Non-literal language is ubiquitous in everyday life, and while hyperbole is a major part of this, it has so far remained relatively unexplored. This volume provides the first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on data from genres such as spoken conversation, TV, newspapers, and literary works from Chaucer to Monty Python. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, it uses approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, to investigate in detail both speaker-centered and emotive aspects of hyperbole, and also addressee-related aspects, such as interpretation and interactional uptake. Illustrated with a range of diachronic case studies, hyperbole is also shown to be a main means of linguistic creativity, and an important contributor to language change. The book concludes with an exploration of the role of hyperbole in political speaking, humour, and literature. Original and in-depth, it will be invaluable to all those working on meaning, discourse, and historical linguistics.

The authors combine a theoretical reassessment of how we understand, study and analyze processes of identification with detailed case studies of the discourses of three-generation families living in split-border communities along the former Iron Curtain, talking about themselves and other social groups, about their way of life and their experiences past and present.

In a stimulating and novel approach, this book explains why metaphors are persuasive, suggesting that they are ideologically effective because they are cognitively plausible "and" evoke an emotional response. "Critical Metaphor Analysis" is then developed in a series of corpus-based studies in which analysis of collocations provides insight into the cognitive motivation and expressive connotation of metaphor. By unifying traditional and cognitive semantic with pragmatic approaches, the reader becomes aware of the importance of metaphor in persuasive language.

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.

Each chapter of this book analyzes the rhetoric of speeches by major American and British politicians to show how metaphor is used to create political myths of monsters, villains and heroic leaders. Metaphors are shown to interact with other figures of speech to communicate subliminal meanings by drawing on the unconscious emotional association of words. An innovative study for students and researchers in discourse analysis, political communication, journalism and media studies.

This volume focuses on spoken language and its production. It is part of a series which provides a forum for the cross-fertilization of ideas from diverse disciplines that share a mutual interest in discourse. A variety of approaches to the topic are represented: sociolinguistics; psycholinguistics; ethnomethodology and the study of language; educational psychology; and computational linguistics.

Far from being rhetorical ornaments, metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the structure of political categorisation and argumentation. Drawing on a very large bilingual corpus, this book, now in paperback, analyses the distribution of 'metaphor scenarios' in more than a decade of public discourse on European integration, elucidating differences in UK and German attitudes and argumentation. The corpus analysis leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory by systematically relating conceptual, semantic and argumentation levels and incorporating the historical dimension of metaphor evolution. Finally, drawing on examples of metaphor negotiation and on a reassessment of Hobbes' concept of metaphor in Leviathan, the book highlights the ethical dimension of metaphor in politics.

George Bush's 1988 campaign pledge, "Read my lips: no new taxes," has become a mantra for those who distrust politicians and bureaucrats. The gulf between what political leaders say and do seems to be widening, and in democratic societies around the world, contributing to an atmosphere of cynicism and apathy among the citizenry. Understanding the characteristics and functions of speech in policy processes is a requirement for trying to overcome this problem; indeed, politicians and bureaucrats spend a good proportion of their time and resources discoursing, i.e., writing, speaking, and publishing. However, there has been scant analysis of political discourse; the aim of this book is to fill this analytical gap, by exploring political speech from a variety of perspectives, including normative, epistemological, and empirical. Incorporating insights from economics, political science, philosophy, and law, and evidence from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Turkey, and the EU, the book addresses a wide variety of timely issues, including:. Fiscal discipline in speeches vs budget balance: Is an improvement (deterioration) of the budget balance preceded by a more (less) fiscally disciplined discourse? Revenues and spending forecasted in budget speeches vs realised budget outcomes: Is there a systematic bias? If so, how can we explain it? Electoral pledges vs actual realisations: Do governments follow up on their electoral pledges? Ideological stance in party publications vs spending and revenues of party governments: Do parties of the right and the left speak different languages? How can we validly classify a government as of the left or of the right? Is there a systematic difference between governments of the right and of the left in terms of their policy? Speeches by central bank officers vs monetary policy: Can changes in monetary policy be predicted by official speeches? The political business cycle: How can taking into consideration the speech-action relationship strengthen (or threaten) our knowledge about electoral and partisan cycles in public spending? Other questions explored include: Should policy makers always tell the truth and all the truth? What are the benefits and the costs of transparency? How can we resolve the apparent contradiction between the democratic demand for transparency and the efficiency requirement of secrecy in many policy areas (budget preparation, monetary policy, foreign policy, security, etc.)? Under which conditions is secrecy acceptable in a democratic society? To what extent may deception and lies lead to a breach of trust or to power abuse? What are the most efficient institutional mechanisms to prevent such abuse? Collectively, the authors present new insights for understanding political process and government activity, and suggest avenues for further research.

Drawing on examples from contemporary life, Woodward explores rhetorical conditions that create powerful moments of identification. Illustrated with interesting examples drawn from politics and art, The Idea of Identification draws on classical social and rhetorical theories to establish a systematic framework for understanding the varieties and forms of identification. Woodward references a variety of contexts in contemporary life to explore the rhetorical conditions that create powerful and captivating moments. By invoking the influential ideas of Kenneth Burke, George Herbert Mead, Joshua Meyrowitz and others, he shows how the rhetorical process of identification is separate from psychological theories of identity construction. Woodward concludes with an argument that film theory has perhaps offered the most vivid descriptive categories for understanding the bonds of identification.

This book compares attitudes to empiricism in language study from mid-twentieth century philosophy of language and from present-day linguistics. It focuses on responses to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, particularly in the work of British philosopher J. L. Austin and the much less well-known work of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

OndrejMajer, Ahti-VeikkoPietarinen, andTeroTulenheimo 1 Games and logic in philosophy Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the unifying methodo- gies over what have been perceived as pretty disparate logical 'systems', or else merely an assortment of formal and mathematical 'approaches' to phi- sophical inquiry. This development has largely been fueled by an increasing dissatisfaction to what has earlier been taken to be a straightforward outcome of 'logical pluralism' or 'methodological diversity'. These phrases appear to re ect the everyday chaos of our academic pursuits rather than any genuine attempt to clarify the general principles underlying the miscellaneous ways in which logic appears to us. But the situation is changing. Unity among plurality is emerging in c- temporary studies in logical philosophy and neighbouring disciplines. This is a necessary follow-up to the intensive research into the intricacies of logical systems and methodologies performed over the recent years. The present book suggests one such peculiar but very unrestrained meth- ological perspective over the eld of logic and its applications in mathematics, language or computation: games. An allegory for opposition, cooperation and coordination, games are also concrete objects of formal study.

The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.

Today's leading theories of meaning, chiefly those of Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, depend crucially upon Gottlob Frege's distinctions between sense and reference, sense and utterance-force, and sense and tone. But while the notions of reference, sense, and force have dominated the discussion, the subtle workings of tone have received scant attention. Long overdue, this is the first comprehensive study of tone. Careful analysis of the more than two dozen varieties identified by Frege and Dummett reveals serious weaknesses in their explanatory framework. The author sketches a broader conception in terms of speakers correctly making things out to be a certain way, a formulation that avoids the demonstrated shortcomings of Fregean truth-conditional accounts while capturing the representational character of meaning as this applies right across the language-not only to words and sentences, but to discreet linguistic components such as word-order, mood of the verb, and patterns of intonation and stress.

The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape. This book contains concise yet thorough and lucid overviews of ancient Near Eastern languages united by alphabetic writing and illuminates their interaction during the first 1000 years of their attestation. All chapters are informed by the most recent scholarship, contain fresh insights, provide numerous examples from the most pertinent sources, and share a clear historical framework that makes it easier to trace processes of contact and convergence in this highly diversified speech area. They also address non-specialists. The following topics are discussed: Alphabetic writing (A. Millard), Ugaritic (A. Gianto), Phoenician and Hebrew (H. Gzella), Transjordanian languages (K. Beyer), Old and Imperial Aramaic (M. Folmer), Epigraphic South Arabian (R. Hasselbach), Old Persian (M. de Vaan/A. Lubotsky), Greek (A. Willi).

This book documents changes and trends in English predicate complementation. In-depth case studies of grammatical patterns presented here uncover new links between form and meaning in these constructions, offering fresh insights into explanatory principles to account for variation and change in the system of English predicate complementation.

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat. Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

Addressing issues related to the physical, cultural, ideological and psychological relocation of English, this volume provides a critical examination of current sociolinguistic study of English in the world and suggests a new approach which focuses more on ideological and psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

This text presents a new model of conversation based on time, in this case referring both to the rhythmic organization of conversation, the tempo, and to the "right time" or timing. These two notions of time correspond to two major systems governing conversation: the turn taking system and the rapport system. This model interweaves linguists' work on spoken discourse, sociologists' work on conversation analysis, and psychologists' work on non-verbal communication. This volume also explores the evolution of the interview as a genre which creates a particular context for conversation. Gatekeeping interviews in particular are explored because of their dual nature-to guide and monitor individuals in an institution or business. They are routine, but essential factors in determining the future of individuals within these organizations. Finally, the volume shows the importance of the listener in conversation. No previous theory of discourse or conversation incorporates the notion of rapport, yet speakers clearly depend on listeners' response as cues for shaping their utterances.

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and the workplace.

This one-volume work covers the West's oldest critical and academic discipline--the elements, structure, principles and techniques of rhetoric in literature, communication and more specifically, public speaking. Major figures and rhetoric in non-Western cultures are covered as well.

Human Rights in the International Public Sphere has an interdisciplinary focus and can be used as a text in communication studies, cultural studies, political science, current events, discourse analysis, area and international studies, and other courses in the social sciences and humanities.

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

Exploring food-related interactions in various digital and cultural contexts, this book demonstrates how food as a discursive resource can be mobilized to accomplish actions of social, cultural, and political consequence. The chapters reveal how social media users employ language, images, and videos to construct identities and ideologies that both encompass and transcend food. Drawing on various discourse analytic frameworks to digital communication, contributors examine interactions across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. From the multimodal discourse of a Korean livestreaming online eating show, to food activism in an English blogging community and discussions of a food-related controversy on Omani Twitter, this book shows how language and multimodal resources serve not only to communicate about food, but also as a means of accomplishing key aspects of everyday social life.

Most of the expressions we use in ordinary language are vague, in the sense that their meaning does not allow us to specify a unique and constant boundary between the objects to which they apply and those to which they don't. An adjective like 'young', for instance, does not select for a sharp range of ages (does 29 still count as 'young'? what about 37, 43?); likewise a determiner like 'many' does not determine a precise number of objects in order to count as many. The phenomenon of vagueness raises substantial puzzles about how we reason and manage to communicate successfully with vague expressions. This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers which contribute novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness, with special attention to the linguistic mechanisms by which vagueness is regulated. The volume is organized in three main parts which concern respectively: * the link between vagueness, gradability and the expression of comparison in language (how does the meaning of the vague adjective 'young' relate to that of the precise comparative 'younger'?) * the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (how do adverbs like 'clearly', 'approximately' or 'surprisingly' constrain the meaning of the expressions they modify?) * ways of evading the sorites paradox (what are the prospects for contextualist and pragmatic solutions?)