considerations of contrastive pragmatics; from cognitive semantics and pragmatics, including metaphor and issues that relate to the logical structure of quantification, modality and demonstration; and from contrastive lexical, constructional and discourse semantics. The languages discussed include Afrikaans, Amele, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Gokana, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Yakut and Zulu.

Inspired by Frank Palmer's work, this book addresses a set of specific topics pertaining to the description of modality in English and places them in a broader context. A number of more general theoretical and typological matters are also raised, which bear upon the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. The methodology adopted is mostly functional-typological, though some reference is made to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from cognitive linguistics to parametric variation. Modal meanings are seen to extend beyond particular lexical and grammatical exponents, through sentential semantics and into actual contexts of use. At the same time, the study of modality seems to challenge commonly held views on the relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis. Other languages discussed include Brazilian Portuguese, Classical and Modern Greek and Spanish.

Against the general neglect of attention phenomena in linguistics, this study, anchored in Cognitive Semantics, offers a first systematic adaptation of Leonard Talmy's groundbreaking model of linguistic attention, applied to Webbased data of English from an emerging lexical network of emo(tion). Some fifty basic attention-related factors combine to yield increasingly complex patterns of interaction, convergence, and conflict affecting all levels of linguistic recombination, from simplex morphemes up to the text format. Differences in attentional profiles of linguistic representations may well account for conceptual alternativity, another fundamental cognitive principle in language: In their verbal interactions, interlocutors, in production and reception, will have to attend to bottom-up mechanisms and top-down strategies of attention in organizing conceptual content and conveying subtle ceptions of reality.

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.

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.

This book deals with two different pragmatic approaches to textual communication: (i) the mainstream approach followed by the 'Ash'ari s, Hanafi s and Mu'tazili s, (ii) the salafite approach followed mainly by the Hanbali s, defended and elaborated by Ibn Taymiyyah. One of the primary aims of the book is to explore and formulate several Muslim legal theorists' pragmatic theories, communicative principles and linguistic views, construct them in the form of models and set them within a general uniform framework. Another aim is to reveal a corpus of information and data which, though highly relevant to modern pragmatics, is still unknown. This study, which can be seen as an extensive introduction to 'medieval Islamic pragmatics', is the first attempt to examine the approaches followed by the Salafi s or the mainstream from a pragmatic viewpoint. There has been no attempt to explain the principles and the strategies utilised by the medieval Sunni Muslim legal theorists in their account of how communication works and how successful interpretation is achieved. Of course, a lot of work has been done on different Islamic sects and their different positions over the interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah, but these studies fall short of delving into the underlying communicative principles that motivate their differences over interpretation. The author's formulation of the Muslim legal theorists' views is enhanced by setting up a reliable theoretical foundation and by delving into their underlying philosophical principles. This involves relating the legal theorists' insights into interpretation and communication to their relevant ontological, epistemological and theological outlooks, and comparing these insights with their modern pragmatic counterparts.

This indispensable volume contains articles that represent the best of Huang's work on the syntax-semantics interface over the last two decades. It includes three general topics: (a) questions, indefinites and quantification, (b) anaphora, (c) lexical structure and the syntax of events.

This fascinating examination of the relations between grammar, text and discourse is designed to provoke genuinely critical discussion on key issues in discourse analysis which are not always clearly identified and explored.

The enquiry into discourse analysis that Zellig Harris initiated 50 years ago raised a number of problematic issues that have remained unresolved ever since. What these are all centrally concerned with is the relationship between the analysis of the formal properties of text and the significance that is assigned to them in discourse interpretation. Widdowson explores this relationship and introduces the notion of pretext as an additional factor in the general interpretative process. He also focuses attention specifically on the work of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the light of the issues discussed.

The result is a stimulating volume that makes explicit the distinctions between the key concepts of text and discourse, and between context, co-text and pretext. It shows how these are related and can provide a theoretical frame of reference for the critical evaluation of current issues in discourse analysis.

This volume seeks to illustrate the fundamental role of language in political action, focusing on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus that was queried through special software with the aim of identifying regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, with classical discourse analysis, which seeks to investigate naturally occurring language in the context in which it is produced. Interpreting the field of politics quite widely, to include news reporting and a quasi-judicial inquiry into the behavior of politicians and journalists, discourses in the USA and the UK are considered. The central purpose of the volume is to gain insights not just into language, and the ways in which we can investigate it through a corpus, but also into the ways in which political action is realized through discourse.

The articles collected in this volume present different aspects of the use of typed feature structures in theoretical and computational linguistics. It covers a wide range of linguistics theories (CCG, Construction Grammar, HPSG, LTAG), a wide range of linguistic phenomena (aspect, concord, idioms, passive), and a wide range of applications (parsing, question answering, semantic composition).

Examines the rhetorical role of images in communicating environmental ideas.

In The Corinthian Correspondence, Frank W. Hughes and Robert Jewett argue that there were eight original letters by the Apostle Paul to the church in Corinth. In the first part of the book, they use literary and redaction criticism to show the reasons for the partition theory of 1 and 2 Corinthians. Analyzing each of the eight letters using rhetorical criticism, they show how the original Corinthian letters were edited and reshaped into 1 and 2 Corinthians in the New Testament. After reflections on the rhetoric of these letters and the historical meaning of the reshaping of the images of Paul, a final chapter traces the consequences of the reshaping of the Corinthian correspondence and the adoption of the bound book (codex) instead of the original papyrus scrolls. Several figures help the reader understand the redactional process, and a new translation of the eight reconstructed Corinthian letters is provided.

This accessible 'how to' text is about classroom interaction - how to study it and how to use that knowledge to improve teaching and learning. Actually showing what critical, constructionist, sociocultural perspectives on teaching, learning, and schooling are and what they can do, it makes discourse analysis understandable and useful to teachers and other nonlinguists.

Using Discourse Analysis to Improve Classroom Interaction:

• offers teachers the powerful tools of discourse analysis as a way of understanding the complex dynamics of human interaction that constitute effective, equitable teaching and learning
• guides readers step-by-step through how to build their interactional awareness to improve their teaching
• includes 'Try It Out' exercises to engage readers in learning how to respond to the social dynamics of their classrooms for the purpose of improving classroom interaction.

Proceeding from simple illustrations to more complex layering of analytical concepts, short segments of talk, transcribed to highlight important points, are used to explain and illustrate the concepts. By the time readers get to the complicated issues addressed in this text they are ready to deal with some of teaching's toughest challenges, and have the tools to build positive relationships among their students so that all can participate equally in the classroom.

Through a critical analysis of ancient African texts that predate Greco-Roman treatises Cecil Blake revisits the roots of rhetorical theory and challenges what is often advanced as the "darkness metaphor" -- the rhetorical construction of Africa and Africans. Blake offers a thorough examination of Ptah-hotep and core African ethical principles (Maat) and engages rhetorical scholarship within the wider discourse of African development. In so doing, he establishes a direct relationship between rhetoric and development studies in non-western societies and highlights the prospect for applying such principles to ameliorating the development malaise of the continent.

The distinguished philosopher of language, Francois Recanati, has proposed a wide-ranging truth-conditional model of pragmatics. In this collection, various aspects of his theories are addressed by distinguished contributors, and are then commented on or answered by Recanati himself so that the reader is drawn into the central debate within philosophy of language and cognitive science as to what kind of pragmatics system is needed.

Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, "Dangerous Writing" outlines a political economic theory of composition. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the analytical power of students' writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy and without, that tend to wed higher education with the aims and logics of "fast-capitalism."
Since the 1980s and the "social turn" in composition studies and other disciplines, scholars in this field have conceived writing in college as explicitly embedded in socio-rhetorical situations beyond the classroom. From this conviction develops a commitment to teach writing with an emphasis on analyzing the social and political dimensions of rhetoric.
Ironically, though a leftist himself, Tony Scott's analysis finds the academic left complicit with the forces in American culture that tend, in his view, to compromise education. By focusing on the structures of labor and of institutions that enforce those structures, Scott finds teachers and administrators are too easily swept along with the inertia of a hyper-commodified society in which students---especially working class students---are often positioned as commodities, themselves. "Dangerous Writing," then, is a critique of the field as much as it is a critique of capitalism. Ultimately, Scott's eye is on the institution and its structures, and it is these that he finds most in need of transformation.