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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
Philips looks at the languages of judges in the courtroom to show that, while judges see themselves as impartial agents of the constitutional right to due process, there is actually much diversity in the way that judges interract with defendants due to their interpretations of the law, their attitudes toward courtroom control, and their own political-ideological stances regarding due process. She uses courtroom transcripts, interviews, and the written law itself to show how ideological diversity is organized in legal discourse.
This volume provides a detailed analysis of the relationships between form and function in spontaneous spoken language. The contributors analyse English, German and Spanish data to present a multilingual perspective on the complexities facing speakers in a variety of contexts. Through an examination of the language of everyday conversation, interviews, consultations, task-based dialogues, football commentaries, radio-play productions and intercultural conversations, the book demonstrates the effect of informational, discourse-external and personal factors on form and shows how speakers position themselves in relation to their discourse, orchestrate different tasks, move between different 'voices', and negotiate meaning. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the multiple layers of spontaneous spoken language. Spoken Language Pragmatics presents research that will be of interest to academics working in linguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics.
Describes how conversation works, providing a systematic and exhaustive account of the structure of spoken discourse and the diverse strategies speakers use to have a conversation. It is illustrated throughout with excerpts from genuine conversation and contains numerous exercises with suggested answers based on conversations in the London-Lund Corpus of English Conversation.
First published in 1979, this book develops a grammatically orientated semantics (as opposed to a semantically orientated grammar) of mood and condition in English. It seeks to establish correspondences between areas of semantic organisation ('planes') and surface grammar, without reverting to an intermediate notion of deep grammar. The chapters explore topics including the differences between 'literal meaning' and 'significance', speech roles, and constructions of condition and reason in terms of the four panes discussed earlier in the volume.
In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics. Using examples from personally recorded conversations, she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the tellability' of jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a particular culture.
It is surprising how much of everyday conversation consists of repetitive expressions such as 'thank you', 'sorry', would you mind?' and their many variants. However commonplace they may be, they do have important functions in communication. This thorough study draws upon original data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English to provide a discoursal and pragmatic account of the more common expressions found in conversational routines, such as apologising, thanking, requesting and offering. The routines studied in this book range from conventionalized or idiomatized phrases to those which can be generated by grammar. Examples have been taken from face-to-face conversations, radio discussions and telephone conversations, and transcription has been based upon the prosodic system of Crystal (1989). An extensive introduction provides the theory and methodology for the book and discusses the criteria for fixedness, grammatical analysis, and pragmatic functions of conversational routines which are later applied to the phrases. Following chapters deal specifically with phrases for thanking, apologising, indirect requests, and discourse-organising markers for conversational routines, on the basis of empirical investigation of the data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.
This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech. In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between "competing discourses", stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.
This volume gives a theoretical account of the problem of analyzing
and evaluating argumentative discourse. After placing argumentation
in a communicative perspective, and then discussing the fallacies
that occur when certain rules of communication are violated, the
authors offer an alternative to both the linguistically-inspired
descriptive and logically-inspired normative approaches to
argumentation.
"On Paul Ricoeur" examines the later work of Paul Ricoeur,
particularly his major work, "Time and Narrative." The essays in
this volume, including three pieces by Ricoeur, consider "Time and
Narrative," extending and developing the debate it has inspired.
This concise and well-organized grammar of classical Arabic, here translated from its original German into English for the first time, provides students of Arabic with a highly useful reference tool. While brief enough to be used with efficiency, the book is also rich in content and thorough in its coverage. Beginning- or advanced-level students working on classical texts and styles will find this grammar quick to use, reliable, and up-to-date. More than just a translation into English, this edition of Wolfdietrich Fischer's Grammar of Classical Arabic includes many revisions and additions provided by the author. In particular, the chapter on syntax offers numerous new text examples and other improvements. The bibliography has been updated to include significant recent contributions to the field of classical Arabic grammar and linguistics. Translated by Jonathan Rodgers with attention to both accuracy and readability, this book is an accessible reference tool that every student of classical Arabic will want to have on hand.
This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable
introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and
typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal
approaches. Throughout, the focus is on grammatical meaning -- the
way languages delineate universal semantic space and encode it in
grammatical form.
This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable
introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and
typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal
approaches. Throughout, the focus is on grammatical meaning -- the
way languages delineate universal semantic space and encode it in
grammatical form.
This handbook explains the various applications to music of analytical methods derived from linguistics and semiotics. Semiotics are related to the tradition of music aesthetics and to works such as Deryck Cooke's "The Language of Music", and the methods of linguistics are explained in language intelligible to musicians. It contains descriptions of the "neutral level", "semiotic analysis", transformation and generation, structural semantics and narrative grammar, intonation theory, the ideas of C.S. Peirce and applications in ethnomusicology with diagrams and music examples.
Focus particles--"even, only, also, merely"--play an important role
in English in various syntactic and semantic domains such as
coordination, focusing, emphatic reflexives, concessive
constructions, and quantification. The syntactic properties of
these expressions pose numerous problems for current syntactic
frameworks and the highly context-dependent and subjective nature
of their meaning presents a challenge for semantic theories.
This student guide to the study of drama explains in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of theatre in performance. The study of semiotics is an increasingly important area of critical practice, and a vital component in any up-to-date drama course, yet it poses a number of tricky and tantalizing questions for the student approaching it for the first time. What is the relationship between theory and practice? How can an understanding of the text as a system of signs be related to the semiotics of stage performance? Can the performance of drama also be read as a sign-system? Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, "Theatre as Sign-System" addresses key drama texts from Sophocles to Caryl Churchill, and offers new and detailed information about performance theory which can be related to textual practice. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of theatre studies, English literature and the performance arts as well as theatre practitioners.
In this book Roger Chartier and his associates explore the history of a cultural practice that has become common and widespread: the writing of letters. They begin by examining the invention of norms for writing letters in the Middle Ages, and the fixing of these norms in popular manuals of various kinds. They then analyse the letter--writing models developed in the ancien regime, showing how these models were linked to court literature, on the one hand, and to the popular books distributed by pedlars, on the other. Finally they discuss the models of letter--writing developed during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, they argue, was a decisive period in the history of letter writing, partly because of the rapid rise in rates of literacy and partly due to broader social and economic transformations, which increased the need for writing letters. By exploring the ways in which practices of letter writing have changed over the centuries, this path--breaking book sheds light on an everyday cultural practice which has created new ways of thinking, of feeling and of relating to others as well as to oneself.
'Metaphor' is the phenomenon whereby we talk and, potentially, think about something in terms of something else. In this book Elena Semino discusses metaphor as a common linguistic occurrence, which is varied in its textual appearance, versatile in the functions it may perform, and central to many different types of communication, from informal interaction to political speeches. She discusses the use of metaphor across a variety of texts and genres from literature, politics, science, education, advertising and the discourse of mental illness. Each chapter includes detailed case studies focusing on specific texts, from election leaflets to specialist scientific articles. Also included is a detailed consideration of corpus (computer-based) methods of analysis. Wide-ranging and informative, this book will be invaluable to those interested in metaphor from a range of disciplines.
Challenging current work in communication and social psychology
that assumes face-to-face interaction can be adequately understood
without attending to discourse expression, this volume examines how
people's goals, concerns, and intentions can be related to
discourse expression. The text discusses discourse-goal linkages in
specific face-to-face encounters such as courtroom exchanges,
marital counseling, and intellectual discussions, as well as in
more general theoretical dilemmas. Because it poses a new set of
questions about social actors' motivations and pre-interactional
goals, this volume offers a new direction for discourse study --
one that seriously considers the thinking and strategy involved in
human communication.
First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.
First published in 1984, this book examines a number of questions on the boundary of competence and performance - whose solutions have implications for linguistic theory in general. In particular, the form of grammatical statements, the relationship between various rules of grammar, the interaction between sentence in a sequence, and the inferences to be drawn from linguistic behaviour to linguistic knowledge. The author argues that many grammatical processes, inadequately handled by conventional sentence-grammars, require a text grammar in which the basic constitutive processes of information and deixis can be specified. They ago further to investigate the novel hypothesis that emphatic structure provides a crucial condition for the application of transformational rules, paying particular attention to the 'movement-rules' using mostly data culled from actual usage.
Intended for advanced students and researchers in linguistics, Descriptive Syntax and the English Verb, first published in 1984, focuses on the syntax of the English verb and notions of tense/aspect, transivity, passive, phrasal verb constructions, nominalisations and complement sentence types are explored. These constructions are shown t
Grammar and Meaning is an introduction to the study of grammar of contemporary English. It provides an impressive survey of all the main areas of English grammar, from words through to sentences and texts. It introduces and explains the linguistic terms needed to talk about the ways in which language works, from simple terms like adjective to more complex terms like non-finite clause. To meet the needs of both students and scholars, Howard Jackson has produced an innovative approach to the study of English grammar. Instead of concentrating on the formal and theoretical discussion of grammar, as many introductions do, this original analysis examines the 'meanings' we want to express when we use language. Beginning with the question, "What do we talk about?", it goes on to investigate how these meanings are structured in the grammar of English. These notions are closer to our ordinary understanding of what language is doing, and therefore the forms and structures of grammar are more easily grasped. The book is extensively illustrated with examples from real English. With analytical exercises in each chapter and a comprehensive glossary of terms, the book will prove and invaluable aid to students of English language, linguistics and English as a Foreign Language, whilst also being accessible to anyone who studies English grammar as part of their course. |
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