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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
What do three murderers, Karl Marx's daughter and a vegetarian vicar have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians. Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie dives deep into previously untapped archives to tell a people's history of the OED. She traces the lives of thousands of contributors who defined the English language, from the eccentric autodidacts to the family groups who made word-collection their passion. With generosity and brio, Ogilvie reveals, for the first time, the full story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world - and celebrates to sparkling effect the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People.
Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.
Fuery explores the relationship between post-structuralism and absence. In order to understand the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan (and Freud), the deconstructionalist methodology of Derrida, Foucault's studies of systems of thought, and Kristeva's socio-cultural and psychoanalytic interests, Fuery believes it is necessary to take into consideration the function and operation of absence. He shows how post-structuralist theory can be seen as a system of studies of subjectivity in terms of absence, and how desire is based almost entirely on the precondition of absence. The study is divided into sections on subjectivity. desire, and meaning, with the final section working toward a hermeneutics and semiotics of absence.
Although Portuguese is one of the main world languages and researchers have been working on Portuguese electronic text collections for decades (e.g. Kelly, 1970; Biderman, 1978; Bacelar do Nascimento et al., 1984; see Berber Sardinha, 2005), this is the first volume in English that encapsulates the exciting and cutting-edge corpus linguistic work being done with Portuguese language corpora on different continents. The book includes chapters by leading corpus linguists dealing with Portuguese corpora across the world, and their contributions explore various methods and how they are applicable to a wide range of language issues. The book is divided into six sections, each covering a key issue in Corpus Linguistics: lexis and grammar, lexicography, language teaching and terminology, translation, corpus building and sharing, and parsing and annotation. Together these sections present the reader with a broad picture of the field.
The essays and commentaries presented here are intended to strike a balance between the disciplines to which the Bar-Hillel Colloquium (formerly the Israel Colloquium) is dedicated. The historical and sociological vantage point is addressed in Krammick's and Mali's treatment of Priestley, in Vicker's and Feldhay's studies of the Renaissance occult and in Warnke's and Barasch's work on the imagination. From a philosophical angle several concepts, all material to the methodology of science, are taken up: rule following, by Smart and Margalit; analysis, by Ackerman, explanation, by Taylor; and the role of mathematics in physics, by Levy-Leblond and Pitowsky. In addition, the volume contains the proceedings of two symposia dedicated to two towering scientific figures: one celebrates Bohr's centennial, and the other examines the "other" Newton. The book should appeal to people whose interest or research is in the fields of philosophy, sociology and history of science, technology and medicine, as well as those interested in science education.
Applying critical kinship perspectives to the study of multilingual families, this book foregrounds family formation processes, gender, and sexuality in examinations of language use. Focusing on historically marginalized families (such as single parent, adoptive, and LGBTQ+), the analyses draw on data from private and public spheres including interviews and recorded interactions in homes, as well as memoirs, documentaries, news media, and even comedy. Lyn Wright addresses questions such as why single parents might be better at raising bilingual children, how multilingualism plays a role in constructing shared histories in adoptive families, and what translingual resources allow LGBTQ+ families to negotiate gender roles and family relationships. In addition, she examines the construction of monolingual, nuclear family norms in public discourse that potentially constrain families' everyday multilingual identities. Integrating related fields of family discourse, family language socialization, and family language policy unifies ways of understanding the intersections of kinship and language. The analyses in this book provide insight into multilingual family experiences, children's language development, and societal level language maintenance and shift.
Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent. Using three cases that involve an exploration of the corporeal influence of the green spaces and commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts; the cartographic texts produced by GPS devices; and two maps involved in a federal court case about marine mammal protection, this book explores and tests the value of what Propen calls "visual-material rhetorics," or a visual rhetoric more expressly attuned to studies of space, the body, and materiality. Grounding all three cases is a theoretical approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias with Carole Blair's theory of material rhetoric. Such an approach brings Foucault's important work on spatiality into conversation with visual-material rhetorics to show how we benefit from conceptualizing rhetorical objects as not merely textual in the traditional sense but also as both visual and material-as spatial. Together, the cases in this book demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences and how visual-material rhetorics function in the service of advocacy. AMY D. PROPEN is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota. Her research on visual rhetoric, critical cartographies, and rhetoric as advocacy has appeared in journals and edited collections, including Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, ACME: An International E-Journal of Critical Geographies, and Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. She is co-author, with Mary Lay Schuster, of Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases.
Marshall, Mayhead, and their contributors explore the discourse women use to negotiate political boundaries. The analysis, based on the study of five governors-Nellie Tayloe Ross, Martha Layne Collins, Ann Richards, Barbara Roberts, and Christine Todd Whitman-illustrates that women bring issues of caring, empowerment, family, and inclusivity to the office. These issues contrast sharply with traditional male-centered ideologies and give renewed vigor to a revised moral point of view in contemporary politics. The essays also demonstrate that women governors must still work within the traditional societal constructs for women. Yet, at the same time, they need to create new paradigms that redefine women's roles and exemplify that woman's place is in the private sphere and the public political arena. The work examines the common obstacles these women faced despite differences in era, political affiliation, geographic location, and ideologies. Simply by being elected, each woman operated within a public/private sphere duality she struggled to overcome. Each woman recognized that she needed to craft appropriate rhetorical strategies to succeed in office while not abandoning the unique values and perspectives she brought to the statehouse. The essays contend that women serving in the governorship resculpt the face of the office, restructure the political landscape, and redefine women's roles. The volume will be of particular value to students and scholars dealing with issues of public address and rhetorical criticism, women's communication, political communication, and women in politics.
In this book, Shoshan asserts that in contemporary Middle Eastern countries the field of struggle that cultures constitute provides the ground for contesting and transforming the hegemonic patriarchal discourse and recently began to give voice, especially in women's literature, to feminist critique. Examining the gender issue as reflected in a variety of discourses that take place in contemporary Middle Eastern cultures, the contributors explore how feminine images are constructed in tradition-bound societies and in the context of nationalist projects. Both Islamic societies in Middle Eastern countries and the Jewish society in Israel are addressed in the discussion of the role of women's writing and other means of expression in challenging traditional-patriarchal concepts, including nationalism. While the conclusion about the manipulation that patriarchal discourse performs on women's images supports the available scholarship, the emphasis in this volume on the specific expressions of feminine discourse will be a welcome addition to the existing literature. The essays in volume range from a discussion of the poetic strategies used to reconcile the roles of women to the shifts in the image of the Turkish woman as expressed in popular historical writing. Some of the essays examine the rituals that gather women together as well as the maternal role women play in the national-religious community. Combining the two, usually separately discussed, cultural notions of discourse and gender, this unique collection of articles addresses them in their various forms in both Islamic societies and the State of Israel.
This book presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the behaviour of negation in gapping sentences. Sophie Repp focusses on German and English with reference to Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Slovak. She shows that these languages exhibit important differences in the interaction of gapping and negation and further that no account in the literature explains why this should be. Dr Repp also argues that the precise interpretation of an elided negation depends on varying combinations of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic factors. Illustrating her argument by the interpretation of the negation in examples such as "Pete hasn't got a video and John a DVD," "Pete didn't clean the whole flat and John laze around all afternoon," and "To Mary, Pete didn't say anything and to Sue, only that he was hungry," Dr Repp questions a basic assumption in the analysis of gapping: that the meaning of the two conjuncts must be parallel in the elided material. This leads her to a wide-ranging discussion of the interpretation of scope and the nature of negation. She then proposes a syntactic analysis that both takes into account the interaction of the grammatical interfaces and is at the same time compatible with more general assumptions of current generative theory. She concludes by considering the implications of her findings for linguistic theory more generally.
He reviled the rich for their cupidity and they found his rhetoric repulsive. Plebians believed him their champion and patricians knew he was their bete noire, remarks Halford Ryan in his eloquent foreword to this definitive survey of Clarence DarroW's development as orator and unique American myth. As a writer, lecturer, debater, and trial lawyer Darrow spoke for the have-nots and cultivated an image of mythic proportions as the underdog's advocate. Many of the more than 2,000 trials in which he was active reflected the major social and philosophical issues of the last quarter of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries in America. Read today, DarroW's speeches still ring true both as political statements and as models of persuasive pleading and pathos--reason enough to study the work of this uncommon advocate who stood perpetually opposed to the great and powerful of the earth. Richard J. Jensen has written a clearsighted volume that documents how Darrow created and then enlarged his personal myth through speeches, writings, and actions. Each chapter focuses on particular segments of that creation. Half of the book consists of authoritative texts of several of DarroW's most influential and rhetorically brilliant speeches, and a speech chronology simplifies the work of researchers. The study opens with a brief biography, an overview of DarroW's rhetoric, along with the forces that affected it, and some initial comments on the elements that make up the myth. The next chapter, Schoolmaster of the Courtroom, chronicles the origins of DarroW's image as a defender of the downtrodden and his early trials in defense of labor unions and their leaders. What is considered to be one of the most famous speeches in American legal history, that given by Darrow at the conclusion of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb trial, is the focus of Chapter Three. Chapter Four centers on the Scopes Trial, perhaps the most famous trial in recent American history, during which the dramatic confrontation with William Jennings Bryan occurred. The penultimate chapter explains the arguments Darrow used to defend the poor, radicals, Blacks, and other less fortunate members of society. Finally, DarroW's rhetoric as a writer and as an active speaker and debater on the lecture circuit is examined. Part II contains the authoritative texts of seven speeches including those given during the Leopold and Loeb Trial and the Scopes Trial, among others. The Chronology of Speeches, Bibliography, and Index close the volume. The speeches along with Jensen's intelligent, readable analysis and criticism will be an important resource for those teaching and studying Legal Rhetoric and the History of Public Address.
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.
This book discusses the application of various statistical methods to texts, rather than numbers, in various fields in behavioral science. It proposes an approach where quantitative methods are applied to data whereas previously such data were analyzed only by qualitative research methods. To emphasize the quantitative aspects of semantics, and the possibilities of conducting scientific interferences, the book introduces the concept of statistical semantics and presents the reader with a subset of techniques found in that domain. More specifically, the book focuses on methods that allow the investigation of semantic relationships between words, based on empirical corpus data. It shows the reader how to apply various statistical methods on texts, for example statistical tests to ascertain whether two sets of text are statistically different, ways to predict variables from text, as well as how to summarize and graphically illustrate texts. Thus, the book presents an accessible hands-on introduction to a selection of techniques, indispensable for cognitive psychologists, linguists, and social psychologists.
Within the historical literary genre, stylistics is widely applicable but as yet under deployed. This book acts as a showcase for the range of analysis possible. Although the analytic focus within the genre has traditionally been on literary criticism, stylistics has much to offer. Bringing together text and context, Patricia Canning synthesizes stylistic models with literary theory and critical theory. The historical and contextual focus throughout the book is on religious, political and ideological issues that animated and defined Reformation England. Each chapter interrogates the dichotomous concept of 'word' and 'image' by considering the ways in which writers of this period deal with these contentious subjects in their dramatic and poetic works. 'Representation' is proposed not just as a matter of semiotics but of ideology.
The topic of communication in elderly care (or eldercare) is important and becoming ever more pressing, with an aging world population and burgeoning numbers needing care. This book looks at this critical but underanalyzed area. It examines the way people talk to each other in eldercare settings from an interdisciplinary and globally cross-cultural perspective. The small body of available research points to eldercare communication taking place with its own specific conditions and contexts. Often, there is the presence of various mental/physical ailments on the part of the receivers, scarcity of time, resources and or flexibility on the part of the care givers and the necessity of assistance with personal activities.The book combines theory and practice, with linguistically informed analysis of real-life interaction in eldercare settings across the world. Each chapter closes with a "Practical Recommendations" section that contains suggestions on how communication in eldercare can be improved. This book will appeal to researchers and carers alike, and is an important and timely publication.
Gring-Pemble asserts that the role of language in shaping policy options is rarely studied and poorly understood. She seeks to analyze congressional hearings and debates on welfare to understand the role of language in framing welfare policy and contemporary welfare discussions. She reviews welfare history in the United States and provides a rhetorical analysis of welfare deliberations. In the process she illustrates the significance of language and ideology in shaping American social policy outcomes.
"Metaphor and Intercultural Communication" examines in detail the dynamics of metaphor in interlingual contact, translation and globalization processes. Its case-studies, which combine methods of cognitive metaphor theory with those of corpus-based and discourse-oriented research, cover contact linguistic and cultural contacts between Chinese, English including Translational English and Aboriginal English, Greek, Kabyle, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish.Part I introduces readers to practical and methodological problems of the intercultural transfer of metaphor through empirical (corpus-based and experimental) studies of translators' experiences and strategies in dealing with figurative language in a variety of contexts. Part II explores the universality-relativity dimension of cross- and intercultural metaphor on the basis of empirical data from various European and non-European cultures. Part III investigates the socio-economic and political consequences of figurative language use through case studies of communication between aboriginal and mainstream cultures, in the media, in political discourse and gender-related discourses. Special attention is paid to cases of miscommunication and of deliberate re- and counter-conceptualisation of cliches from one culture into another. The results open new perspectives on some of the basic assumptions of the 'classic' cognitive paradigm, e.g. regarding metaphor understanding, linguistic relativity and concept-construction.
"No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume." - The Boston Globe You know the author's name. You recognize the title. The advice of Strunk is as valuable today as when it was first offered. This book has conveyed the principles of English style to millions of readers. Use "the little book" to make a big impact with writing.
This book offers a new way of doing African philosophy by building on an analysis of the way people talk. The author bases his investigation on the belief that traditional African philosophy is hidden in expressions used in ordinary language. As a result, he argues that people are engaging in a philosophical activity when they use expressions such as taboos, proverbs, idioms, riddles, and metaphors. The analysis investigates proverbs using the ordinary language approach and Speech Act theory. Next, the author looks at taboos using counterfactual logic, which studies the meaning of taboo expressions by departing from a consideration of their structure and use. He argues that the study of these figurative expressions using the counterfactual framework offers a particular understanding of African philosophy and belief systems. The study also investigates issues of meaning and rationality departing from a study on riddles, explores conceptual metaphors used in conceptualizing the notion of politics in modern African political thought, and examines language and marginalization of women and people with disabilities. The book differs from other works in African philosophy in the sense that it does not claim that Africans have a philosophy as is commonly done in most studies. Rather, it reflects and unfolds philosophical elements in ordinary language use. The book also builds African Conception of beauty and truth through the study of language.
Phillips Brooks, author of the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem, was the rector of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston for 22 years and the Bishop of Massachusetts for 15 months until his death in 1893. This volume in the Great American Orators series focuses on Brooks' oratorical style and the public's response to his rhetoric. Chesebrough provides a biographical sketch of Brooks' life emphasizing the development and use of his oratorical skills and placing him within the secular and ecclesiastical contexts of his times. Attention is given to Brooks' development as a public speaker and to his manner of sermon preparation and delivery. Three of Brooks' sermons are printed in their entirety: Abraham Lincoln, The Cradle of the Lord, and Help from the Hills, preceded by introductory remarks and a brief analysis of the sermon. This examination of Brooks' rhetoric will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of American theology and American religious history, especially Episcopal history.
This volume examines the complex, contradictory discourses of hypertext. Using theoretical material from cultural theory, radical and border pedagogies, and technology criticism, the text discusses three primary ways hypertext is articulated: as automated book (technical communication), as virtual commodity (online databases), and as environment for constructing and exploring multiple subject positions (postmodern hypertext in composition and literature). I would recommend the entire book to researchers and academics who recognize the need to integrate new technologies into our classrooms and pedagogies. - Technical Communication
This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements?
American pragmatism can be best understood against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The essays in this volume, by philosophers, cultural critics, and historians, explore the development of pragmatism in this context. The emphasis in this volume is on the interrelations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement, and the cultural, political, and educational programs that have been associated with pragmatism from James, Dewey, and Mead to Rorty and Cornel West. The book is divided into three parts, reflecting the periods of Progressivism, Positivism, and Postmodernism. The contributors explore the ways in which pragmatist writings have been appropriated or misappropriated in the literature and practice of Progressive reformers, positivist academics, end-of-ideology liberals, and postmodernists.
This work originates from the need to develop an integrated dynamic model of negation in discourse that is adequate for understanding the role of negation in an extensive and complex piece of discourse. Most work on negation is strongly influenced by traditional philosopical problems, but little work has been carried out in the area of discourse. Approaches to negation within the functional-cognitive tradition tend to focus of specific agents of negation, its function as a speech act, or its cognitive model. Few attempts have been made to propose an integrated discourse model, studies of negation with few exceptions tend to be limited to brief selections or isolated sentences. This book fills the gap in studies of negation in discourse by providing an up-to-date critical review of the state of the art in negation and by proposing a model that brings together the semantic, cognitve, and pragmatic features of negation, which are crucial for an understanding of its role in disourse. |
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