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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
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.
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.
Far-right populist politics have arrived in the mainstream. We are now witnessing the shameless normalization of a political discourse built around nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. But what does this change mean? What caused it? And how does far-right populist discourse work? The Politics of Fear traces the trajectory of far-right politics from the margins of the political landscape to its very centre. It explores the social and historical mechanisms at play, and expertly ties these to the "micro-politics" of far-right language and discourse. From speeches to cartoons to social media posts, Ruth Wodak systematically analyzes the texts and images used by these groups, laying bare the strategies, rhetoric and half-truths the far-right employ. The revised second edition of this best-selling book includes: A range of vignettes analyzing specific instances of far-right discourse in detail. Expanded discussion of the "normalization" of far-right discourse. A new chapter exploring the challenges to liberal democracy. An updated glossary of far-right parties and movements. More discussion of the impact of social media on the rise of the far-right. Critical, analytical and impassioned, The Politics of Fear is essential reading for anyone looking to understand how far-right and populist politics have moved into the mainstream, and what we can do about it.
"A highly effective introduction to the range of approaches found in discourse analysis and a lively and intellectually stimulating Reader." - David Silverman, Goldsmiths College, University of London, U.K. Discourse Theory and Practice is much more than a collection of key classic articles and papers in the field of discourse analysis. The aim of the book is to introduce students to the major figures in the field, and to some of their writings which, combined with the interspersed editorial commentaries, should allow students to understand the key epistemological and methodological issues of discourse theory and practice. The Reader is organized into four coherent parts, namely: Foundations and Building Blocks; Social Interaction; Minds, Selves and Sense-Making; and Culture and Social Relations. Key readings include works by Stuart Hall, Jonathan Potter, David Silverman, Erving Goffman, Teun van Dijk, Derek Edwards and Michael Billig. Chapters introduce the student to each individual and their reading, contextualizing each in terms of their contribution to the field, theoretical standpoint and individual method of doing discourse analysis. The many didactic elements of the book make it ideal as an introduction to the study of discourse for all students of psychology, sociology, linguistics or cultural studies.
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).
The Elements of Style (1918), by William Strunk, Jr., and E..B. White, is an American English writing style guide. It is the best-known, most influential prescriptive treatment of English grammar and usage, and often is required reading and usage in U.S. high school and university composition classes. This edition of The Elements of Style details eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, "a few matters of form," and a list of commonly misused words and expressions.
Examines the rhetorical role of images in communicating environmental ideas.
"Thoughts and Utterances" is the first sustained investigation of
two distinctions that are fundamental to all theories of utterance
understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the
distinction between what is explicitly and what is implicitly
communicated. The central claim of this book is that the linguistically
encoded meaning of an utterance underdetermines the propositions
explicitly communicated by the utterance. The arguments and
analyses are developed within the relevance-theoretic framework of
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, so the approach is resolutely
cognitive, focussing on the representational levels and mental
processes involved in utterance interpretation. However, extensive
comparison is made throughout with other pragmatic frameworks,
including those of Paul Grice, Francois Recanati and Kent Bach,
which are more philosophically based, and that of Stephen Levinson,
which has a more linguistic and computational orientation. Finally, this volume assesses and attempts to reconcile the different perspectives of theories of human semantic competence and accounts of the pragmatic processes involved in communication and interpretation.
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."
This volume examines the various linguistic and cultural problems which point towards the practical impossibility of conveying in one language exactly what was originally said in another. The author provides an exhaustive discussion of Spanish translations from English texts, including non-standard registers. Equivalence across languages, that most elusive of terms in the whole theory of translation, is discussed in terms of linguistic equivalence, textual equivalence, cultural equivalence and pragmatic equivalence. Other aspects studied include how translation has been perceived over the centuries, the differences and the similarities between a writer and a translator, plus a detailed examination of translation as process, all of which bring the problems of literary translation into perspective.
The book is devoted to conceptual metaphors in English according to the level of abstraction in their target domains. The findings reveal a striking difference between mappings onto concrete domains and mappings onto abstract ones. In metaphors with concrete target domains, a preexisting similarity between the source and target concepts can be revealed or highlighted. In contrast, when the target domain is abstract, the similarity between the source and target concepts is created rather than merely revealed or highlighted. To some degree, creation of similarity is possible even with concrete domains, but in abstract ones it is necessary, not optional. This is because abstract concepts have little or no schematic structure in the first place. Since abstract concepts are classified in language as kinds of physical objects, they inherit rudimentary physical properties, such as density, weight, temperature, etc. Looking at metaphors from this perspective allows us to refine the existing theories of metaphor.
This study investigates three different post-modifying adjective constructions in the English language. While English adjectives generally precede the entities they modify, they may also occur in postmodifying position. This study assumes that the different postmodifying constructions are a positional variation of attributive premodification. The support for this claim is derived from a detailed analysis of the general syntax and semantics of adjectives as well as a cross-check of previous theories with a wide range of actual language examples taken from computerized corpora. An approach from the Prague School 'Functional Sentence Perspective' enables this study to accomplish an integrated view of adjectival postmodification.
"A Counter-History of Composition" contests the foundational
disciplinary assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric
represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition.
Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and
concurrently dismissed as innate, intuitive, and unteachable,
whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for
producing argumentative texts. Counter to this, Byron Hawk
identifies vitalism as the ground for producing rhetorical
texts-the product of complex material relations rather than the
product of chance. Through insightful historical analysis ranging
from classical Greek rhetoric to contemporary complexity theory,
Hawk defines three forms of vitalism (oppositional, investigative,
and complex) and argues for their application in the environments
where students write and think today.
The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities.
Die Arbeit bildet den ersten umfassenden Beitrag zur Fachsprache der Ökologie und des Umweltschutzes. Sie basiert auf den Methoden der neueren Fachsprachenforschung. Weitere Anhaltspunkte bieten die Erkenntnisse der Lexikografie, Semantik, Pragmatik, Textsortenlinguistik, Wortbildungsforschung und Kontrastivität. Ökologie und Umweltschutz stellen zusammen ein horizontal und vertikal in hohem Maße differenziertes Fachgebiet dar. Auch bezüglich der Anwendungssituationen ist die ökologische Fachsprache vertikal mannigfaltig geschichtet. Daraus folgt, dass sich auch die Vielfalt der relevanten Textsorten auf dem Gebiet als sehr groß erweist. Einer näheren Analyse wird die Textsorte Umweltwörterbuch unterzogen. Im Vordergrund der Wortschatz-Betrachtung stehen semantische Verfälschungen in fachexterner Kommunikation, Euphemismen und der kaum diskutierte Aspekt der Mehrfachbenennung.
Why are today's students not realizing their potential as critical thinkers? Although educators have, for two decades, incorporated contemporary cultural studies into the teaching of composition and rhetoric, many students lack the powers of self-expression that are crucial for effecting social change. "Acts of Enjoyment" presents a critique of current pedagogies and introduces a psychoanalytical approach in teaching composition and rhetoric. Thomas Rickert builds upon the advances of cultural studies and its focus on societal trends and broadens this view by placing attention on the conscious and subconscious thought of the individual. By introducing the cultural theory work of Slavoj Zizek, Rickert seeks to encourage personal and social invention--rather than simply following a course of unity, equity, or consensus that is so prevalent in current writing instruction. He argues that writing should not be treated as a simple skill, as a naï ve self expression, or as a tool for personal advancement, but rather as a reflection of social and psychical forces, such as jouissance (enjoyment/sensual pleasure), desire, and fantasy-creating a more sophisticated, panoptic form. The goal of the psychoanalytical approach is to highlight the best pedagogical aspects of cultural studies to allow for well-rounded individual expression, ultimately providing the tools necessary to address larger issues of politics, popular culture, ideology, and social transformation.
This book addresses the problems of the nature of the category of aspect, its formal expression and its relation to Action modes, to the Aorist/Imperfect and Perfect/Non-Perfect distinctions. The discussion is largely based on data from Bulgarian -- a Slavonic language where aspect as a grammatical category systematically coexists not only with verbal prefixation, but also with temporal boundedness, correlation and, in the nominal sphere, definiteness. Cross-language parallels with English and French data and the mapping of Bulgarian structures to notions drawn from the «western tradition of aspectual study result in the outline of a framework for an integrated study of the expression of aspectuality in languages belonging to different language groups. Refuting existing views of aspect as a «compensatory phenomenon for nominal definiteness, the book presents arguments in favour of a systematic relation between verbal prefixation and NP quantification in Slavonic languages and of a compositional, syntactic dimension of aspectual analysis.
Rhetorical scholarship has found rich source material in the disciplines of advertising, communications research, and consumer behavior. Advertising, considered as a kind of communication, is distinguished by its focus on causing action. Its goal is not simply to communicate ideas, educate, or persuade, but to move a prospect closer to a purchase. The editors of "Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric" have been involved in developing the scholarship of advertising rhetoric for many years. In this volume they have assembled the most current and authoritative new perspectives on this topic. The chapter authors all present previously unpublished concepts that represent advances beyond what is already known about advertising rhetoric. In the opening and closing chapters editors Ed McQuarrie and Barbara Phillips provide an integrative view of the current state of the art in advertising rhetoric.
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.
The present 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 attempts to formulate formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.
"A Companion to Rhetoric" offers the first major survey in two
decades of the field of rhetorical studies and of the practice of
rhetorical theory and criticism across a range of disciplines.
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