![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
What is the relationship between spatial and temporal representations in language and cognition? What is the role of culture in this relationship? I enter this discussion by offering a community-based, cross-generational study on the community of speakers of as-Sani' Arabic, members of a Negev Desert Bedouin tribe in Israel. The book presents the results of ten years of fieldwork, the linguistic and cognitive profiles of three generations, and first-hand narration of a century of history, from nomadism to sedentarism, between conservation, resilience, and change. Linguistic and cognitive representations change with lifestyle, culture, and relationships with nature and landscape. Language changes more rapidly than cognitive structures, and the relationship between spatial and temporal representations is complex and multifaceted.
"Corpus Linguistics and The Study of Literature" provides a theoretical introduction to corpus stylistics and also demonstrates its application by presenting corpus stylistic analyses of literary texts and corpora. The first part of the book addresses theoretical issues such as the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in corpus linguistic analyses, criteria for the evaluation of results from corpus linguistic analyses and also discusses units of meaning in language. The second part of the book takes this theory and applies it to "Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen and to two corpora consisting of: Austen's six novels; and texts that are contemporary with Austen. The analyses demonstrate the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools can extract new critical angles. This book will be a key read for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates working in corpus linguistics and in stylistics on linguistics and language studies courses. The editorial board includes: Paul Baker (Lancaster), Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Dominique Maingueneau (Paris XII), Christian Mair (Freiburg), Alan Partington (Bologna), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Siena and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster), and Feng Zhiwei (Beijing). "The Corpus and Discourse" series consists of two strands. The first, "Research in Corpus and Discourse", features innovative contributions to various aspects of corpus linguistics and a wide range of applications, from language technology via the teaching of a second language to a history of mentalities. The second strand, "Studies in Corpus and Discourse", is comprised of key texts bridging the gap between social studies and linguistics. Although equally academically rigorous, this strand will be aimed at a wider audience of academics and postgraduate students working in both disciplines.
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.
This book provides a detailed exploration of negation and negative polarity phenomena and their implications for linguistic theory. Including new, specially commissioned work from some of the leading European, American, and Japanese scholars, Negation and Polarity covers all of the main approaches to this subjectDSsyntactic, pragmatic, semantic, and cognitiveDSin a variety of language contexts.
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
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 innovative work provides the first comprehensive account of general extenders ("or something", "and stuff", "or whatever"). Combining insights from linguistics, cognitive psychology, and interactional sociolinguistics, the author demonstrates that these small phrases are not simply vague expressions, but have a powerful role in making interpersonal communication work. The audience for this book includes linguists, scholars of English, teachers of English as a first and a second language, sociolinguists, psycholinguists, and communications researchers.
Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.
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.
France's greatest tragedian, Jean Racine, is often admired for his poetic and tragic qualities. This book, on the other hand, explores the theatrical qualities of Racine's language and takes as its analytical tool two neglected parts of rhetoric, inventio and dispositio. How does Racine write exciting dialogue? He makes the persuasive interaction of characters a key feature of his dramatic technique and Word as Action shows how he deploys persuasion in well-defined contexts: trials, embassies, and councils; informal oratory as protagonists try to manipulate each other and their confidants in order to make their own views and wishes prevail; self-persuasion in monologues; and narrations, often used by characters with persuasive intent. The book draws illuminating and provocative comparisons with other playwrights and offers a closer and better documented description of the specific nature of Racine's theatrical language than has previously been available in any one study.
All human speech has expression. It is part of the 'humanness' of speech, and is a quality listeners expect to find. Without expression, speech sounds lifeless and artificial. Remove expression, and what's left is the bare bones of the intended message, but none of the feelings which surround the message. The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived eed for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.
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.
At the birth of analytic philosophy Frege created a paradigm that is centrally important to how meaning has been understood in the twentieth century. Frege invented the now familiar distinctions of sense and force, of sense and reference, of concept and object. He introduced the conception of sentence meaning as residing in truth-conditions and argued that semantics is a normative enterprise distinct from psychology. Most importantly, he created modern quantification theory, engendering the idea that the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic underpin the meanings of natural-language sentences. Stephen Barker undertakes to overthrow Frege's paradigm, rejecting all the above-mentioned features. The framework he offers is a speech-act-based approach to meaning in which semantics is entirely subsumed by pragmatics. In this framework: meaning resides in syntax and pragmatics; sentence-meanings are not propositions but speech-act types; word-meanings are not objects, functions, or properties, but again speech-act types; pragmatic phenomena one would expect not to figure in semantics, such as pretence, enter into the logical form of sentences; a compositional semantics is provided by showing how speech-act types combine together to form complex speech-act types; the syntactic structures invoked are not those of quantifiers, open sentences, variables, variable-binding, etc., rather they are structures specific to speech-act forms, which link logical form and surface grammar very closely. According to Barker, a natural language - a system of thought - is an emergent entity that arises from the combination of simple intentional structures, and certain non-representational cognitive states. It is embedded in, and part of, a world devoid of normative facts qua extra-linguistic entities. The world, in which the system is embedded, is a totality of particular states of affairs. There is no logical complexity in re; it contains mereological complexity only. Some truths have truth-makers, but others, logically complex truths, lack them. Nevertheless, the truth-predicate is univocal in meaning. Renewing Meaning is a radical, ambitious work which offers to transform the semantics of natural language.
Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body is an exploration of a multimodal theory of cognitive science. Using linguistic theories first developed by Saussure and more latterly by M. A. K. Halliday, Paul Thibault analyses how social and biological systems interact to produce meaning. This fascinating study will be of interest to undergraduates and academics researching cognitive linguistics and advanced semiotics. The book engages with the current dialogue between the human and life sciences to ask questions about the relationship between the physical, biological aspects of a human being, and the sociocultural framework in which a human being exists. Paul J. Thibault argues that we need to understand both the semiotic, discursive nature of meaning making, and the physical context in which this activity takes place. The two are inseparable, and hence the only way we can understand our subjective experience of our environment and our perceptions of our inner states of mind is by giving equal weight to both frameworks. This 'ecosocial semiotic' theory engages with linguistics, semiotics, activity theory, biology and psychology.In so doing, the book produces a new way of looking at how a human being makes sense of his or her environment, but also how this environment shapes such meanings.
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?
This volume focuses on persuasion and the structure and analysis of persuasive communication. It brings together contributions from scholars from a variety of backgrounds in communication sciences and psychology, with insights into the processing of persuasive messages, attitude theory as viewed from a neural network model, and models of resistance to influence. This series compiles research from a range of disciplines such as information science, library science, and international relations, that share the unifying purpose of understanding communication and information processing. It offers reviews of those diverse areas that fall within the broad rubrics of information and communication science, as well as an overview of how people use information. The volumes report on research in three important areas: information transfer and information systems; the uses and effects of communications; and the control of communications and information.
Although what language users in different cultures say about their
own language has long been recognized as of potential interest, its
theoretical importance to the study of language has typically been
thought to be no more than peripheral. Theorizing Language is the
first book to place the reflexive character of language at the very
centre both of its empirical study and of its theoretical
explanation. Language can only be explained as a cultural product of the
reflexive application of its own creative powers to construct,
regulate, and give conceptual form to objects of understanding.
Language is itself, first and foremost, an object of cultural
understanding. Theoretical analyses of language which have
neglected its reflexive character, or simply taken its effects for
granted, merely impose their own artificial structures on their
analytical object. The first part of this book discusses the consequences of neglecting this reflexive character for the technical concepts and methods which are used in analysing different types of communicational phenomena. In the second part, normativity - a crucial aspect of language's reflexive nature - is examined. The book's third and final part focuses on particular issues in the history of linguistic thought which bear witness to the rhetoric of language theorizing as a reflexive form of inquiry.
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.
Are contemporary art theorists and critics speaking a language that has lost its meaning? Is it still based on concepts and values that are long out of date? Does anyone know what the function of the arts is in modern society?Roy Harris breaks new ground with his linguistic approach to the key issues. He situates those issues within the long-running debate about the arts and their place in society which goes back to the Classical period in ancient Greece. Contributors to the debate included some of the most celebrated artists and philosophers of their day--Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo, Kant, Hegel, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix--but none of these eminent figures or their supporters provided a reasoned overview examining the multilingual development of Western artspeak as a whole. Nor did they develop any explicit account of the relationship between the arts and language.The Necessity of Artspeak shows for the first time that what have usually been considered problems of aesthetics and artistic justification often have their source in the linguistic assumptions underlying the terms and arguments presented. It also shows how artspeak has been--and continues to be--manipulated to serve the interests of particular social groups and agendas. Until the semantics of artspeak is more widely understood, the public will continue to be taken in by the latest fads and fashions that propagandists of the art world promote.
"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 volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. A central issue in linguistic theory, affix ordering receives much attention amongst the research community, though most studies deal with only one language. By contrast, the majority of the chapters in this volume consider more than one language and provide data from typologically diverse languages, some of which are examined for the first time. Many chapters focus on cases of affix ordering that challenge linguistic theory with such phenomena as affix repetition and variable ordering, both of which are shown to be neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as previously assumed. The book also offers an explicit discussion on the non-existence of phonological affix ordering, with a focus on mobile affixation, and one on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations, undesirable in many theories, are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological decomposition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises important questions regarding the general architecture of grammar and the nature and side effects of our theoretical assumptions.
This work is a collection of the best research reports and essays gathered globally by the editors over a three-year period. World-renowned experts from the Arab region as well as the West have authored most of the chapters. Seven sections divide the text, and each investigates compelling, timely questions for today's communication professionals. Because of its focus on communications and new media, this volume may be used at colleges and universities worldwide. It will impact numerous academic disciplines and the professional world as well. A wide range of curricula may adopt the text as supplementary reading for courses in political science, speech and rhetoric, public relations, sociology, communications, journalism, diplomacy and government.
Over the past twenty years, scholars in a wide variety of academic disciplines have been giving increasing attention to rhetoric - the study of persuasive argument. In Faithful Persuasion David S. Cunningham offers the contemporary era's first sustained account of the relationship between rhetoric and Christian theology. Cunningham argues that Christian thinkers should abandon their attempts to codify argumentation within the canons of formal logic and suggests that they should instead come to a more organic understanding of the process of persuasion. This rhetorical approach to theology can cast new light on longstanding theological controversies and establish a new agenda for the study of the methods, sources, and norms of Christian theology. Drawing chiefly upon the rhetorical insights of Aristotle, and on the reappropriation of Aristotle's views by numerous modern rhetoricians - ranging from John Henry Newman to Kenneth Burke and Chaim Perelman - Cunningham establishes a firm foundation from which to support his central assertion that "Christian theology can best be understood as a form of persuasive argument". In addition, he explores the implications of a rhetorical method for studies in doctrinal formulation, biblical exegesis, and church history. Written for theologians, clergy members, and laypeople with a strong interest in theology, this book will introduce readers to the richness of the rhetorical tradition and its important implications for the discipline of Christian theology.
Theodore Parker, a great orator of the mid-19th century, was a Unitarian clergyman who directed much of his oratory towards ecclesiastical and social reform. Parker challenged slavery and other social ills. As a volume in the Great American Orators series, the focus is on Parker's oratory and its effect on theology and the social structures of the mid-19th century. Biographical information pertains to those aspects of Parker's life that influenced and shaped his elocution and ideas. Parker's rhetoric and rhetorical techniques are examined. Three of Parker's important speeches are included, each with an introduction that places it in its proper context. This study will appeal to students of rhetoric, theology, and mid-nineteenth-century American religious history. The book is divided into two sections. The first concentrates on Parker's life, his role as an abolitionist, social reformer, and public order. Part Two scrutinizes three of Parker's most famous discourses. The author establishes Parker's place among mid-19th-century preachers. |
You may like...
Machine Learning and Artificial…
Benjamin Moseley, Lion Krischer
Hardcover
R5,114
Discovery Miles 51 140
Hybrid Optimization - The Ten Years of…
Pascal Van Hentenryck, Michela Milano
Hardcover
R4,113
Discovery Miles 41 130
Event Mining for Explanatory Modeling
Laleh Jalali, Ramesh Jain
Hardcover
R1,302
Discovery Miles 13 020
Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and…
Ansgar Steland, Kwok-Leung Tsui
Hardcover
R4,742
Discovery Miles 47 420
A Long View of Research and Practice in…
ManMohan S. Sodhi, Christopher S. Tang
Hardcover
R2,824
Discovery Miles 28 240
Handbook on Semidefinite, Conic and…
Miguel F. Anjos, Jean B. Lasserre
Hardcover
R6,647
Discovery Miles 66 470
|