Benoit and his colleagues apply the functional theory of political campaign discourse to 25 presidential primary debates beginning with the 1948 American presidential primary campaign. They conclude with the 2000 presidential primaries.

They identify the functions, topics, and targets of attacks, and the results are compared with research on primary TV spots and with general debates. An important resource for scholars and students of American presidential and party elections and political communications.

In August, 1959, an anxious William Rueckert wrote Kenneth Burke to ask, "When on earth is that perpetually 'forthcoming' A Symbolic of Motives forthcoming? Will it be soon enough so that I can wait for it before I complete my book Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations]? If the Symbolic is not forthcoming soon, would it be too much trouble for you to send me a list of exactly what will be included in the book, and some idea of the structure of the book?" Burke replied, "Holla If you're uncomfortable, think how uncomfortable I am. But I'll do the best I can. . . ." In the course of their long correspondence, the nature of the Symbolic-Burke's much-anticipated third volume in his Motivorum trilogy-vexed both men, and they discussed its contents often. Ultimately, Burke left the job of pulling it all together to Rueckert. Forty-eight years after they first discussed the Symbolic, Rueckert has fulfilled his end of the bargain with this book, Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955. ESSAYS TOWARD A SYMBOLIC OF MOTIVES, 1950--1955 contains the work Burke planned to include in the third book in his Motivorum trilogy, which began with A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). In these essays-some of which appear here in print for the first time-Burke offers his most precise and elaborated account of his dramatistic poetics, providing readers with representative analyses of such writers as Aeschylus, Goethe, Hawthorne, Roethke, Shakespeare, and Whitman. Following Rueckert's Introduction, Burke lays out his approach in essays that theorize and illustrate the method, which he considered essential for understanding language as symbolic action and human relations generally. Burke concludes with a focused account of humans as symbol-using and misusing animals and then offers his tour de force reading of Goethe's Faust. About the Author KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) is the author of many books, including the landmark predecessors in the Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). He has been hailed as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Paul Jay refers to him as "the most theoretically challenging, unorthodox, and sophisticated of twentieth-century speculators on literature and culture." Geoffrey Hartman praises him as "the wild man of American criticism." According to Scott McLemee, Burke may have "accidentally create d] cultural studies." About the Editor William H. Rueckert, the "Dean of Burke Studies," has authored or edited numerous groundbreaking books and articles on Kenneth Burke, including the landmark study, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (1963, 1982). His correspondence with Burke was collected in Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987 (Parlor, 2003). His most recent book is Faulkner From Within-Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner (Parlor, 2004).

The first substantial textbook on pragmatics to focus on Spanish. The authors discuss key theories within the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatics, concentrating on the relationship between language use and socio-cultural contexts, and their uptake by Hispanists. Drawing on research by foremost scholars in the field, with reference to a wide range of 'Spanishes', including a first treatment of 'sociopragmatic variation'. Concepts throughout are illustrated with real language examples taken from different Spanish corpora. The book is carefully structured to be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate, as well as postgraduate, students.

How do people understand metaphorical language? How do metaphors affect the way people experience their social interactions? Do people always interpret metaphors? Does a metaphor necessarily have the same meaning to different people? Can a commonplace metaphor affect the way people think even if they don't interpret it? Why does it matter how people interpret metaphors? In this book, Ritchie proposes an original communication-based theory of metaphor that answers these and other questions about metaphors and metaphorical language.

In The Semantics of Silence in Biblical Hebrew, Sonja Noll explores the many words in biblical Hebrew that refer to being silent, investigating how they are used in biblical texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Ben Sira. She also examines the tradition of interpretation for these words in the early versions (Septuagint, Vulgate, Targum, Peshitta), modern translations, and standard dictionaries, revealing that meanings are not always straightforward and that additional work is needed in biblical semantics and lexicography. The traditional approach to comparative Semitics, with its over-simplistic assumption of semantic equivalence in cognates, is also challenged. The surprising conclusion of the work is that there is no single concept of silence in the biblical world; rather, it spans multiple semantic fields.

Media are objects with content and character that we describe using in- phrases: in the story, in the picture, in the movie, in the dream... Like the propositional attitudes, these objects present a variety of hard problems for semantic and philosophical analysis. The Semantics of Media is an organized exploration of fundamental questions in the semantics of media. The first three chapters set out a straightforward model within the possible-worlds framework, and consider how it might account for a range of notions applying to media generally: implicit vs. explicit content, propositional vs. individual content, causal vs. intentional content and the idea of a single World of the Medium. The final three chapters examine ways of elaborating the model to cover a range of phenomena keyed to the functionality of particular forms of media. Chapter Four is a discussion of fiction and our apparent reference to fictional characters. Chapter Five deals with the phenomenon of viewpoint in pictorial media. Chapter Six is a study of interactions between users and characters of media centering on the puzzling case of seeing in films. The Semantics of Media will be of interest to specialists in the fields of linguistics, philosophy and communications.

Friedenberg brings to this study of Theodore Roosevelt a thorough grounding in the criticism of American public address. Basing his findings on his own detailed reading of Roosevelt's speeches and supplementing it with his own research in the primary collections of Roosevelt's manuscripts, Robert V. Friedenberg reveals the depth of Roosevelt's fascinating rhetorical career. Friedenberg's astute analysis of Roosevelt's use of classic rhetorical method shows how dependent the president was on the style of the classical masters as well as American predecessors such as Washington and Lincoln. This book demonstrates and analyzes the persuasive and expressive public speaking of the first great orator of this century, Theodore Roosevelt. Following a foreword by Halford R. Ryan and a preface by Friedenberg, the book provides critical analysis of Roosevelt's rhetoric of militant decency. After an overview, Friedenberg applies his analysis, which is followed by the application of militant decency rhetoric to foreign policy, responsible citizenship, and progressive reform. A series of Roosevelt's collected speeches forms the second part of the volume and provides concrete examples of Roosevelt's rhetorical style. A speech chronology and a bibliography close the work. As we Americans look to the twenty-first century, we might do well to look for guidance and inspiration in the writings and speeches of the man who led us into the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt.

Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics examines the rhetoric surrounding women who hold or have held the highest office of a nation-state. Heads of state, such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet, have navigated their ascent to executive government in vastly different ways while contending with gendered expectations of leadership, especially since most of them are the first woman to occupy their country's highest governmental position. This book analyzes how these women rhetorically perform their positions of power-discursively, visually, and physically-in a traditionally male leadership role. Specifically, this project examines how certain rhetorical acts open up and close down the potential to confront the gendered expectations surrounding political leadership. When people analyze, campaign for, or critique a "female prime minister" or a "woman president," they are not just talking about one woman but also referencing a collective neoliberal logic that interrupts and reaffirms the belief that the nation-state is an eternal, inevitable structure. Diverse political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, and Indira Gandhi, are continually put in conversation with one another, through popular media representations, academic scholarship, and political analyses. This book examines the effect of such comparisons and connections, ultimately arguing that many of these gestures reduce or over-simplify women's contributions to world politics. In order to show this effect, this book manifests the transnational connections found in autobiographies, organizations, political commentaries, biographical films, and other sources that focus on women who have been heads of state.

It is twenty-five years since Jurgen Habermas published his "Theory of Communicative Action." Colin B. Grant shares the same commitment to a philosophical theory of communication but issues a range of challenges to Habermas' magnum opus. "Uncertainty and Communication" mounts a critique of theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a radical rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in our interconnected global communication system.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not only to notoriously difficult aspects of interpreting linguistic objects, such as indexicals, anaphora, and metonymy, but also to establishing the precise reference of common nouns and the scopes of noun phrases. The central issue in computational semantics is how processes of finding and combining the relevant linguistic and contextual information into contextually appropriate meanings can be organised. Traditional approaches of applying context information to disambiguated natural language expressions do not work well, due to the massive ambiguity in natural language. Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations. Underspecified representation and inference are therefore the key topics in this book. The book is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who take an interest in the computation of meaning, and who want to know what is happening in this exciting field of research.

This book provides a detailed study of Icelandic argument structure alternations within a syntactic theory of argument structure. Building on recent theorizing within the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, the author proposes that much of what is traditionally attributed to syntax should be relegated to the interfaces, and adapts the late insertion theory of morphology to semantics. The resulting system forms sound-meaning pairs by generating hierarchical structures that can be translated into morphological representations, on the one hand, and semantic representations, on the other. The syntactic primitives, however, underdetermine both morphophonology and semantics. Without appealing to special stipulations, the theory derives constraints on the external argument of causative-alternation verbs, interpretive restrictions on nominative objects, and the optionally agentive interpretation of verbs denoting self-directed motion.

This series of lectures provides an overview of the author's work on quantitative applications in cognitive linguistics by discussing a wide range of studies involving corpus-linguistic as well as experimental work. After a discussion of how corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics relate to each other, the author discusses empirical and statistical studies of a wide variety of phenomena including morphophonology (morphological blends and alliteration effects), corpus-based cognitive semantics, frequency and association at the syntax-lexis interface. The book concludes with chapters exemplifying the role that bottom-up approaches can take, the role of statistical methods more generally, and the role of converging evidence from corpus and experimental data.The lectures for this book were given at The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics in May 2013. In the e-book version all handouts have been made available at the back. All audio of the lectures as well as the handouts are available for free, in Open Access, here.

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.

This work represents the first integrated account of how deixis operates to facilitate points of view, providing the raw material for reconciling index and object. The book offers a fresh, applied philosophical approach using original empirical evidence to show that deictic demonstratives hasten the recognition of core representational constructs. It presents a case where the comprehension of shifting points of view by means of deixis is paramount to a theory of mind and to a worldview that incorporates human components of discovering and extending spatial knowledge. The book supports Peirce's triadic sign theory as a more adequate explanatory account compared with those of Buhler and Piaget. Peirce's unitary approach underscores the artificiality of constructing a worldview driven by logical reasoning alone; it highlights the importance of self-regulation and the appreciation of otherness within a sociocultural milieu. Integral to this semiotic perspective is imagination as a primary tool for situating the self in constructed realities, thus infusing reality with new possibilities. Imagination is likewise necessary to establish postures of mind for the self and others. Within these imaginative scenarios (consisting of overt, and then covert self dialogue) children construct their own worldviews, through linguistic role-taking, as they legitimize conflicting viewpoints within imagined spatial frameworks.

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Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property of natural language. This monograph provides a comprehensive survey of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness. The book discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness, which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer science. It argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential for further contextual specification, and proposes a unified logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic, philosophy of language, and NL- oriented AI. Although it makes extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts since all technical terms are carefully explained.

Philips looks at the languages of judges in the courtroom to show that, while judges see themselves as impartial agents of the constitutional right to due process, there is actually much diversity in the way that judges interract with defendants due to their interpretations of the law, their attitudes toward courtroom control, and their own political-ideological stances regarding due process. She uses courtroom transcripts, interviews, and the written law itself to show how ideological diversity is organized in legal discourse.

The six essays of Visual Identities are an important contribution to the growing field of industrial semiotics. Floch's major strength is his analysis of signs in a way which is both industrially relevant and textually precise. Until recently there have been two quite different and distinct ways of understanding commerical signs, such as logos and advertisements. Industry-based work has tended to look at questions of marketing and has often been reduced to the mass psychology of 'appeal' and audience research, whereas the textual analysis of commerical signs has tended to come from limited positions of identity politics and criticism (Marxism, feminism, etc). Floch manages to find a way between (and also outside) these traditions. In doing so he has produced a book which will interest industrial practitioners in advertising, marketing and design as well as students and academics in semiotics.

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler's diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

"Analysing Multimodal Documents" presents the first systematic, corpus-based, and theoretically rigorous approach to the description and analysis of multimodal documents. John Bateman introduces researchers and advanced students to a linguistically-based method of analysis that shows how different modes of expression--including language, rhetoric, images, typography, colour and space--go together to make up a document with a recognizable genre. The author draws upon both academic research and concrete experience of how designers and production teams put documents together.

In this book Roger Chartier and his associates explore the history of a cultural practice that has become common and widespread: the writing of letters. They begin by examining the invention of norms for writing letters in the Middle Ages, and the fixing of these norms in popular manuals of various kinds. They then analyse the letter--writing models developed in the ancien regime, showing how these models were linked to court literature, on the one hand, and to the popular books distributed by pedlars, on the other. Finally they discuss the models of letter--writing developed during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, they argue, was a decisive period in the history of letter writing, partly because of the rapid rise in rates of literacy and partly due to broader social and economic transformations, which increased the need for writing letters. By exploring the ways in which practices of letter writing have changed over the centuries, this path--breaking book sheds light on an everyday cultural practice which has created new ways of thinking, of feeling and of relating to others as well as to oneself.

This concise and well-organized grammar of classical Arabic, here translated from its original German into English for the first time, provides students of Arabic with a highly useful reference tool. While brief enough to be used with efficiency, the book is also rich in content and thorough in its coverage. Beginning- or advanced-level students working on classical texts and styles will find this grammar quick to use, reliable, and up-to-date. More than just a translation into English, this edition of Wolfdietrich Fischer's Grammar of Classical Arabic includes many revisions and additions provided by the author. In particular, the chapter on syntax offers numerous new text examples and other improvements. The bibliography has been updated to include significant recent contributions to the field of classical Arabic grammar and linguistics. Translated by Jonathan Rodgers with attention to both accuracy and readability, this book is an accessible reference tool that every student of classical Arabic will want to have on hand.

Mikhail Bakhtin was right. Humans could not use the languages they know without also learning the genres which govern so much of our social life. These genres frequently consist of rules prescribing the order in which we must say things and formulaic phraseology which prescribes what can and should be said. Native speakers know only a small fraction of the formulaic genres in a speech community. This relativizes the concept of a native speaker in all situations. Koenraad Kuiper illustrates these views with an array of fascinating case studies of engagement notice writers, horse race commentators, weather forecasters, pump aerobics instructors, square dance callers, cartoonists, and Red Guards.

Using data from a newspaper corpus, this book offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. The book analyses how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read.This cutting edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.The editorial board includes: Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Lecce and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster and Vienna), 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.