"The book draws on a lot of research, is friendly to the reader, and will be of good value to teachers."

Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Australia

This comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible text on idiom use, learning, and teaching approaches the topic with a balance of sound theory and extensive research in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics combined with informed teaching practices. Idioms is organized in three parts:

• Part I includes discussion of idiom definition, classification, usage patterns, and functions.
• Part II investigates the process involved in the comprehension of idioms and the factors that influence individuals? understanding and use of idioms in both L1 and L2.
• Part III explores idiom acquisition and the teaching and learning of idioms, focusing especially on the strategies and techniques used to help students learn idioms.

To assist the reader in grasping the key issues, study questions are provided at the end of each chapter. The text also includes a glossary of special terms and an annotated list of selective idiom reference books and student textbooks.

Idioms is designed to serve either as a textbook for ESL/applied linguistics teacher education courses or as a reference book. No matter how the book is used, it will equip an ESL/applied linguistics students and professionals with a solid understanding of various issues related to idioms and the learning of them.

Blogs and Wikis have not been with us for long, but have made a huge impact on society. Wikipedia is the best known exemplar of the wiki, a collaborative site that leads to a single text claimed by no-one; blogs, or web-logs, have exploded into the mainstream through novelisations, film adaptations and have gathered huge followings. Blogs and wikis also serve to provide a coherent basis for a discourse analysis of specific web language. What makes these forms distinctive as genres, and what ramifications does the technology have on the language? Myers looks at how blogs and wikis: *allow for easier than ever publication *can claim to challenge institutional hierarchies *provide alternate perspectives on events *exemplify globalization *challenge demarcations between the personal and the public *construct new communities and more Drawing on a wide range of popular blogs and wikis, the book works alongside an author blog that contains regularly updated links, references and a glossary. An essential textbook for upper level undergraduates on linguistics and language studies courses, it elucidates, informs and offers insights into a major new type of discourse. This coursebook will include a companion website.

Marking the 50th anniversary of one among this philosopher’s most distinguished pieces, Blumenberg’s Rhetoric proffers a decidedly diversified interaction with the essai polyvalently entitled ‘Anthropological Approach to the Topicality (or Currency, Relevance, even actualitas) of Rhetoric’ ("Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik"), first published in 1971. Following Blumenberg’s lead, the contributors consider and tackle their topics rhetorically—treating (inter alia) the variegated discourses of Phenomenology and Truthcraft, of Intellectual History and Anthropology, as well as the interplay of methods, from a plurality of viewpoints. The diachronically extensive, disciplinarily diverse essays of this publication—notably in the current lingua franca—will facilitate, and are to conduce to, further scholarship with respect to Blumenberg and the art of rhetoric. With contributions by Sonja Feger, Simon Godart, Joachim Küpper, DS Mayfield, Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, Daniel Rudy Hiller, Katrin Trüstedt, Alexander Waszynski, Friedrich Weber-Steinhaus, Nicola Zambon.

This book focuses on the complexities of the communication of health-related messages and information through the use of case studies. The expert contributors to this volume are scholars who, during their research and consulting, grapple with many of the issues of concern to those studying health communication. While several introductory books offer brief case studies to illustrate concepts covered, this book provides in-depth cases that enable more advanced students to apply theory to real situations.

Rather than approach debate primarily as a form of interscholastic competition, this unique book identifies it as an activity that occurs in many settings: scientific conferences, newspaper op-ed pages, classrooms, courts of law, and everyday domestic life. Debate is discussed as an integral part of academic inquiry in all disciplines. As in all fields of study, various competing views are advanced and supported; Debate and Critical Analysis is designed to better prepare the student to assess and engage them. This text posits four characteristics of true debate -- argument development, clash, extension, and perspective -- which form the basic structure of the book. Each concept or aspect of argument covered is illustrated by an example drawn from contemporary or historical sources, allowing the reader to actually see the techniques and strategies at work. All popular forms of competitive debate, including "policy," "Lincoln-Douglas," "value-oriented," and "parliamentary," are discussed in detail -- as embedded in the actual topical controversies with which they are concerned. In this way, the student can learn the structures, reasoning processes, and strategies that may be employed, as well as the practical affairs of debating, from brief-writing to the flowsheet.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

Challenging current work in communication and social psychology that assumes face-to-face interaction can be adequately understood without attending to discourse expression, this volume examines how people's goals, concerns, and intentions can be related to discourse expression. The text discusses discourse-goal linkages in specific face-to-face encounters such as courtroom exchanges, marital counseling, and intellectual discussions, as well as in more general theoretical dilemmas. Because it poses a new set of questions about social actors' motivations and pre-interactional goals, this volume offers a new direction for discourse study -- one that seriously considers the thinking and strategy involved in human communication.

You are at a dinner with someone attractive. She suddenly kisses you. Or he leans unexpectedly across the table and caresses your thigh. Whatever. You know the kind of encounter and the range of possible responses. Consider the kiss. What does it mean, and where does it lead? Does kissing necessarily imply more, and if so how much? These and similar questions of amorous ethics and erotic disquisition are the central to our everyday intimate public lives and they are the lost object of the law of love, the "lex amatoria" collated and presented here.

Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

The use of vague language (for example expressions such as 'bags of time', 'doing stuff', 'sort of thing', 'and all that') is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. Vague Language Explored examines the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests also applications in TEFL, asking questions such as 'What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?' and suggesting directions for future research.

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.

• Thoroughly integrates the treatment of semantics and pragmatics, providing a more accessible, realistic, coherent and contemporary account of linguistic meaning than can be achieved by treating the two topics separately • Betty Birner’s lively and student-friendly writing style engages even students new to the study of linguistics with this fascinating subject • Includes chapters on topical and cutting-edge subjects such as meaning, machines and artificial intelligence.

This book is a study of techniques used to introduce, continue and change the discourse topic in expository writing. Discourse topic is examined by focusing on the sequential techniques and strategies in a step-by-step process. To describe the process a model of sequentiality is proposed. The aims of the book are to advance current thinking in discourse analysis and to provide a practical exemplar of expository discourse.

This book offers a global exploration of current theory and practice in the teaching of stylistics and the implementation of stylistic techniques in teaching other subjects. Pedagogical stylistics is a field that looks at employing stylistic analysis in teaching, with the aim of enabling students to better understand literature, language and also improving their language acquisition. It is also concerned with the best practice in teaching stylistics. The book discusses a broad range of interrelated topics including hypertext, English as a Foreign Language, English as a Second Language, poetry, creative writing, and metaphor. Leading experts offer focused, empirical studies on specific developments, providing in-depth examinations of both theoretical and practical teaching methods. This interdisciplinary approach covers linguistics and literature from the perspective of current pedagogical methodology, moving from general tertiary education to more specific EFL and ESL teaching. The role of stylistics in language acquisition is currently underexplored. This contemporary collection provides academics and practitioners with the most up to date trends in pedagogical stylistics and delivers analyses of a diverse range of teaching methods.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s keynote address during his visit at the University of �ódź in 2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations, published by Peter Lang.

This book is a comprehensive guide to academic writing and publishing. It approaches the subject from a descriptive foundation for understanding academic tenure and promotion decisionmaking. The book then treats the considerations for selecting the avenues open to an academic for publishing: conference papers, grants, journals, scholarly books, texts, and popular or trade books. Each avenue is given a chapter-length discussion. Electronic media is also described in detail. Finally, Cantor offers a view of the marketing of a book product.

This work describes and analyzes the authors' study of collaborative technical writing in an institutional setting - that of a group of nurses composing the writing of a hospital-based nursing project. This study seeks to provide the context for the authors to draw conclusions on: writing in a collaborative group; the role of discourse in constructing the social dynamics of community groups; and on institutional authorship for virtual audiences.

"Identity Trouble" brings together contributions from a wide variety of discourse fields to discuss the rising pressures on traditional understandings of identity. The focus is on failures and uncertainties in people's construction of their identities when faced with social, cultural, organizational or other changes and fluidities. The contributions raise a number of critical questions about the concept of identity and how it may be refigured, and draw on a wide range of empirical studies of identity problems in personal and social life.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary cognitive linguistics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of methods and current research topics and future directions. The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field. It devotes space to looking specifically at the major figures and their contributions. It is a complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working within cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and those interested more generally in language and cognition.