As a student, and in any profession based on your studies, good oral communication skills are essential. It is therefore extremely important to develop your ability to converse, to discuss, to argue persuasively, and to speak in public. This is one reason why, whatever subject you study, you will be encouraged to discuss your work in seminars and you will have opportunities to give short talks or presentations.
Most people probably take for granted their ability to speak; not thinking much about it until the have to address an audience, or attend an important interview. However, just as your first impressions of other people are based on how they look and how they speak - so are their impressions of you. In every conversation, as well as when you give a talk or presentation, or are interviewed, you are not only conveying information about the subject being discussed but also presenting yourself.
"Speaking for Yourself" provides clear, straightforward advice that will help you:
Be a good listener
Express yourself clearly and persuasively
Contribute effectively to discussions
Prepare talks or presentations
Prepare effective visual aids
Deliver effective presentations
Perform well in interviews
In short, it will help you to express your thoughts clearly and persuasively - and so to achieve your short and medium-term goals as a student, and your career goals.

Is it the greatest fear of all? Numerous surveys attest to the now well-known fact--the vast majority of people are more afraid of public speaking than any other experience, even death. With its unique approach, Scared Speechless turns your fear around by providing a step-by-step guide to successful speech making. To help prepare you for your next speech, some of the topics Rebecca McDaniel explores are nervousness and fears; persuasive, informative, impromptu, and extemporaneous speaking; topic choice; and learning the library. She also covers speech preparation; supporting your thesis; introductions and conclusions; delivery techniques; visual aids; choosing a topic; and organizing, supporting, and delivering your speech. Each chapter explains the process, illustrates with examples, and provides exercises to try out your new-found skills. Whether you are a student or a professional, the logical chapter sequence and the clear guidelines provided will ease you through the process. Scared Speechless is the perfect text for beginning speech classes and the essential guide for any professional who needs to improve his or her public speaking skills. With her extensive experience as a teacher of public speaking, McDaniel leaves no area uncovered and helps you go far beyond your fear of public speaking to become an accomplished presenter.

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict offers critical and social identity intersectionalities approach to interpretations of femininity among three generations of women for a rhetorical examination of how femininity is made to mean by media and popular culture. Amplified are voices of women across multiple age, ethnic, and sexual orientation groups who shared in focus groups and interviews their perceptions of femininity and feminine ideals. Femininity is explored using theories from communication and mass media, psychology, sociology, and feminist and gender studies. Donnalyn Pompper explores femininities as shaped by cultural rituals and industries, at home and at work in organizations, on sporting fields and arenas, and in politics.

This book brings together the perspectives of eminent and emerging scholars on contemporary issues relevant to the practice, pedagogy and institutionalization of the humanities in the three Chinese contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. It addresses the need to investigate how humanities discussions, often exclusively drawn from, and grounded in, western contexts, are today being played out in these three places. The humanities in contemporary Chinese contexts may have different social and pedagogical roles, and a consideration of them will enable people to moderate, and perhaps even refute, claims made in the recent (re)readings of the humanities. As Asian universities rise in the global rankings and as east-west university collaborations and partnerships become more common, it is important that the nature, practice and institutionalization of the humanities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China are explored and described for English readers. Exploring new perspectives arising from an examination of the humanities in these places, this volume aims neither to establish a position of polarity, which would pit western sites against Chinese ones, nor to argue for universal sameness. Rather, the goal is to find nuanced correspondences and differences between these various backgrounds, so that there is a greater understanding of the specificities of Chinese contexts. This will help shed light not only on the contexts in question, but also potentially on how to rearticulate the importance of the humanities in general, creating an intercultural dialogue focused on the humanities. As the global university strives to move the different traditions of learning closer together through international rankings, rubrics, and shared research agendas, it is important that we explore these locations of potential cultural exchange.

What is semiotics? This term is applied in a wide range of disciplines from literary theory and film to law, architecture and communication studies. But what does it actually mean and how can we use it? "Key Terms in Semiotics "provides exactly the information that a student needs when encountering semiotics for the first time or as a more advanced reader wishing to do in-depth readings.

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce "female moral art," writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme. Papke begins with a brief examination of the ideology of true womanhood, which, she argues, permeates Chopin's and Wharton's fiction and world views. The remainder of her work offers an ideological reading of their social fiction in which their characters search for states of liminality, where they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy. Repeatedly, Papke argues, these states of liminality are literally encoded into images of characters positioned on the edge of an abyss that then becomes a repository of multiple meanings. The author presents Chopin's and Wharton's female discourse as radical art because it dares to defy that which is both alienating and destructive. Papke's provocative analysis will be of interest not only to Wharton and Chopin scholars, but also to those working in the fields of feminist and women's studies. It will also interest scholars and students of American studies, particularly those working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.

This book examines mathematical discourse from the perspective of Michael Halliday's social semiotic theory. In this approach, mathematics is conceptualized as a multisemiotic discourse involving language, visual images and symbolism. The book discusses the evolution of the semiotics of mathematical discourse, and then, proceeds to examine the grammar of mathematical symbolism, the grammar of mathematical visual images, intersemiosis between language, visual images and symbolism and the subsequent ways in which mathematics orders reality. The focus of this investigation is written mathematical texts. The aims of the book are to understand the semantic realm of mathematics and to appreciate the metaphorical expansions and simultaneous limitations of meaning in mathematical discourse. The book is intended for linguists, semioticians, social scientists and those interested in mathematics and science education. In addition, the close study of the multisemiotic mature of mathematics has implications for other studies adopting a social semiotic approach to multimodality.

This work is an in-depth analysis of the full breadth of Sojourner Truth's public discourse that places it in its proper historical context and explores the use of humor and narratives as primary rhetorical strategies used by this illiterate ex-slave to create a powerful public persona. The book provides a comprehensive survey of the life of Sojourner Truth, and includes a unique and authoritative compilation of primary rhetorical documents, such as speeches, songs, and public letters.

This is the only major work to date that analyzes the breadth of Sojourner Truth's public discourse. The volume includes a complete and authoritative compilation of her extant rhetoric, including several versions of the same speech, reports of her speaking appearances, public letters published by Truth in newspapers, and songs written and performed by her as part of her public lectures. Three chapters address the rhetorical dimensions of Truth's public persona. First, an historical survey contextualizes her life and speaking from slave to reformer, placing into perspective the variety of experiences that comprised her background. Second, an analysis of Truth's use of humor focuses upon how she employed the strategies of superiority and incongruity in her refutation of opponents and the establishment of her own credibility. Third, a critique of Truth's use of narratives in her discourse reveals how both her speeches and songs rely upon three fundamental stories for their persuasive impact: her slave life and religious conversion, her use of the black jeremiad to portray race differences, and her tales of woman's strength and moral conviction. The volume concludes with a consideration of Truth's status as a folk legend and how she wished to be remembered.

This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary novels, the contributed chapters combine literary studies with corpus linguistics to analyse fantasy, romance, crime, historical and science fiction in French and English. The authors offer new insights into long-standing debates on genre distinction and the hybridization of genres by deploying a new, interdisciplinary methodology. Sitting at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a firm grounding in the digital humanities, this book will be of particular relevance to literary scholars, corpus stylists, contrastivists and lexicologists, as well as general readers with an interest in twentieth-century genre fiction.

This book is a collection of papers by leading researchers in computational semantics. It presents a state-of-the-art overview of recent and current research in computational semantics, including descriptions of new methods for constructing and improving resources for semantic computation, such as WordNet, VerbNet, and semantically annotated corpora. It also presents new statistical methods in semantic computation, such as the application of distributional semantics in the compositional calculation of sentence meanings. Computing the meaning of sentences, texts, and spoken or texted dialogue is the ultimate challenge in natural language processing, and the key to a wide range of exciting applications. The breadth and depth of coverage of this book makes it suitable as a reference and overview of the state of the field for researchers in Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Intelligence. "

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.

Through an analysis of the discourse practices of populist Far Right groups in France, Italy and Belgian Flanders, this book makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the ways in which homophobic discourse functions. It proposes an innovative heuristic for the conceiving of the interplay of language, context and culture: discourse ecology. The author brings linguistic theories, methods and ways of understanding and thinking about language to a study of the overt and covert homophobic discourses of three non-Anglophone populist movements, and grounds the interpretation of such practices in observable data. In doing so the book encourages us all to reconsider the power we give language in our activism and scholarship, as well as in our private lives.

This book offers a metaphysical development of the notion of perspective. By explaining the functional nature of point of view, and by providing a concrete definition of point of view as a window through which to see the world, it offers a scientific realist theory that explains that points of view are real structures that ground properties and objects as well as perspectives. The notion of point of view has been of key importance in the history of philosophy, and different philosophical schools have used this notion to conduct analyses from the external reality to the inner phenomenal status, or even to construct an entire philosophical system. However, there has been a lack of systematic analysis of what a point of view is and what its structure is; this book fills the gap in the literature and makes the transition between semantics and epistemology, and the philosophy of science.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfill two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language.

Challenging the tendency to disparage Nashe's writing as the product of an eccentric sensibility and to explain his texts in journalistic terms more appropriate to modern commercial publishing, this work provides an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of sixteenth-century literature. Lorna Hutson reveals hitherto overlooked links between humanist approaches to the literary text and the transformation of the English economy through humanist-inspired policies of ethical and social reform; from this context, Nashe's textual prodigality emerges as an assault upon the contemporary impoverishment of literary activity caused by the political over-valuing of the printed word. Generic precedents turn out to be festive; each of Nashe's apparently unstructured pamphlets derives shaping energy from traditions of popular-festive mockery. The pamphlets bring an older conception of seasonal prosperity into subversive dialogue with the newer discourse of provident individualism. For Nashe, stylistic experiment is shown to mean more than a choice of style; it is, rather, the expression of an intricate, socially engaged imagination.

This book investigates how digital youth engage in computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the era of social media. Particularly focused on their uses of emoji, their motivations, attitudes and interpretations of emoji use, Emoji Speak provides the first book-level discussion looking at youth-to-youth Social Network Service (SNS) communication and emoji use. Where previous research on SNS communication has tended to focus on the English language, in this book Jieun Kiaer explores SNS as a global phenomenon. Presenting the results of empirical investigation through large-scale surveys, SNS corpora, and interviews with a wide pool of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and British youth participants, Kiaer compares SNS communication across languages to provide insight in understanding youth language and their emojing behaviours. Arguing that the future of our modern languages lies within the multi-modal and multi-lingual linguistic behaviours found in SNS, Emoji Speak suggests that emoji use among young people is leading to the emergence of a new, 'social' grammar.

This book is a guide to discourse, discourse analysis and genre, aimed at upper level undergraduates as well as graduate students. It has a student-friendly, inductive approach, leading readers from examples to principles. Using a clear and progressive framework together with genuine discourse examples, students are given a clearly structured understanding of how each dimension of discourse is linked together.

• Offers a clear, authoritative and systematic approach to analyzing real-world texts
• Includes analysis of a wide range of authentic texts
• Provides practical guidance on how to carry out a discourse analysis project

With an explicit focus on genre and genres, it draws on contexts which are highly appealing to students such as forensic and linguistic discourse, and the discourse of texting, internet chat and television. It also offers clear guidance as to how to carry out a discourse analysis project.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis is a comprehensive survey of the ways in which enhanced meaning emerges through the interaction of more than one mode of communication. Different modes of communication covered include: Language. Dynamic and static visual images. Architecture and three-dimensional objects in the realm of material lived-in space, as well as electronic media, film and print. This also includes the study of transition and phase, camera and body movement, typography, layout and the use of colour, and how such choices orientate the viewer to particular readings of the text and context. Multimodal Discourse Analysis will be useful to researchers interested in the application of systemic functional linguistics to media studies, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.

In the past two decades there has been considerable interest in the ways in which subjects are positioned in discursive practice. This interest has entailed a focus on the role of language and discourse in the processes in and through which subjects are constituted in discourse. However, questions of agency and how it relates to consciousness have received less attention. This book explores the ways in which agency and consciousness are created through transactions between self and other. The book argues that it is necessary to regard body-brain interactions in the context of the social and discursive practices which act upon human bodies. These issues of agency and individuation are explored in relation to infant semiosis, as well as in relation to children's symbolic play. Thibault looks at the importance of the self-referential moral conscience in relation to the interpersonal dimension of all acts of meaning-making. This conscience is also connected to the development of a self-referential viewpoint which the book argues is connected to the ecosocial semiotic systems of thinking about consciousness as a complex system operating on many different levels. The author discusses and evaluates the work of linguists, psychologists, biologists, semioticians, and sociologists such as Basil Bernstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, J. J. Gibson, M. A. K. Halliday, Walter Kauffman, Lakoff & Johnson, Jay Lemke, Jean Piaget and Stanley Salthe, to develop a new theory of agency and consciousness.

Through an analysis of the discourse practices of populist Far Right groups in France, Italy and Belgian Flanders, this book makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the ways in which homophobic discourse functions. It proposes an innovative heuristic for the conceiving of the interplay of language, context and culture: discourse ecology. The author brings linguistic theories, methods and ways of understanding and thinking about language to a study of the overt and covert homophobic discourses of three non-Anglophone populist movements, and grounds the interpretation of such practices in observable data. In doing so the book encourages us all to reconsider the power we give language in our activism and scholarship, as well as in our private lives.

This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an important role. The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.