This volume is a collection of original contributions that address the problem of words and their meaning. This represents a still difficult and controversial area within various disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Although all of these disciplines have to tackle the issue, so far there is no overarching methodology agreed upon by researchers. The aim of the volume is to provide answers based on empirical linguistics methods that are relevant across all the disciplines and provide a bridge among researchers looking at word meaning from different angles.

Contemporary storytelling provides a welcome refuge for those seeking the antidote to the increasingly impersonal experiences of the technology age. Bare data and facts don't always have the ability to inspire or teach, but storytelling, if effective, will always touch its audience. Spaulding has compiled and provided written analysis for a series of talks covering subjects all relating to the importance of storytelling here and now in the 'Age of Information'. She campaigns for the 'Virtual Reality of the Mind', and discusses the Story as Social Glue, driving home the point that the word is mightier than the word processor.

Focusing on ancient rhetoric outside of the dominant Western tradition, this collection examines rhetorical practices in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, and China. The book uncovers alternate ways of understanding human behavior and explores how these rhetorical practices both reflected and influenced their cultures. The essays address issues of historiography and raise questions about the application of Western rhetorical concepts to these very different ancient cultures. A chapter on suggestions for teaching each of these ancient rhetorics is included.

This book explores the gap that has developed between two sides in linguistics: the formal tradition and the functional tradition. It discusses fundamental issues such as tense, aspect and action by examining and comparing insights from the two traditions with a view to determining whether there are any possibilities of future bride-building between the two approaches. This study focuses on comparing the actual output of different linguistic approaches and examines their 'usefulness'. A major aim is, therefore, to evaluate and identify the most useful approach.

Focusing on ancient rhetoric outside of the dominant Western tradition, this collection examines rhetorical practices in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, and China. The book uncovers alternate ways of understanding human behavior and explores how these rhetorical practices both reflected and influenced their cultures. The essays address issues of historiography and raise questions about the application of Western rhetorical concepts to these very different ancient cultures. A chapter on suggestions for teaching each of these ancient rhetorics is included.

Over the last several decades, the study of discourse processes has moved from the complementary efforts characteristic of multidisciplinary research, to the explicitly integrative focus of interdisciplinary research. Some organizations have supported the methodological and conceptual merger of areas like literary studies, psychology, linguistics, and education. As evident in this special issue, research concerning personal involvement in narrative discourse has benefited from these developments. The five studies supported in this issue examine a range of potential determinants of personal involvement in narrative discourse. These include overt verbalization of thoughts and feelings, foregrounding, preference for genre and protagonists, relevance of the content of a text to the reader, and identifying with a character. These studies also examine different aspects of what is absorbed by the reader, including sophisticated forms of questioning, lasting appreciation of story points, involvement with story characters, commitment to story-consistent beliefs, and changes in the sense of self. Collectively, these studies challenge the conception of what it means to understand media presentations of fictional narratives as well as the conception of the strategies through which such understanding is attained.

In this book, the term "Critical Theory" has a double meaning. Author George Snedeker refers to both the work of the Frankfurt School and other neomarxist social theorists as well as any recent work in literary criticism. Using "Critical Theory," Snedeker explores the continuing relevance of new marxist social and political theory. He provides an evaluation of the contributions to contemporary social theory of the main figures of Western Marxism, including Gerog Lukacs, Edward W. Said, Raymond Williams, J rgen Habermas, and Oliver C. Cox.

"Meaning" brings together some of the most significant philosophical work on linguistic representation and understanding, presenting canonical essays on core questions in the philosophy of language.

This anthology includes classic articles by key figures such as Frege, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, and Davidson; and recent reactions to this work by philosophers including Mark Wilson, Scott Soames, James Higginbotham, and Frank Jackson. Topics discussed include analyticity; translational indeterminacy; theories of reference; meaning as use; the nature of linguistic competence; truth and meaning; and relations between semantics and metaphysics. An extensive introduction gives an overview and detailed critical evaluation of the seminal views and arguments represented in the anthology. Meaning is an ideal text for courses in philosophy of language and semantics.

This special issue shows how accessibility phenomena need to be studied from a linguistic and psycholinguistic angle, and in the latter case from interpretation, as well as production. The contributions augment the growing knowledge of accessibility in text and discourse processing. They also illuminate how accessibility is marked in a text or a discourse, how readers and listeners respond to those markings, and how mental representations evolve and change as a direct result of accessibility. The editors hope is that the text affects the readers' representations in ways that linguists and psycholinguists theorize as beneficial.

English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. In each location in which English is spoken it absorbs some of the idiosyncracies of the language native to that region, and one of the most fascinating areas of research for World Englishes is the African context. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English. Vivian de Klerk presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the historical development of this variety of English, and of English in South Africa more generally. The book outlines how the corpus of spoken Xhosa English was designed and compiled, and discusses the criteria relating to informants, the use of spoken rather than written data, and the codes and transcription conventions. The syntactic and pragmatic features of Xhosa English as demonstrated by the corpus are described in detail, and two chapters focus on the use of the discourse markers 'actually' and 'well'. The second section of this book examines the implications of the corpus findings.Vivian de Klerk looks at the implications of the use of this variety of English in educational, legal, social, cultural and everyday contexts. The final chapter of the book speculates as to the future of this fascinating variety of English in a globalised world. This cutting-edge study will be of interest to researchers in world Englishes, language variation and corpus linguistics.

Over the last twenty years, the humanities and social sciences have been preoccupied with the powers and limitations of language. During these years literary theory has become peculiarly fascinated with what language cannot do, with the impossibility of language meaning what the individual intends it to mean, if indeed individuals can intend or mean. But language does exist and does appear to be useful in communicating, and most of the time those who use the same language feel they are successful in communicating with each other. In Interpretive Acts, rather than ask whether communication is possible, Professor Harris explores the issues that arise from the question: how does communication occur? In this, he draws on a variety of fields which have contributed to literary theory by the study of strategies for expressing and for interpreting intended meanings: discourse analysis, sociolinguists, philosophy of language, and rhetorical theory. For language to be understood, there has to be a mutually understood context: Professor Harris argues that there are seven dimensions of context in terms of which an author calculates readers' responses. Having defined the goal of interpretation as the author's intended meaning, criticism is then seen in terms of the question: `what does it mean that the author meant that meaning?'

In 1888, Mark Twain reflected on the writer's special feel for words to his correspondent, George Bainton, noting that "the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter." We recognize differences between a politician who is "willful" and one who is "willing" even though the difference does not cross word-stems or parts of speech. We recognize that being "held up" evokes different experiences depending upon whether its direct object is a meeting, a bank, or an example. Although we can notice hundreds of examples in the language where small differences in wording produce large reader effects, the authors of "The Power of Words" argue that these examples are random glimpses of a hidden systematic knowledge that governs how we, as writers or speakers, learn to shape experience for other human beings.
Over the past several years, David Kaufer and his colleagues have developed a software program for analyzing writing called DocuScope. This book illustrates the concepts and rhetorical theory behind the software analysis, examining patterns in writing and showing writers how their writing works in different categories to accomplish varying objectives. Reflecting the range and variety of audience experience that contiguous words of surface English can prime, the authors present a theory of language as an instrument of rhetorically priming audiences and a catalog of English strings to implement the theory. The project creates a comprehensive map of the speaker and writer's implicit knowledge about predisposing audience experience at the point of utterance.
The book begins with an explanation of why studying language from the standpoint of priming--not just meaning--is vital to non-question begging theories of close reading and to language education in general. The remaining chapters in Part I detail the steps taken to prepare a catalog study of English strings for their properties as priming instruments. Part II describes in detail the catalog of priming categories, including enough examples to help readers see how individual words and strings of English fit into the catalog. The final part describes how the authors have applied the catalog of English strings as priming tools to conduct textual research.

Translated by:
Sean Ward

Manifestations of Genericity offers a unified analysis of minimally contrasting generic sentences with indefinite singular (IS) and bare plural (BP) subjects - as in 'A bird flies' versus 'Birds fly' - within the framework of formal semantics. Beyond the classic distinction between quantificational and kind predication genericity, there is another important distinction in the generic domain, namely the distinction between two types of quantificational, modalized (I-) generalizations: 'in virtue of' generalizations, expressed by both IS and BP sentences, and 'descriptive' generalizations, expressed by BP sentences alone. When combined with independent semantic and pragmatic mechanisms, the difference in accessibility relations makes correct and precise predications as to a wide range of both old and newly observed semantic, pragmatic and distributional differences between IS and BP sentences.

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

In Relevance in Argumentation, author Douglas Walton presents a new method for critically evaluating arguments for relevance. This method enables a critic to judge whether a move can be said to be relevant or irrelevant, and is based on case studies of argumentation in which an argument, or part of an argument, has been criticized as irrelevant. Walton's method is based on a new theory of relevance that incorporates techniques of argumentation theory, logic, and artificial intelligence. The work uses a case-study approach with numerous examples of controversial arguments, strategies of attack in argumentation, and fallacies. Walton reviews ordinary cases of irrelevance in argumentation, and uses them as a basis to advance and develop his new theory of irrelevance and relevance. The volume also presents a clear account of the technical problems in the previous attempts to define relevance, including an analysis of formal systems of relevance logic and an explanation of the Grecian notion of conversational relevance. This volume is intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in those fields using argumentation theory--especially philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and communication studies, in addition to argumentation. The work also has practical use, as it applies theory directly to familiar examples of argumentation in daily and professional life. With a clear and comprehensive method for determining relevance and irrelevance, it can be convincingly applied to highly significant practical problems about relevance, including those in legal and political argumentation.

In Relevance in Argumentation, author Douglas Walton presents a new method for critically evaluating arguments for relevance. This method enables a critic to judge whether a move can be said to be relevant or irrelevant, and is based on case studies of argumentation in which an argument, or part of an argument, has been criticized as irrelevant. Walton's method is based on a new theory of relevance that incorporates techniques of argumentation theory, logic, and artificial intelligence. The work uses a case-study approach with numerous examples of controversial arguments, strategies of attack in argumentation, and fallacies. Walton reviews ordinary cases of irrelevance in argumentation, and uses them as a basis to advance and develop his new theory of irrelevance and relevance. The volume also presents a clear account of the technical problems in the previous attempts to define relevance, including an analysis of formal systems of relevance logic and an explanation of the Grecian notion of conversational relevance. This volume is intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in those fields using argumentation theory--especially philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and communication studies, in addition to argumentation. The work also has practical use, as it applies theory directly to familiar examples of argumentation in daily and professional life. With a clear and comprehensive method for determining relevance and irrelevance, it can be convincingly applied to highly significant practical problems about relevance, including those in legal and political argumentation.

The Japanese history textbook debate is one that keeps making the news, particularly with reference to claims that Japan has never 'apologised properly' for its actions between 1931 and 1945, and that it is one of the few liberal, democratic countries in which textbooks are controlled and authorised by the central government. There are frequent protests, both from within Japan and from overseas, that a biased, nationalistic history is taught in Japanese schools. This is the first time that all the authorised textbooks currently in use have been analysed using a critical discourse that is anchored firmly in the theory of 'language within society', elucidating the meanings and associated ideologies created by the language of the textbooks.

This classic guide discusses the nature and development of structuralism and semiotics. It calls for a new critical awareness of the ways in which we communicate and draw attention to their implications for our society.
Published in 1977 as the first volume in the New Accents series, Structuralism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those with no prior knowledge of the field. Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an entry not only into structuralism and semiotics, but into the wide range of cultural and critical theories underpinned by these approaches.
Structuralism and Semiotics remains the clearest introduction to some of the most important topics in modern critical theory. An afterword and fresh suggestions for further reading ensure this new edition will become, like its predecessor, the essential starting point for anyone new to the field.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203130022

The Athabaskan language family is the largest group of Amerindian languages in North America, including languages such as Navajo and Apache. This volume is a collection of previously unpublished articles on Athabaskan syntax, semantics, and morphology, and will be of interest not only to those with a anthropological interest in Native American languages, but also to theoretical linguists concerned with issues discussed. The book will also be useful in that it directly confronts the problems facing languages like Navajo as they struggle to survive; the list of contributors thus brings together not only prominent linguists (including Navajos) but educators as well.

Discourses in Place is essential reading for anyone with an interest in language and the way we communicate. Written by leaders in the field, this text argues that we can only interpret the meaning of public texts like road signs, notices and brand logos by considering the social and physical world that surrounds them. Drawing on a wide range of real examples, from signs in the Chinese mountains to urban centres in Austria, Italy, North America and Hong Kong, this textbook equips students with the methodology and models they need to undertake their own research in 'geosemiotics', the key interface between semiotics and the physical world.
Discourses in Place is highly illustrated, containing real examples of language in the material world, including a 'how to use this book' section, group and individual activities and a glossary of key terms.

Narrative Gravity explores the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist idea that our stories make us up, rather than we make up our stories.
The cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett has suggested that human beings tell stories as compulsively as beavers build dams or birds nests. Our basic identities are conferred on us by the myriad takes we hear and narrate throughout our lifetimes. All 'selves' are 'centres of narrative gravity'.
But even if it is true that we are born to weave stories, why is it that we are so 'programmed'? Narrative Gravity attempts to answer this question by carrying the important but embryonic notion that stories are obsessive self-constructions, to its logical conclusion. The book argues that narrative - a universal form found in every known human culture - functions as a 'species of natural theory'.
This is a foundational text for students of linguistics, philosophy and literary theory.

Discourses in Place is essential reading for anyone with an interest in language and the way we communicate. Written by leaders in the field, this text argues that we can only interpret the meaning of public texts like road signs, notices and brand logos by considering the social and physical world that surrounds them. Drawing on a wide range of real examples, from signs in the Chinese mountains to urban centres in Austria, Italy, North America and Hong Kong, this textbook equips students with the methodology and models they need to undertake their own research in 'geosemiotics', the key interface between semiotics and the physical world.
Discourses in Place is highly illustrated, containing real examples of language in the material world, including a 'how to use this book' section, group and individual activities and a glossary of key terms.

Drawing on examples from contemporary life, Woodward explores rhetorical conditions that create powerful moments of identification. Illustrated with interesting examples drawn from politics and art, The Idea of Identification draws on classical social and rhetorical theories to establish a systematic framework for understanding the varieties and forms of identification. Woodward references a variety of contexts in contemporary life to explore the rhetorical conditions that create powerful and captivating moments. By invoking the influential ideas of Kenneth Burke, George Herbert Mead, Joshua Meyrowitz and others, he shows how the rhetorical process of identification is separate from psychological theories of identity construction. Woodward concludes with an argument that film theory has perhaps offered the most vivid descriptive categories for understanding the bonds of identification.