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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Drawing on some 3,000 published interviews with contemporary authors, Authors on Writing: Metaphors and Intellectual Labor reveals new ways of conceiving of writing as intellectual labor. Authors' metaphorical stories about composing highlight not interior worlds but socially situated cultures of composing and apparatuses of authorship. Through an original method of interpreting metaphorical stories, Tomlinson argues that writing is both an individual activity and a collective practice, a solitary activity that depends upon rich, sustained, and complex social networks, institutions, and beliefs. This new book draws upon interviews with writers including: Seamus Heaney, Roald Dahl, Samuel Beckett, Bret Easton Ellis, John Fowles, Allen Ginsburg, Alice Walker and Gore Vidal.
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.
Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth-neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context. Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives. "
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 is the first study of the use of figures of speech other than metaphor in scientific texts. Fahnestock breaks new ground in the rhetorical study of scientific argument by demonstrating how figures of speech other than metaphor have been used to accomplish key conceptual moves in scientific texts. Examples, both verbal and visual, range across disciplines and centuries to reaffirm the positive value of these once widely-taught devices. Her work will be of substantial interest to scholars of rhetoric, linguistics, cognitive science, and the study of science.
Asking Questions examines a central phenomenon of language -- the
use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable
literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic
of "questions," and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried
to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over
the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking
questions. Robert Fiengo not only does this, but also takes up some
more foundational issues in the theory of language.
Taking as its point of departure the general assumption that meaning is crucial in accounting for verb complementation, this volume presents the results of an empirical study of verb complementation patterns of semantically similar English verbs. The semantic parallels of the verbs selected are based on their coverage in dictionaries - first and foremost the Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst, Heath, Roe and Goetz 2004) - as well as corpus research and native speaker assessments. It is demonstrated that despite obvious similarities in complementation between such verbs, there are still a significant number of syntactic discrepancies which cannot be accounted for on the basis of meaning alone and that semantic factors - such as selection restrictions and aspectual properties - do not sufficiently correlate with the verbs' syntactic properties and consequently do not have sufficient explanatory power. Thus the results rigorously challenge so-called projectionist approaches which assume the position that complementation is determined by semantic properties and thus ought to be predictable on this basis. In the light of a general trend towards placing greater emphasis on semantic aspects, in the fields of construction grammar and cognitive grammar too, the number of idiosyncratic phenomena on the level of single complements as well as whole patterns clearly underlines the importance of storage phenomena as opposed to rule-based generation. As such it stresses the necessity of finding ways to systematically account for item-specific properties of verbs in any grammatical theory of the English language. The book is targeted at all linguists interested in the relationship between semantics and syntax, which is one of the prevalent questions in modern linguistics, also in the field of construction grammar and cognitive grammar. Since the data is presented in a way which is compatible with various theories of complementation, the target group is clearly not restricted to any specific linguistic school. Because of the large amount of item-specific information presented, this book is also a valuable source for grammarians and lexicographers.
This book discusses major milestones in Rohit Jivanlal Parikh's scholarly work. Highlighting the transition in Parikh's interest from formal languages to natural languages, and how he approached Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, it traces the academic trajectory of a brilliant scholar whose work opened up various new avenues in research. This volume is part of Springer's book series Outstanding Contributions to Logic, and honours Rohit Parikh and his works in many ways. Parikh is a leader in the realm of ideas, offering concepts and definitions that enrich the field and lead to new research directions. Parikh has contributed to a variety of areas in logic, computer science and game theory. In mathematical logic his contributions have been in recursive function theory, proof theory and non-standard analysis; in computer science, in the areas of modal, temporal and dynamic logics of programs and semantics of programs, as well as logics of knowledge; in artificial intelligence in the area of belief revision; and in game theory in the formal analysis of social procedures, with a strong undercurrent of philosophy running through all his work.This is not a collection of articles limited to one theme, or even directly connected to specific works by Parikh, but instead all papers are inspired and influenced by Parikh in some way, adding structures to and enriching "Parikh-land". The book presents a brochure-like overview of Parikh-land before providing an "introductory video" on the sights and sounds that you experience when reading the book.
What can language tell us about society? Looking at a range of genres, from political speeches to internet chat, this book shows how qualitative methods are used to analyse discourses throughout the social sciences. The practical problems of designing and conducting discourse-based research are solved in this key resource for all social scientists.
Genre theory in the past few years has contributed immensely to our understanding of the way discourse is used in academic, professional and institutional contexts. However, its development has been constrained by the nature and design of its applications, which have invariably focused on language teaching and learning, or communication training and consultation. This has led to the use of simplified and idealised genres. In contrast to this, the real world of discourse is complex, dynamic and unpredictable. This tension between the real world of written discourse and its representation in applied genre-based literature is the main theme of this book. The book addresses this theme from the perspectives of four rather different worlds: the world of reality, the world of private intentions, the world of analysis and the world of applications. Using examples from a range of situations including advertising, business, academia, economics, law, book introductions, reports, media and fundraising, Bhatia uses discourse analysis to move genre theory away from educational contexts and into the real world. Introduction * Overview: Perspectives on Discourse * The World of Reality * The World of Private Intentions * The World of Analysis * The World of Applications * References
English is a global language which has spread historically through imperialism and more recently through communication networks throughout the world. In each location in which English is spoken it absorbs some of the idiosyncracies of the language native to that region, and one of the most fascinating areas of research for World Englishes is the African context. This research monograph examines English as it is spoken by the Xhosa people in South Africa, and is based primarily on an extensive spoken corpus of Xhosa English. Vivian de Klerk presents a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the historical development of this variety of English, and of English in South Africa more generally. The book outlines how the corpus of spoken Xhosa English was designed and compiled, and discusses the criteria relating to informants, the use of spoken rather than written data, and the codes and transcription conventions. The syntactic and pragmatic features of Xhosa English as demonstrated by the corpus are described in detail, and two chapters focus on the use of the discourse markers 'actually' and 'well'. The second section of this book examines the implications of the corpus findings.Vivian de Klerk looks at the implications of the use of this variety of English in educational, legal, social, cultural and everyday contexts. The final chapter of the book speculates as to the future of this fascinating variety of English in a globalised world. This cutting-edge study will be of interest to researchers in world Englishes, language variation and corpus linguistics.
The book analyzes and evaluates what major linguistic models say on the interaction of lexicon and syntax in language performance. To check the plausibility of the assumptions, they are compared with what psycholinguists have found out. Moreover, reformulations, situations of speech need, and the use of 'lexical stretches' are analysed for what they can contribute to the discussion, and for one of the main issues also experimental evidence is produced.
"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.
This new study reconciles cognitive metaphor theory with Critical
Discourse Analysis to offer a fresh approach to the study of
metaphor. In applying this framework to a substantial corpus of
texts from business magazines, the author shows how metaphors of
war, sports and evolutionary struggle are used to construct
business as a masculinized social domain. In view of the subtle but
pervasive socio-cognitive impact of these metaphors, the study
raises the question of possible alternatives and the scope for
change in business media discourse. |
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