This book explores the results of language contact in Michif, an endangered Canadian language that is traditionally claimed to combine a French noun phrase with a Cree verb phrase, and is hence usually considered a 'mixed' language. Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen provide a detailed account of the Michif noun phrase in which they examine issues such as the mass/count distinction, plurality, gender, articles, and demonstratives. Their analysis reveals that while parts of the Michif noun phrase have French lexical sources, and the language has certain features that are borrowed from French, its syntax in fact looks very much like that found in other Algonquian languages. The final chapter of the book discusses the wider implications of these findings: the authors argue that contact does not create a whole new language category and that Michif should instead be considered an Algonquian language with French contact influence; they also extend their analysis to other mixed languages and creoles. The book will be of interest to Algonquian scholars, formal linguists in the fields of syntax, morphology, and semantics, and to all those working on issues of language contact.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction is the first book to provide a concise, straightforward guide for students and researchers who are interested in understanding and using discourse analysis. The authors reflect on the practice of analyzing discourse and the potential for revealing the processes of social construction that constitute social and organizational life. Addressed to graduate students, academics, and experienced researchers, this book is a comprehensive guide for those new to discourse analysis as well as for researchers in need of a complement to other modes of inquiry. 

Silly rabbit Your argument is ill-founded.

Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed dose of old-school logic (really old-school, a la Aristotle).

Here are cogent explanations of the straw man fallacy, the slippery slope argument, the ad hominem attack, and other common attempts at reasoning that actually fall short plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of animals who (adorably) commit every logical faux pas. Rabbit thinks a strange light in the sky must be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (the appeal to ignorance). And Lion doesn t believe that gas emissions harm the planet because, if that were true, he wouldn t like the result (the argument from consequences).

Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to YouTube comments which makes this geek-chic book a must for anyone in the habit of holding opinions. It s the antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals "

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.

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology.

Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple, diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the postcolonial aesthetics through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries.

Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anik Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.

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.

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.

"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 volume brings together various strands of research focusing on aspects of the syntax of agreement, and the role that agreement plays in linguistic theory. The essays collected here show how and why agreement has emerged in recent years as the central theoretical construct in minimalism. Although the theoretical context of the volume is minimalist in character, Boeckx formulates formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.

This volume is about 'dislocation' - the removal of phrases from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis.

This book builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. While there exists previous work on future-referring expressions, this is the first treatment of such a variety of expressions in a formal semantic framework. Arguments presented herein explicate the meanings of these expressions, and account for similarities and differences among them. Shared is a future-oriented model with a systematic alternation between inertial and bouletic ordering sources that provide a new way of understanding the age-old future Law of the Excluded Middle, evident in all of the future-referring expressions. A difference found among these meanings is the presence or absence of progressive- or generic-like aspect in a position higher than the future modal. These very high aspectual operators affect the temporal argument of the modal's accessibility relation, with detectable effects that can be used to determine scope relations in future conditionals. Copley's analysis thus addresses a number of issues of great interest to formal semanticists, from modal and aspectual semantics, to the mapping of functional elements in the clause, to the logical form of conditionals.

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.

A comprehensive guide to academic research methods that focuses on two of the world's fastest growing industries... As tourism continues to play a larger role in economies all over the world, record numbers of students are flocking to college and university programs in this specialized field of study. Charged with writing a comprehensive thesis that relates to their special hospitality area of interest, many of these students--some of whom are preparing a thesis for the first time in their academic careers--experience difficulty in organizing a project on such a scale. Designed as a companion to the student who is writing such a thesis, How to Research and Write a Thesis in Hospitality and Tourism is a beginner's guide to basic research and writing specifically on this burgeoning field of study. This hands-on guide helps students pull together the various components of a thesis in an organized, coherent fashion--from the cover page to the bibliography--and all the chapters in between. Students learn everything they need to know about developing, designing, and completing an original research study including:

• How to develop an original thesis
• How to conduct a thorough literature review
• How to write a knockout introduction
• How to write effective chapter summaries
• How to prepare footnotes and bibliography
• How to prepare a persuasive cover letter
• How to obtain, record, analyze, and interpret data
• And much more!