Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody ('timing') and intonation ('melody') used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.

The common aim of the contributions to this volume is to shed light on the communication of conceptual structures. The papers investigate how speakers rely on the same cognitive dispositions in three different areas of transfer: in the lexicalization of metonymies and metaphors; in intercultural communication; and in expert-lay communication.

Grounded primarily in the ethnography of communication and aligned with the multidisciplinarity of discourse analysis, the book examines the use of proverbs in the daily life of a social network of Mexican-origin transnational families in Chicago and Michoacan, Mexico. Various and detailed analyses of actual proverb use reveal that proverbs in this particular population function as a highly contextualized communicative strategy that serves four discrete social functions: to argue, to advise, to establish rapport, and to entertain. Proposing that the social and cognitive aspects of language use must be combined for a complete understanding of how such genres of language are actually used by regular people in daily life, the author shows how ordinary people use sophisticated cognitive processes to interpret the socially-relevant meanings of proverbs in everyday conversation. The book provides an unusual mix of contextualized discourse analysis that is ethnographic, linguistic, and cognitive, yielding much needed insight into a segment of the Mexican-origin population of the Midwestern U.S., a population whose increasing importance and size is often mentioned, but about which precious few linguistic studies have been conducted. The volume not only helps to fill this void but it is also one of the few studies that focuses on the impact of transnationalism on linguistic practices, regardless of cultural group. Departing from the conventional approach of ignoring the role of everyday-language use in order to focus exclusively on culture, economics, or migrant patterns, the book makes linguistic practice the central issue, and thus affirms that it is language that weaves together the two distant sites of transnational communities, providing a fertile area for understanding the perspectives of the transmigrants themselves.

New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity is a contribution to the growing field of language and sexuality. The authors present new and exciting data from lesbian and gay conversations, narratives, representations of lesbians in film and erotic fiction, and representations of prominent gay men in newspaper reports to exemplify some of the ways in which lesbians and gay men construct identity from among the symbolic resources available within lesbian and gay communities.

This collection of essays grew out of the workshop 'Existence: Semantics and Syntax', which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est ('Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East'), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases."

This book introduces key issues and historical contexts in critical discursive research in psychology. It sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts, arguments that can be made for qualitative research in academic settings, and arguments that could be made against it by critical psychologists.

The relationship of language to cognition, especially in development, is an issue that has occupied philosophers, psychologists, and linguists for centuries. In recent years, the scientific study of sign languages and deaf individuals has greatly enhanced our understanding of deafness, language, and cognition. This Counterpoints volume considers the extent to which the use of sign language might affect the course and character of cognitive development, and presents a variety of viewpoints in this debate.
This volume brings the language-thought discussion into a clearer focus, both theoretically and practically, by placing it in the context of children growing up deaf and the influences of having sign language as their primary form of communication. The discussion is also sharpened by having internationally recognized contributors, such as Patricia Siple, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Ruth Campbell, with specialties in varied areas, all converging on a common interest in which each has conducted empirical research. These contributors clarify and challenge the theoretical assumptions that have driven arguments in the language-thought debate for centuries. An introduction by the editors provides a historical overview of the issues as well as a review of empirical findings that have been offered in response to questions about language-thought relations in deaf children. The final chapters are structured in the form of "live" debate, in which each contributor is given the opportunity to respond to the other perspectives presented in this volume.

If Edward Everett is remembered at all today, it is as the orator who gave the other speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863. Ironically, Everett's oration, which was given wide coverage in contemporary newspapers, was recognized as both epideictic and argumentative. Everett defended the Union cause, whereas Lincoln's speech was strictly ceremonial. A second irony that attends Everett's oratorical career is that his countrymen believed him to be one of the great orators of the time, the undisputed master of ceremonial address. In this first new study of Edward Everett's oratory, author Ronald Reid addresses the historical and oratorical paradoxes that have influenced perceptions of Everett's career. Reid reconstitutes the role of epideictic rhetoric in the United States from the end of the Revolutionary War to the eve of the Civil War and reinstates Everett in the pantheon of great American orators. He demonstrates why Everett fell into virtual obscurity and treats the reader to a penetrating analysis of the role of public persuasion in the United States during a critical period in its history. In Edward Everett: Unionist Orator Reid effectively restores Everett to his rightful rostrum in the unfolding national drama from the 1820s to the 1860s, providing a sweeping story of America's golden age of oratory in the process. The book opens with a discussion of the influence of Everett's eighteenth-century heritage on his desire to save the Union at all costs. The author shows how the seeds of Everett's Unionism were starting to sprout in his literary and theological speeches and writings, and how he developed the rhetorical methods that he would use throughout his career.Next, Reid deals with Everett's oratory during his years of service, first as a congressman and then as governor of Massachusetts. Here he discusses Everett's increasing concern about the divisiveness of the partisan and sectional causes he espoused. Chapters three and four deal with Everett's modification of his earlier Unionist strategies in an effort to deal with increasing sectionalism and preserve the United States. In conclusion, Reid reviews Everett's oratory, speculating about the role of epideictic oratory in general in maintaining, or failing to maintain, social unity. Sample speeches complete the work, which include a partial text of one of Everett's congressional speeches, a 4th of July oration, his "Character of Washington," and a partial text of Everett's Gettysburg address.

In contrast to previous approaches to phonological typology, the typology of syllable and word languages relates the patterns of syllable structure, phoneme inventory, and phonological processes to the relevance of the prosodic domains of the syllable and the phonological word. This volume proves how useful this kind of typology is for the understanding of language variation and change. By providing a synchronic and diachronic account of the syllable and the phonological word in Central Catalan (Catalan dialect group) and Swabian (Alemannic dialect group), the author shows how the evolution of Old Catalan and Old Alemannic can be explained in terms of a typological drift toward an increased relevance of the phonological word. Further, the description of Central Catalan and Swabian allows to identify common strategies for profiling the phonological word and thus makes an important contribution to research on prosodic phonology.

This volume includes a selection of fifteen papers delivered at the Second International Conference on Late Modern English. The chapters focus on significant linguistic aspects of the Late Modern English period, not only on grammatical issues such as the development of pragmatic markers, for-to infinitive constructions, verbal subcategorisation, progressive aspect, sentential complements, double comparative forms or auxiliary/negator cliticisation but also on pronunciation, dialectal variation and other practical aspects such as corpus compilation, which are approached from different perspectives (descriptive, cognitive, syntactic, corpus-driven).

This book is written for both linguists and computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence as well as to anyone interested in intelligent text processing.

Lexical function is a concept that formalizes semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations which holds between the base and its partner in a collocation. Knowledge of collocation is important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. The book shows how collocations can be annotated with lexical functions in a computer readable dictionary - allowing their precise semantic analysis in texts and their effective use in natural language applications including parsers, high quality machine translation, periphrasis system and computer-aided learning of lexica. The books shows how to extract collocations from corpora and annotate them with lexical functions automatically. To train algorithms, the authors created a dictionary of lexical functions containing more than 900 Spanish disambiguated and annotated examples which is a part of this book. The obtained results show that machine learning is feasible to achieve the task of automatic detection of lexical functions.

This book is a cross-linguistic exploration of semantic and functional change in modal markers. Its approach is broadly functional typological but makes frequent reference to work in formal semantics by scholars such as Angelika Kratzer and Paul Portner. The author starts by considering what modality is and how it relates to and differs from subjectivity. He argues that modality cannot be defined in terms of subjectivity: both concepts are independent of each other, the first exhibiting different degrees of subjectivity, and the second being operative in a much wider range of grammatical and lexical categories. Subjectivity, he suggests, should not be defined solely in terms of performativity, evidentiality, or construal, but rather from the interplay of multiple semantic and pragmatic factors. He then presents a two-dimensional model for the descriptive representation of modality, based on the notion that among the many aspects of modal meaning, volitivity and speech-act-orientation versus event-orientation are two of its most salient parameters. He shows that it is especially the dimension of speech-act orientation versus event-orientation, parallel to category climbing in syntax, that is operative in diachronic change. Numerous examples of diachronic change within modality and between modality and other categories are then examined with respect to their directionality. With a focus on Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese the book is a countercheck to hypotheses built on the Indo-European languages. It also contains numerous illustrations from other languages.

"GENADMIN: THEORIZING WPA IDENTITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY makes an important contribution to writing studies in general by showing how the identification of writing program administration as scholarly and creative (not merely administrative) invites new ways to think about and theorize composition's place in the field and in institutional structures. GENADMIN also contributes to WPA scholarship by opening a rich and textured discussion of a very specific moment in which WPA work becomes a focus for graduate studies in the field. . . . GENADMIN speaks with equal importance to junior and senior WPAs, to the people who train graduate students for WPA work, and to those who hire new WPAs." -Nancy C. DeJoy, Michigan State University GENADMIN: THEORIZING WPA IDENTITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY examines identity formation in a generation of rhetoric and composition professionals who have had explicit preparation in scholarly dimensions of writing program work. GENADMIN disrupts histories and narratives that posit writing program administration as managerial, where the most one can hope for is to become a hero who successfully champions writing rather than a victim of an untenable job. The authors draw on composition and rhetorical theory, WPA experiences and scholarship, and contemporary philosophy to offer writing program administration as an epistemology and a discourse for change. GENADMIN repositions WPAs as agents and reclaims writing program administration as a positive professional commitment that looks toward, rather than simply stems from, current challenges in higher education. An Afterword by Jeanne Gunner, Joseph Harris, Dennis Lynch, and Martha Townsend continues the important conversation, setting the stage for future discussion of the issues raised in this groundbreaking account of a new generation of writing program administrators. COLIN CHARLTON is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and coordinator of developmental reading/writing at the University of Texas-Pan American. JONIKKA CHARLTON is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and coordinator of first-year writing at the University of Texas-Pan American. TAREZ SAMRA GRABAN is Assistant Professor of English and coordinator of multilingual writing at Indiana University. KATHLEEN J. RYAN is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Montana. AMY FERDINANDT STOLLEY is Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Director at Saint Xavier University.

Verbal aspect in Ancient Greek has been a topic of significant debate in recent scholarship. In this book, Constantine R. Campbell investigates the function of verbal aspect within New Testament Greek narrative. He argues that the primary role of verbal aspect in narrative is to delineate and shape the various 'discourse strands' of which it is constructed, such as mainline, offline, and direct discourse. Campbell accounts for this function in terms of the semantic value of each tense-form. Consequently, in the search for more effective conclusions and explanations, he challenges and reassesses some of the conclusions reached in previous scholarship. One such reassessment involves a boldly innovative approach to the perfect tense-form.

Language and communication are central features of social behaviour. So, it is somewhat surprising that the social psychological study of language, communication and discourse has a relatively short history. In this book a leading group of language, discourse and social psychology scholars will overview the history, theories and methods of the field. However, the main focus is on current developments in the social psychology of language and discourse, showcasing cutting edge empirical work.

These three essays on social science terminology examine commonly used words whose meanings, on closer examination, are not clear. The first essay analyzes the term "socialization" as it is used inconsistently by 24 authors in psychology, sociology, and education. Brezinka contends that it is frequently confused with the term "education," to the detriment of both concepts. The second essay, "Models in Educational Theories," examines 15 usages of the term "models," including the vogue expression "paradigm," and finds little of use for the science of education in the concepts. The third essay, "Conflict Education," attacks the New Left and its pedagogical theories for failing to abide by basic principles of concept construction and use. Throughout the book, the author shows how imprecision can be identified and corrected.

This book examines the concept of " Neurosemantics", a term currently used in two different senses: the informational meaning of the physical processes in the neural circuits, and semantics in its classical sense, as the meaning of language, explained in terms of neural processes. The book explores this second sense of neurosemantics, yet in doing so, it addresses much of the first meaning as well. Divided into two parts, the book starts with a description and analysis of the mathematics of the brain, including computational units, representational mechanisms and algorithmic principles. This first part pays special attention to the neural architecture which has been used in developing models of neurosemantics. The second part of the book presents a collection of models, and describes each model reproducing specific aspects of the semantics of language. Some of these models target one of the core problems of semantics, the reference of nouns, and in particular of nouns with a strong perceptual characterization. Others address the semantics of predicates, with a detailed analysis of colour attributes. While this book represents a radical shift from traditional semantics, it still pursues a line of continuity that is based on the idea that meaning can be captured, and explained, by a sort of computation.

The enormous body of short story anthologies from the nineteen countries of Spanish America and Brazil testifies to their importance for writers, editors, readers, and, especially, for schools and universities, teachers and students. The study of anthologies and their contents can be particularly revealing for many of the questions looming large in critical discourse, particularly those on canon formation and the relations between literature and cultural institutions; but researching this corpus is difficult because it varies greatly in quality, distribution, and format. The present volume for the first time gathers this mass of material and organizes it for systematic study. The main section comprises annotated listings of 1302 short story anthologies: those with stories from all or most of the countries grouped together, including a section of English-language anthologies; those from countries of a region; and those from individual nations. For most entries a full listing of contents is provided along with brief commentary. A second section comprises annotated bibliographies of criticism of the short story, similarly arranged with materials for Latin America as a whole as well as regionally and nationally. The volume ends with four indexes: of authors of the stories; of authors of essays, introductions, and other critical materials; of titles of the critical works; and of themes. An essential tool for scholars working on Latin American narrative, this bibliography will also serve as a practical finding aid for individual writers and stories.

This book, addressed primarily to students and researchers in semantics, cognitive linguistics, English, and Australian languages, is a comparative study of the polysemy patterns displayed by percussion/impact ('hitting') verbs in English and Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Central Australia). The opening chapters develop a novel theoretical orientation for the study of polysemy via a close examination of two theoretical traditions under the broader cognitivist umbrella: Langackerian and Lakovian Cognitive Semantics and Wierzbickian Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Arguments are offered which problematize attempts in these traditions to ground the analysis of meaning either in cognitive or neurological reality, or in the existence of universal synonymy relations within the lexicon. Instead, an interpretative rather than a scientific construal of linguistic theorizing is sketched, in the context of a close examination of certain key issues in the contemporary study of polysemy such as sense individuation, the role of reference in linguistic categorization, and the demarcation between metaphor and metonymy. The later chapters present a detailed typology of the polysemous senses of English and Warlpiri percussion/impact (or P/I) verbs based on a diachronically deep corpus of dictionary citations from Middle to contemporary English, and on a large corpus of Warlpiri citations. Limited to the operations of metaphor and of three categories of metonymy, this typology posits just four types of basic relation between extended and core meanings. As a result, the phenomenon of polysemy and semantic extension emerges as amenable to strikingly concise description.

This monograph is a detailed linguistic analysis of the discourse of German nationalism, colonialism and Anti-Semitism using a methodological framework devised by Ruth Wodak et al., the Discourse Historical Approach. It pays particular attention to the discourse strategies, argumentation topoi and metaphors used by a selection of representative authors of both political propaganda and fiction. The study shows how the analysis of linguistic and social behaviour and the connection between them sheds light on the nature and effects of human behaviour, and on the motives and reasoning behind human actions. Within the context of nationalism and prejudiced behaviours, the construction in discourse of individual and group 'self-images' and the discursive means of contrasting these with 'other-images' is of major significance

The goal of inquiry is to acquire knowledge of truths about the world. In this book, Jason Stanley argues that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing a truth about the world. When you learned how to swim, what happened is that you learned some truths about swimming. Knowledge of these truths is what gave you knowledge of how to swim. Something similar occurred with every other activity that you now know how to do, such as riding a bicycle or cooking a meal. Of course, when you learned how to swim, you didn't learn just any truth about swimming. You learned a special kind of truth about swimming, one that answers the question, "How could you swim?" Know How develops an account of the kinds of answers to questions, knowledge of which explains skilled action. Drawing on work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, action theory, philosophy of language, linguistic semantics, and cognitive neuroscience, Stanley presents a powerful case that it is our success as inquirers that explains our capacity for skillful engagement with the world.

Shelton confirms the power of talk in the specific case of the 1994 debate on comprehensive health care reform and beyond. He provides a context rich with detail concerning health care and health care reform in America and a social scientific examination of specific discourse factors that includes narratives, naming, and medical metaphors. Shelton's assessment of the debate reveals that opposition discourse was much more directly impacted and broader in scope. This is followed by a rhetorical analysis that extends the genre of crisis rhetoric. Shelton's rhetorical analysis reveals that the virtual crisis of big government both subsumed and overwhelmed the actual health care crisis. Such an assessment--including an ethical analysis of the 1994 floor debate and detailed consideration of the social existence of hatred for government--produces a host of research and scholarly implications. A thoughtful analysis that will be of value to scholars and researchers in political communication and public policy.

The internal bootstrapps for establishing the grammatical system of a human language build an essential topic in language acquisition research. The discussion of the last 20 years came up with the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis which assigns lexical development the role of the central bootstrapping process. The volume presents work from different theoretical perspectives evaluating the strength and weaknesses of this hypothesis.

The volume addresses the role of salience in discourse and provides broad coverage of various perspectives on and functions of discourse salience. The range of multidisciplinary approaches adopted in the volume differ with regard to the underlying theoretical proposals and foci of research. The topics range from (i) entity-based salience to (ii) discourse-structural salience of utterances to (iii) extra-linguistic factors of salience in discourse. Accordingly, the volume is organized into three sections. Part I focuses on discourse referents and the choice of referring expressions. The contributions cover issues such as salience and demonstrativity in Russian, discourse salience and grammatical voice in the West Siberian language Eastern Khanty, the joined information of syntactic and semantic prominence, and a computational framework of salience metrics. The contributions to Part II are concerned with linguistic structures at or above the clause level. The salience of discourse segments is addressed with respect to the translation of discourse relations and position of verb arguments in Old High German. Part III extends the scope beyond purely linguistic phenomena and deals with the role of extra-linguistic salience in discourse processing. Visual salience in a situated-dialog context, salience marking by hypertextual links, and extra-linguistic salience derived from a mental representation of the described situation are all discussed here. The notion of salience is of relevance to discourse studies in theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, as well as psycholinguistics.

This book opposes the position that meanings can be explained by way of intralinguistic relations, as in structural linguistics and its successors, and rejects definitional descriptions of meaning as well as naturalistic accounts. The idea that we are able to live by strings of mere signifiers is shown to rest on a misconception. Ruthrof also attempts an explanation of why arguments grounded in a post-Saussurean view of language, as for instance certain feminist theories, find it so difficult to show how precisely the body can be reclaimed as an integral part of linguistic signs. In reinstating the body in language, Ruthrof draws on Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, as well as on the writings of Helen Keller.