What is French and how has it changed over time? Can we distinguish language history from historical linguistics, and language change from linguistic change? These questions are explored using copious material from the history of the French language, concentrating on changes in the relatively modern period in particular. Posner explains how change comes about and how changes at different levels of language interact, and the role of sociological and ideological factors is set against the internal mechanisms that trigger change. This work makes a substantial contribution to the theory of linguistic change, as well as to discussion of the relationship between language and history in French-speaking areas, including Canada and French Creole-speaking countries.

Since we need words with new meanings to discover what is true, it follows that without those words there could be no truth as we know it. Without just those words that we create there would be no knowledge for us. In that case knowledge is found embedded in the very words that we formulate. Interpretation and definition as rhetorical and logical modes are interactive in determining and precising meaning that transcends our repertoire of literal usage. "Language use" by abandoning old trails of usage and by refining usage gives us the opportunity and freedom to explore and discover what never has been thought about, used, or expressed before.

The generation of meaning is the most fundamental process of the mind. It underlies all major mental functions, such as intelligence, memory, perception, and communication. Not surprisingly, it has been one of the most difficult processes to understand and represent in a model of human cognition. Dr. Christine Hardy introduces two fundamental concepts to address the complexity and richness of meaning. First, she discusses Semantic Constellations, which constitute the basic transversal network organization of mental and neural processes. Second, she addresses a highly dynamic connective process that underlies conscious thought and constantly gives birth to novel emergents or meanings. Taken together, Hardy asserts, the mind's network architecture and connective dynamics allow for self-organization, generativity, and creativity. They can also account for some of the most interesting facets of mental processes, in particular, nonlinear shifts and "breakthroughs" such as intuition, insights, and shifts in states of consciousness. This connective dynamic does not just take place within the mind. Rather, it involves a continuously evolving person-environment interaction: meaning is injected into the environment, and then retrojected, somewhat modified, back into the psyche. This means that, simultaneously, we are both perceiving reality and subtly influencing the very reality we perceive: objects, events, and other individuals. The way in which we think and feel, both individually and collectively, interacts with the physical world and directly shapes the society in which we live. The very same connective dynamic, Hardy shows, is the foundation for those rare yet striking transpersonalexperiences known as synchronicity and psychic phenomena. We live in a world in which we interact with reality at a very fundamental level. Hardy's work is a major analysis for scholars and researchers in the cognitive sciences, psychology, and parapsychology.

Distinguished researchers from around the world examine the interplay between gender and metaphor in political language in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Singapore. They draw on a wide variety of corpus data to determine to what extent metaphors used by women in political power differ with, or remain the same as that of men. They also examine what effect metaphor use has on women's power in the political arena. This wide-ranging collection of language-based studies will interest students and researchers in discourse analysis, political communication, gender studies, journalism, and media studies.

This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions. Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages. Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of elementary logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

`Peterson is an authority of a philosophical and linguistic industry that began in the 1960s with Vendler's work on nominalization. Natural languages distinguish syntactically and semantically between various sorts of what might be called `gerundive entities' - events, processes, states of affairs, propositions, facts, ... all referred to by sentence nominals of various kinds. Philosophers have worried for millennia over the ontology of such things or `things', but until twenty years ago they ignored all the useful linguistic evidence. Vendler not only began to straighten out the distinctions, but pursued more specific and more interesting questions such as that of what entities the causality relation relates (events? facts?). And that of the objects of knowledge and belief. But Vendler's work was only a start and Peterson has continued the task from then until now, both philosophically and linguistically. Fact Proposition Event constitutes the state of the art regarding gerundive entities, defended in meticulous detail. Peterson's ontology features just facts, proposition, and events, carefully distinguished from each other. Among his more specific achievements are: a nice treatment of the linguist's distinction between `factive' and nonfactive constructions; a detailed theory of the subjects and objects of causation, which impinges nicely on action theory; an interesting argument that fact, proposition, events are innate ideas in humans; a theory of complex events (with implications for law and philosophy of law); and an overall picture of syntax and semantics of causal sentences and action sentences. Though Peterson does not pursue them here, there are clear and significant implications for the philosophy of science, in particular for our understanding of scientific causation, causal explanation and law likeness.' Professor William Lycan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This thought-provoking book initiates a dialogue among scholars in rhetoric and hermeneutics in many areas of the humanities. Twenty leading thinkers explore the ways these two powerful disciplines inform each other and influence a wide variety of intellectual fields. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde organize pivotal topics in rhetoric and hermeneutics with originality and coherence, dividing their book into four sections: Locating the Disciplines; Inventions and Applications; Arguments and Narratives; and Civic Discourse and Critical Theory. Contributors to this volume include Hans-Georg Gadamer (one of whose pieces is here translated into English for the first time), Paul Ricoeur, Gerald L. Bruns, Charles Altieri, Richard E. Palmer, Calvin O. Schrag,.Victoria Kahn, Eugene Garver, Michael Leff, Nancy S. Streuver, Wendy Olmsted, David Tracy, Donald G. Marshall, Allen Scult, Rita Copeland, William Rehg, and Steven Mailloux. For readers across the humanities, the book demonstrates the usefulness of rhetorical and hermeneutic approaches in literary, philosophical, legal, religious, and political thinking. With its stimulating new perspectives on the revival and interrelation of both rhetoric and hermeneutics, this collection is sure to serve as a benchmark for years to come.

In this highly interdisciplinary work, linguist Anna Wierzbicka casts new light on the words of Jesus by taking her well-known semantic theory of "universal human concepts"- concepts which are intuitively understandable and self-explanatory across languages-and bringing it to bear on Jesus' parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Her approach results in strikingly novel interpretations of the Gospels. Written in dialogue with other biblical commentators, What Did Jesus Mean? is scholarly, rigorous, and yet accessible.

This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 - 2011 at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as "sign", "symbol" or "legal language," demonstrate how a lawyer's professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can "say the law," or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.

Bringing together recent international research in the field of hospital communication and interaction, the contributors to this book contextualize clinical professional work by focussing on the rising intensity of information and communication practices in organizations generally, and in health care in particular.

This book offers new insights into how English speakers talk about their own and others' emotions. Using statistical evidence and corpus-linguistic methods, but also qualitative text analyses, the author examines how expressions that describe emotions are employed in a large corpus of conversational, newspaper, fictional and academic English.

This volume contains a selection of papers (keynote addresses and other important papers) from the International Conference on Argumentation at Amsterdam of 2002 by prominent international scholars of argumentation theory. The contributions are representative of the main approaches to the study of argumentation: the informal logical approach, the logical approach, the dialectical approach, the rhetorical and the communicative approach. Taken together the papers in this volume provide an insightful cross-section of the current state of affairs in argumentation research.
The collection of essays as a whole will be of interest to all those working in the field of argumentation theory and to all scholars who are interested in recent developments in this field.

Inspired by Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, Mick Short's classic introduction to stylistics, Language and Style represents the state-of-the-art in literary stylistics and encompasses the full breadth of current research in the discipline. Written by leading scholars in the field, chapters cover a variety of methodological and analytical approaches, from traditional qualitative analysis to more recent developments in cognitive and corpus stylistics. Addressing the three, key literary genres of poetry, drama and narrative, Language and Style is divided into carefully balanced sections. Based on original research, each chapter demonstrates a particular analytic technique and explains how this might be applied to a text from one of the literary genres. Framed by helpful introductory material covering the foundational principles of stylistics, the chapters act as practical exemplars of how to carry out stylistic analysis. Comprehensive and engaging, this invaluable resource is essential reading for anyone interested in stylistics.

This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a "partitive article" in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of "partitive articles". The outcome is a snapshot of current research into "partitive articles" and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovencal.

This edited collection presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The chapters consider how interactants do identity work and how identity is indexed (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse.

"Indefinites and the Type of Sets" explores a new theory of indefinite noun phrase interpretation and definiteness effects. The book provides an introduction to aspects of the semantics of noun phrases, as well as comparing alternate theories; and, explores a new theory of indefinite noun phrase interpretation and definiteness effects. It is written accessibly by one of the world's most prominent formal semanticists. The book is useful for students and scholars in formal semantics as well as the neighboring fields of syntax, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language.

This title presents a collection of contributions by linguists and lawyers on topical questions of the interconnections between language and law, and opens up a wide range of theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to aspects such as politics and the public domain, court proceedings, criminology, the editing of legislation, legal training and the Europeanization of law.

A seminal work in international communication, examining news reports, civic discourse, and images of Africa in Russian press. This book is about power and influence, politics and communication across frontiers--a thoroughly challenging analysis of Russia's foray into African and international communication. The book penetrates the intellectual, social, cultural, political, geographical, and historical aspects of the relationship between the African continent and Russia, before, during, and after the Cold War. The book is well-researched and up-to-date. The study was conducted within the framework of Russian geo-political interests, the belligerent ideological determinism of the Communist era, the implosion of historical materialism, and the delicate post-communist path to democracy, capitalism, and reconstruction. The book will appeal to a global audience of journalists, scholars, political scientists, historians, cultural and social critics, policy makers, and the general public.

Although psychology is steeped in writing, as a discipline it has developed little explicit understanding of writing. This is the first book to examine writing (and the teaching of writing) in psychology from the standpoint of composition studies, the scholarly field that specializes in the study and teaching of writing. The book's purpose is to develop a different, richer, more explicit understanding of writing than psychology presently has. Three major aspects of writing are discussed: audience, genre, and style. After examining these, the author draws implications for the teaching of writing in psychology. The work does not aim to tell psychologists how to write better; rather, it suggests how they might think differently about writing.

De Landtsheer and Feldman draw together a collection of research essays examining the nature, characteristics, content, and reception of public rhetoric in various cultures and social settings. The volume focuses on three concerns. First, it examines public speech and symbols in various countries in both the East and the West. Second, it details various methods to study political discourse. Third, it reviews public speech and symbols in relationship to citizenship.

As a unique study of the ways in which public speech works in a variety of nations to liberate and educate when it bridges the gaps between political elites and regular citizens, this volume should appeal to anyone, including scholars and researchers, with an interest in better understanding the burgeoning world of political communication.

This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the center of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in "Bleak House," read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life.

How does our knowledge of the language on the one hand, and of the context on the other, permit us to understand what we are told, to resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit content, to appreciate metaphor and irony? These issues have been studied in two disciplines: linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with only limited interactions between the two. This volume lays down the foundation for a new field: "Experimental Pragmatics." Contributions review pioneering work and present novel ways of articulating theories and experimental methods in the area.

This book explores the complexity of story text. Its thesis is that one can elicit the world view of a people from a close structural analysis of their narrative discourse. It is the first methodological explanation of how stories can be used as a source of cultural data and an illustration of how to do a rhetorically close analysis of a story text. A theory of narrative structure is presented which leads to a conversationally based definition of what can properly be called a story.

This book explores the various transformations of biblical proper names. The basic phonetic relationship between Semitic languages on the one hand and non-Semitic languages, like Greek and Latin, on the other hand, is so complex that it was hardly possible to establish a unified tradition in writing biblical proper names within the Greek and Latin cultures. In the transmission we encounter various transformations of biblical proper names. The basic phonetic relationship between Semitic languages on the one hand and non-Semitic languages, like Greek and Latin, on the other hand, is so complex that it was hardly possible to establish a unified tradition in writing biblical proper names within the Greek and Latin cultures. Since the Greek and Latin alphabets are inadequate for transliteration of Semitic languages, authors of "Greek and Latin Bibles" were utter grammatical and cultural innovators. In "Greek and Latin Bibles" we note an almost embarrassing number of phonetic variants of proper names. A survey of ancient "Greek and Latin Bible" translations allows one to trace the boundary between the phonetic transliterations that are justified within Semitic, Greek, and Latin linguistic rules, and those forms that transgress linguistic rules. The forms of biblical proper names are much more stable and consistent in the Hebrew Bible than in Greek, Latin and other ancient Bible translations. The inexhaustible wealth of variant pronunciations of the same proper names in Greek and Latin translations indicate that Greek and Latin translators and copyists were in general not fluent in Hebrew and did therefore not have sufficient support in a living Hebrew phonetic context. This state affects personal names of rare use to a far greater extent than the geographical names, whose forms are expressed in the oral tradition by a larger circle of the population. Over the last 30 years this pioneering series has established an unrivaled reputation for cutting-edge international scholarship in Biblical Studies and has attracted leading authors and editors in the field. The series takes many original and creative approaches to its subjects, including innovative work from historical and theological perspectives, social-scientific and literary theory, and more recent developments in cultural studies and reception history.

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar -- semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic. Knowing how these interact is crucial to understanding the operations of any specific language and to the explanation of how language in general operates in the mind. The new research presented here combines theoretical and experimental perspectives on one of the most productive fields in contemporary linguistics.
After the editors' introduction the volume is organized along four themes: the structural properties of sentences interfacing with meaning and the lexicon; internal word structure and its effect on the syntactic and phonological components; the syntax-phonology interface and its relation to the phonetics-phonology interface; and the implications of interfaces for language acquisition and language processing. The book will interest theoretical linguists and all those in linguistics and cognitive science working on the mental operations of language.