This groundbreaking collection showcases Jenny Cheshire's influential work in bringing greater attention to quantitative analysis of socio-grammatical variation and builds upon her contributions with new lines of inquiry pushing sociolinguistic research forward. Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, the volume is structured in six parts with a particular focus on syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, each section turning a lens on a different aspect of socio-grammatical variation. The first sections of the volume focus on the role of structure, its relevance for sociolinguistic production and perception and the impact of social structure on formal structure. Two sections look at the interface of variationist research with other aspects of linguistic research, including generative syntax and discourse-pragmatic features. The final sections consider the importance of integrating broader external factors in socio-grammatical variation, exploring the impact of interactional pressures in the sociolinguistic environment and the role of multi-ethnic contact varieties. Taken together, this volume demonstrates the critical role of socio-grammatical variation in our understanding of language change as a holistic process.

In this original study, Vernon Robbins brings together social-scientific and literary-critical approaches to explore early Christianity. Treating its canonical texts as ideological constructs, Robbins investigates Christianity as a cultural phenomenon, and expounds and develops a system of socio-rhetorical criticism.
"The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse" first establishes a concept of culture and then combines it with Geertz' anthropological concept of 'thick description'. Subsequently, the relation of texts to society and culture is discussed. In this manner, multiple methods of interpretation are used in an organized and programmatic way, allowing the reader distinctly new insights into the development of early Christianity.

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.

This book offers an accessible, practical and engaging guide that provides sample instructional activities supported by theoretical background information, with a focus on the nature of the instructional process in relation to several variables. It approaches instructional models, strategies, methods, techniques, tactics and planning from a new perspective and shares effective tips to help readers better understand the instructional process and its theoretical elements. The book addresses the following questions: What is the nature of the instructional process? What are the classifications of contemporary models and strategies developed within the instructional process? Which groups yield the most effective methods and techniques, and how can they best be practically implemented? What are the instructional tactics teachers need to take into consideration, in which groups are they collected, and which tips can help us employ each tactic? Additionally, readers can adapt the book's ready-to-use sample activities to their own educational settings. Overall, this book offers an enlightening discussion on contemporary practices related to the teaching process, a broad and holistic theoretical framework, and an ideal reference source for all students and scholars who are interested in the educational sciences.

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.

This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual and logical semantics, historical development, and acquisition. There are also specific chapters on modality in Zapotec and American Sign Language, which show the range of forms that modal notions can take. To assist its tutorial function, the book closes with a comprehensive conceptual outline of all the chapters. Key features: new series textbook covers the essentials of modality

Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge. A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.

Studies in Linguistics and Cognition offers a comprehensive collection of essays in the interdisciplinary fields of linguistics and cognition. These essays explore the connections between cognitive approaches and different theoretical and applied linguistic theories, such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics and semantics among others, providing revealing insights into the nature of the cognitive processes underlying language. The authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, ranging from the study of figurative language, phrasal verbs and humorous discourse to the analysis of fuzzy concepts, attitude verbs and neologisms. These and other related questions are dealt with in this integrative overview of the linguistic and cognitive processes. The volume is structured in three main sections, each corresponding to a distinct level of meaning description: Section I deals with Lexicon and Cognition, Section II with Semantics and Cognition and Section III with Communication and Cognition. This book provides thought-provoking reading for linguists, pragmaticians, psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as scholars in computational linguistics and natural language processing who are interested in gaining a better understanding of the interface between cognition and linguistics.

Iceberg semantics is a new framework of Boolean semantics for mass nouns and count nouns in which the interpretation of a noun phrase rises up from a generating base and floats with its base on its Boolean part set, like an iceberg. The framework is shown to preserve the attractive features of classical Boolean semantics for count nouns; the book argues that Iceberg semantics forms a much better framework for studying mass nouns than the classical theory does. Iceberg semantics uses its notion of base to develop a semantic theory of the differences between mass nouns and count nouns and between different types of mass nouns, in particular between prototypical mass nouns (here called mess mass nouns) like water and mud versus object mass nouns (here called neat mass nouns) like poultry and pottery. The book shows in detail how and why neat mass nouns pattern semantically both with mess mass nouns and with count nouns. Iceberg semantics is a compositional theory and in Iceberg semantics the semantic distinctions defined apply to noun phrases of any complexity. The book studies in depth the semantics of classifier noun phrases (like three glasses of wine) and measure noun phrases (like three liters of wine). The classical wisdom is that classifier interpretations are count. Recent literature has argued compellingly that measure interpretations are mass. The book shows that both connections follow from the basic architecture of Iceberg semantics. Audience: Scholars and students in linguistics - in particular semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics and syntax - and neighbouring disciplines like logic, philosophy of language, and cognitive science.

In this monograph, the author offers a new way of examining the much discussed notion of identity through the theoretical and methodological approach called multimodal interaction analysis. Moving beyond a traditional discourse analysis focus on spoken language, this book expands our understanding of identity construction by looking both at language and its intersection with such paralinguistic features as gesture, as well as how we use space in interaction. The author illustrates this new approach through an extended ethnographic study of two women living in Germany. Examples of their everyday interactions elucidate how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to extend our understanding of how identity is produced and negotiated in context from a more holistic point of view.

The Glot International State-of-the-Article books constitute the ideal solution for every-one who wants to have a good idea of what the others are doing but does not have time to follow the developments in all other parts of the field on a day to day basis. All articles were previously published in Glot International and have been revised and updated, and special attention was given to the extensive bibliography, which constitutes an important part of each overview article. Among the essays in the first volume are overview articles dealing with VP ellipsis (by Kyle Johnson), Ergativity (by Alana Johns), tone (by San Duanmu), acquisition of phonology (by Paula Fikkert), and semantic change (by Elizabeth Closs Traugott). The second volume offers articles on subjects ranging from the development of grammars (by David Lightfoot) and markedness in phonology (by Keren Rice) to the syntactic representation of linguistic events (by Sara Thomas Rosen), optionality in Optimality syntax (by Gereon Muller) and the nature of coordination (by Ljiljana Progovac).

"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.

The New Rhetoric is founded on the idea that since "argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced," says Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and they rely, in particular, for their theory of argumentation on the twin concepts of universal and particular audiences: while every argument is directed to a specific individual or group, the orator decides what information and what approaches will achieve the greatest adherence according to an ideal audience. This ideal, Perelman explains, can be embodied, for example, "in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite." Like particular audiences, then, the universal audience is never fixed or absolute but depends on the orator, the content and goals of the argument, and the particular audience to whom the argument is addressed. These considerations determine what information constitutes "facts" and "reasonableness" and thus help to determine the universal audience that, in turn, shapes the orator's approach. The adherence of an audience is also determined by the orator's use of values, a further key concept of the New Rhetoric. Perelman's treatment of value and his view of epideictic rhetoric sets his approach apart from that of the ancients and of Aristotle in particular. Aristotle's division of rhetoric into three genres-forensic, deliberative, and epideictic-is largely motivated by the judgments required for each: forensic or legal arguments require verdicts on past action, deliberative or political rhetoric seeks judgment on future action, and epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric concerns values associated with praise or blame and seeks no specific decisions. For Aristotle, the epideictic genre was of limited importance in the civic realm since it did not concern facts or policies. Perelman, in contrast, believes not only that epideictic rhetoric warrants more attention, but that the values normally limited to that genre are in fact central to all argumentation. "Epideictic oratory," Perelman argues, "has significant and important argumentation for strengthening the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds." These values are central to the persuasiveness of arguments in all rhetorical genres since the orator always attempts to "establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience."

This book documents Baudrillard's encounters with semiology and structuralism, detailing his efforts to destroy structural analyses from the inside by setting signification ablaze with his concept of symbolic exchange. The text also reveals Baudrillard's difficulties in attempting to go beyond signification. It situates Baudrillard's work in the broad spectrum of European and American semiotic traditions. The book also traces the development of his key concept of symbolic exchange over 30 years of theorizing. It discusses Baudrillard's engagements with and debts to French theatre and literature, with reference to Antoin Artaud, Alfred Jarry and Victor Segalen. Finally, it considers Baudrillard's relation to the thought of Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, de Certeau and Lyotard.

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.

New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.

Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new techniques from a broad range of contemporary dramatists, including Sarah Ruhl, Suzan Lori-Parks and Young Jean Lee. New features in this edition include an in-depth study of the adaptation of classical texts in contemporary playwright and the utilizing new technologies, such as YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs to create alternative dramatic forms.

The author 's step-by-step approach offers the reader new models for:

• narrative
• dialogue
• character
• monologue
• hybrid plays

This is a working text for playwrights, presenting a range of illuminating new exercises suitable for everyone from the workshop student to the established writer. New Playwriting Strategies is an essential resource for anyone studying and writing drama today.

Rather than approach debate primarily as a form of interscholastic competition, this unique book identifies it as an activity that occurs in many settings: scientific conferences, newspaper op-ed pages, classrooms, courts of law, and everyday domestic life. Debate is discussed as an integral part of academic inquiry in all disciplines. As in all fields of study, various competing views are advanced and supported; "Debate and Critical Analysis" is designed to better prepare the student to assess and engage them.
This text posits four characteristics of true debate -- argument development, clash, extension, and perspective -- which form the basic structure of the book. Each concept or aspect of argument covered is illustrated by an example drawn from contemporary or historical sources, allowing the reader to actually see the techniques and strategies at work. All popular forms of competitive debate, including "policy," "Lincoln-Douglas," "value-oriented," and "parliamentary," are discussed in detail -- as embedded in the actual topical controversies with which they are concerned. In this way, the student can learn the structures, reasoning processes, and strategies that may be employed, as well as the practical affairs of debating, from brief-writing to the flowsheet.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

This important volume explores alternative ways in which those involved in the field of speech communication have attempted to find a philosophical grounding for rhetoric. Recognizing that rhetoric can be supported in a wide variety of ways, this text examines eight different philosophies of rhetoric: realism, relativism, rationalism, idealism, materialism, existentialism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism. The value of this book lies in its pluralistic and comparative approach to rhetorical theory. Although rhetoric may be the more difficult road to philosophy, the fact that it is being traversed by a group of authors largely from speech communication demonstrates important growth in this field. Ultimately, there is recognition that if different thinkers can have solid reasons to adhere to disparate philosophies, serious communication problems can be eliminated. Rhetoric and Philosophy will assist scholars in choosing from among the many philosphical starting places for rhetoric.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This edited collection draws together diverse international work on formulaic language such as idioms, collocations, lexical bundles and phrasal verbs. Formulaic sequences are more or less fixed word combinations such as idioms, collocations, lexical bundles, phrasal verbs and so on. Study in this area has grown over the past fifteen years, despite the fact that there are no academic journals or conferences devoted to this topic. This edited collection is an attempt to draw together the diverse international work on formulaic language. It features an introduction by Dr Regina Weinert, a pioneer and expert in the study of formulaic language in acquisition. The authors have an international scope, from China and Italy to Armenia, Canada and Britain. The book is divided into three sections: Formulaic Language in Acquisition and Pedagogy; Identification and Psycholinguistic Processing of Formulaic Language; and, Communicative Functions of Formulaic Language. The topics of the papers are as varied as the geographic locations of the authors - critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, memorization, corpus analysis, specific languages such as Arabic, and even Beowulf and blogging language. This volume represents a step forward for the study of formulaic language, offering diverse, often previously unexplored perspectives from international researchers, advancing knowledge in innovative ways. It makes a fresh contribution the growing number of works on this topic and will appeal to researchers and academics working with formulaic language throughout linguistics.

This volume is concerned with aspects of word meaning within the general methodological framework of generative grammar. Its aim is to diagnose linguists' failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps toward satisfying these requirements. The author argues that despite the objections of some philsophers, a scientifically respectable theory of word meaning is possible.