Elastic language is a phenomenon in linguistics that refers to how we stretch the meanings of words, depending on the context in which they are used - for example many, about 20, perhaps, could be. This study looks specifically at elastic language in the fields of medicine and healthcare, showing how it is used to serve both the patient's and the professional's needs. It explores the pragmatics and metapragmatics of elasticity in the delivery of online medical information as a way of avoiding miscommunication. Based on data from Chinese and English sources, it takes a cross-cultural perspective, to present an account of harmony and disharmony between professional medical websites and their users. Adding exciting new dimensions to the fields of health communication and pragmatics, it is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and interactional linguistics, as well as professionals involved in healthcare and communication.

This study of Cicero's political oratory and Roman imperialism in the late Republic offers new readings of neglected speeches. C.E.W. Steel examines the role and capacities of political oratory and puts Cicero's attitude to empire, with its limitations and weaknesses, in the context of wider debates among his contemporaries on the problems of empire.

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.

This prestigious collection of papers discusses the relationship between meaning and representation.
Illustrates the differences that exist on the question of how formal representations relate to semantic representations.
Includes contributions by Tim Crane, Jerry Fodor, Paul Horwich, John Hyman, Ernie Lepore, Gregory McCulloch and Mark Sainsbury.

Social Semiotics is a lively introduction to the ways in which different aspects of modern society combine to create meaning. These 'semiotic resources' surrounding us include obvious modes of communication such as language, gesture, images and music, but also less obvious ones such as food, dress and everyday objects, all of which carry cultural value and significance. Social Semiotics uses a wide variety of texts including photographs, adverts, magazine pages and film stills to explain how meaning is created through complex semiotic interactions. Practical exercises and examples as wide ranging as furniture arrangements in a public places, advertising jingles, photojournalism and the rhythm of a rapper's speech provide readers with the knowledge and skills they need to be able to analyse and also produce successful multimodal texts and designs. Featuring a full glossary of terms, exercises, discussion points and suggestions for further reading, Social Semiotics makes concrete the complexities of meaning making and is essential reading for anyone interested in how communication works.

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy visits the essay as if for the first time, clearing away lore about the essay and responding to the prose itself. It shows how many of Orwell's rules and admonitions are far less useful than they are famed to be, but it also shows how some of them can be refurbished for our age, and how his major claim-that politics corrupts language, which then corrupts political discourse further, and so on indefinitely-can best be re-deployed today. "Politics and the English Language" has encouraged generations of writers and readers and teachers and students to take great care, to be skeptical and clear-sighted. The essay itself requires a fresh, clear, skeptical analysis so that it can, with reapplication, reclaim its status as a touchstone in our era of the rule of falsehood: the age of "pseudocracy."

The book analyzes and evaluates what major linguistic models say on the interaction of lexicon and syntax in language performance. To check the plausibility of the assumptions, they are compared with what psycholinguists have found out. Moreover, reformulations, situations of speech need, and the use of 'lexical stretches' are analysed for what they can contribute to the discussion, and for one of the main issues also experimental evidence is produced.

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.

Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court's written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of drivers stopped by the police to the decision-making processes of the Environmental Protection Agency-as well as the term's best-known case, which recognized a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex as well as different-sex couples. Fiction and the Languages of Law reframes a number of long-running legal debates, identifies other related paradoxes within legal discourse, and traces them all to common sources: judges' and lawyers' habit of alternating unselfconsciously between two different attitudes toward the language they use, and a set of professional biases that tends to prevent scrutiny of that habit.

The overarching theme of Discourse and Technology is cutting-edge in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse. This volume opens up a discussion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and related fields about the two-fold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how discourse data is collected, transcribed, and analyzed -- and the impact that these technologies are having on social interaction and discourse.As inexpensive tape recorders allowed the field to move beyond text, written or printed language, to capture talk -- discourse as spoken language -- the information explosion (including cell phones, video recorders, Internet chat rooms, online journals, and the like) has moved those in the field to recognize that all discourse is, in various ways, "multimodal," constructed through speech and gesture, as well as through typography, layout and the materials employed in the making of texts. The contributors have responded to the expanding scope of discourse analysis by asking five key questions: Why should we study discourse and technology and multimodal discourse analysis? What is the role of the World Wide Web in discourse analysis? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in studies of social actions and interactions? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in educational social interactions? and, How does one use multimodal discourse analyses in the workplace? The vitality of these explorations opens windows onto even newer horizons of discourse and discourse analysis.

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.

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.

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.

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies  How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience.  Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities.  The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.

Ableism, a form of discrimination that elevates "able" bodies over those perceived as less capable, remains one of the most widespread areas of systematic and explicit discrimination in Western culture. Yet in contrast to the substantial body of scholarly work on racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism remains undertheorized and underexposed. In this book, James L. Cherney takes a rhetorical approach to the study of ableism to reveal how it has worked its way into our everyday understanding of disability. Ableist Rhetoric argues that ableism is learned and transmitted through the ways we speak about those with disabilities. Through a series of textual case studies, Cherney identifies three rhetorical norms that help illustrate the widespread influence of ableist ideas in society. He explores the notion that "deviance is evil" by analyzing the possession narratives of Cotton Mather and the modern horror touchstone The Exorcist. He then considers whether "normal is natural" in Aristotle's Generation of Animals and in the cultural debate over cochlear implants. Finally, he shows how the norm "body is able" operates in Alexander Graham Bell's writings on eugenics and in the legal cases brought by disabled athletes Casey Martin and Oscar Pistorius. These three simple equivalencies play complex roles within the social institutions of religion, medicine, law, and sport. Cherney concludes by calling for a rhetorical model of disability, which, he argues, will provide a shift in orientation to challenge ableism's epistemic, ideological, and visual components. Accessible and compelling, this groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of disability studies as well as to disability rights advocates.

This book investigates the systematic correspondences between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation in the domain of predicate-argument relationships. It takes as its starting point the striking effects of nominal argument interpretation on aspectual semantics, pursuing the intuition that these effects are not quirky or exceptional, but are in fact the most visible reflexes of a more pervasive and systematic interaction between the aspectual event structure of a predicate and its arguments. The Scottish Gaelic language is the empirical base of the investigation, as it exhibits a set of predicational structures which interact in a highly visible way with its aspectual system. The book provides a detailed working out of a semantic system of argument classification which moves away from lexically-driven thematic roles in the traditional sense and towards a more constrained, syntactically motivated, set of primitives. This book is intended for linguists (including postgraduate students and lecturers) and those especially interested in Aspect, Argument Structure, Lexical Semantics, Predication, and the syntax/semantics interface; scholars interested in the Scottish Gaelic lang

Anaphora is the study of referential relationships in language. Given the great flowering of the study of this topic in the last decade, it is time for a book that reports on the major results of recent research and sets the stage for further inquiry.

The authors represented in "Anaphora: A Reference Guide" are among the world's leading researchers on anaphora and are ideally suited to meet this goal. Their work draws on theoretical principles and methodologies in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, as well as the integrated, broad perspective of cognitive science.

These stimulating reports of cutting-edge research will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students and will find a large audience among professional researchers of anaphora and scholars who want to catch up on what is new and exciting in the area.

Anaphora is the study of referential relationships in language. Given the great flowering of the study of this topic in the last decade, it is time for a book that reports on the major results of recent research and sets the stage for further inquiry.

The authors represented in "Anaphora: A Reference Guide" are among the world's leading researchers on anaphora and are ideally suited to meet this goal. Their work draws on theoretical principles and methodologies in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, as well as the integrated, broad perspective of cognitive science.

These stimulating reports of cutting-edge research will be useful to both undergraduate and graduate students and will find a large audience among professional researchers of anaphora and scholars who want to catch up on what is new and exciting in the area.

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.

This book studies interpreting between languages as a discourse process and as about managing ccommunication between two people who do not speak a common language. Roy examines the turn exchanges of a face-to-face interpreted event in order to offer a definition of interpreted events, describe the process of taking turns with an interpreter, and account for the role of the interpreter in terms of the performance in interaction.

Translated by:
Sean Ward

In this second edition of Steve Fuller's original work Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: A New Beginning for Science and Technology Studies, James Collier joins Fuller in developing an updated and accessible version of Fuller's classic volume. The new edition shifts focus slightly to balance the discussions of theory and practice, and the writing style is oriented to advanced students. It addresses the contemporary problems of knowledge to develop the basis for a more publicly accountable science. The resources of social epistemology are deployed to provide a positive agenda of research, teaching, and political action designed to bring out the best in both the ancient discipline of rhetoric and the emerging field of science and technology studies (STS). The authors reclaim and integrate STS and rhetoric to explore the problems of knowledge as a social process--problems of increasing public interest that extend beyond traditional disciplinary resources. In so doing, the differences among disciplines must be questioned (the exercise of STS) and the disciplinary boundaries must be renegotiated (the exercise of rhetoric). This book innovatively integrates a sophisticated theoretical approach to the social processes of creating knowledge with a developing pedagogical apparatus. The thought questions at the end of each chapter, the postscript, and the appendix allow the reader to actively engage the text in order to discuss and apply its theoretical insights. Creating new standards for interdisciplinary scholarship and communication, the authors bring numerous disciplines into conversation in formulating a new kind of rhetoric geared toward greater democratic participation in the knowledge-making process. This volume is intended for students and scholars in rhetoric of science, science studies, philosophy, and communication, and will be of interest in English, sociology, and knowledge management arenas as well.

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.