• 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.

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

"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.

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.

Expository Discourse describes the social science research genre in an entirely original light. The authors present a comprehensive model which characterizes the generic, registerial and discoursal options as they interweave within a text, formulating explicit realization statements that relate the abstract categories of move and act (as described by Swales) to the way these units actually are created by lexical and grammatical choices. The realization networks draw on the work of systemic functional linguists, primarily Halliday, Hasan, Martin, and Ventola.

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.

As we move into the 21st century, broader approaches in governments, industries, and universities are necessary. Governments are increasingly forced to collaborate with other governments to address problems beyond the control of individual nations. Industries increasingly find it difficult to survive without pursuing global markets. Also, universities are moving from departmental to interdisciplinary approaches to curriculums. These changes call for greater scope in goals, social structures, and methodologies. Technical communication is an example of a field deeply involved in all of these institutions and prompted toward greater scope in the engagement of problems. Rhetorical Scope and Performance examines the history of the narrowness of goals, social structures, and methodologies associated with the field of technical communication in the second half of the 20th century. Whitburn traces some of the roots of this narrowness back to a philosophical tradition stemming from Plato, Aristotle, the religious philosophers, and the apologists for science. As an alternative to the narrowness of the philosophical tradition, this work traces a rhetorical tradition stemming from Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and the Renaissance that promotes greater scope in the engagement of problems. This alternative also provides a theoretical construct more appropriate for many of today's needs than the philosophical tradition. Using the history of technical communication as an example, this book shows how an Isocratean rhetoric can broaden and therefore improve our approaches to decision making in the 21st century.

New Directions in Rhetoric and Religion reflects the complex and fluid natures of religion, rhetoric, and public life in our globalized, digital, and politically polarized world by bringing together a diverse group of rhetorical scholars to provide a comprehensive and forward-looking collection on rhetoric and religion. This volume addresses these topics in three separate sections: 1. Rhetorics of religion at work in public activism, 2. Rhetorics of religion in contemporary public discourse, and 3. Ways that rhetoric scholars study religion. Scholars of rhetoric, religion, and social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.

This book presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, a First World War poet who has typically been perceived as a poet of protest and irony, but whose work is in fact multi-faceted and complex in theme and shifted in style considerably throughout his lifetime. The author starts from the premise that a more systematic account of Sassoon's style is possible using the methodology of contemporary stylistics, in particular Cognitive Grammar. Using this as a starting point, he revisits common ideas from Sassoon scholarship and reconfigures them through the lens of cognitive stylistics to provide a fresh perspective on Sassoon's style. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, war poetry, twentieth-century literature, and cognitive linguistics.

This title reveals the depth and complexity of the language used in SMS text communication, and how it exploits various linguistic resources to create identities. Understanding the discourse of text messaging has profound implications for society. SMS messaging has impacted considerably on how we communicate with others. At the same time, negative, sometimes alarmist media coverage continues to fuel debate surrounding its 'damaging' effects on language and children's literacy. To what extent is this true? Should we worry about this communication tool - or embrace it? Drawing on a range of academic sources from various fields, this book describes the language used in a corpus of over 11,000 text messages, as yet the largest collection in the UK. In particular, the book defines text messaging as a language variety shaped by users' creative responses to the functions and limitations of the medium. This is an essential book for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying discourse analysis, as well as educators wanting to understand this important new form of discourse. Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. "The Continuum Discourse Series" aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable introduction to an aspect of the way language is used in real life.

This book takes a fresh look at Tolkien's literary artistry from the points of view of both linguistics and literary history, with the aim of shedding light on the literary techniques used in The Lord of the Rings. The authors study Tolkien's use of words, style, narrative techniques, rhetoric and symbolism to highlight his status as literary artist. Dirk Siepmann uses a corpus stylistic approach to analyse Tolkien's vocabulary and syntax, while Thomas Kullmann uses discourse theory, literary history and concepts of intertextuality to explore Tolkien's literary techniques, relating them to the history of English fiction and poetry. Issues discussed include point of view, speeches, story-telling, landscape descriptions, the poems inserted into the body of the narrative, and the role of language in the characterization of the novel's protagonists. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of literature, corpus linguistics and stylistics, as well as Tolkien fans and specialists.

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ( "The nature of variation and parameters ") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ( "Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies ") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.

The last thirty years have seen the world transformed according to market models of competition and consumption. These changes have had profound consequences across the professions in areas as diverse as education, healthcare and social services. The Discourse of Commercialization examines what it means for professionals oriented towards service provision to work within this environment. Drawing on a multi-perspectived study of English Language Teaching colleges, the book explores how teaching practices are permeated and challenged by a 'discourse of commercialization' through which market priorities become normative in teachers' professional lives. For anyone who wants to understand and address issues raised by the commercialization of professional practice with a particular focus on education, The Discourse of Commercialization provides an analysis that can inform organizational practice and change.

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

Where is the space for contemporary environmentalism when both the utopian promises of a clean and pure earthly Eden and the dystopian prophecies of an environmental apocalypse have failed to be fully realized? Rather than falling into one of these familiar environmental categories, contemporary space is configured, as this book outlines, as heterotopia, an in-between space of dissonance, where encounters with waste are a daily occurrence and where dirty matter refuses to submit to human demands and intentions. Through an exploration of a series of spaces in which acts of leisure and recreation are configured alongside vibrant dirty matter, this book explores how contemporary heterotopia offer entanglements with a dirty other that promote novel opportunities for humans to ethically respond and be responsible to the continued presence of waste and to generate a sense of ecological care for a dirty world. In doing so, the book urges readers away from a utopian vision of what the environment should be and instead asks how we can ethically exist within and around the dirtied environment as it is. This book will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, environmental rhetorics, and environmental ethics.

This long-needed sourcebook assesses the unique styles and themes of notable African-American orators from the mid-19th century to the present—of 43 representative public speakers, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson to Barbara Jordan and Thurgood Marshall. The critical analyses of the oratory of a broad segment of different types of public speakers demonstrate how they have stressed the historical search for freedom, upheld American ideals while condemning discriminatory practices against African-Americans, and have spoken in behalf of black pride. This biographical dictionary with its evaluative essays, sources for further reading, and speech chronologies is designed for broad interdisciplinary use by students, teachers, activists, and general readers in college, university, institutional, and public libraries.

Scholarly considerations of the relationship between the United States government and Native Americans have largely ignored the rhetoric utilized by both in the course of their ongoing conflicts. This fascinating new study concentrates on the persuasive and public strategies of both government and Indian leaders, focusing on the written and oral records of several key episodes in American history. This approach, which author Janice Schuetz calls rhetorical ancestry reveals the ways in which government and Indian spokespersons have constituted and defined issues; created, prolonged, and managed conflict; and silenced and empowered each other's voices.

Chronicling the emergence of government and Indian leaders who were forced to deal with conflicts in new ways, each chapter makes use of historical evidence to draw inferences about the rhetorical features of the discourse and its effects. Both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric--including treaties, letters, oral histories, speeches, ritual performances, media reports, biographical narratives, protests and demonstrations, political hearings, and legal proceedings--are represented here, illuminating a legacy that evolved in the personal and political language of its participants.

This book examines the impact of white racialization in homiletics. The first section, Racial Hegemony, interrogates the white, colonial bias of Euro-American homiletical practice, pedagogy, and theory with particular attention to the intersection of preaching and racialization. The second section, Resistance and Possibilities, contributes diverse critical homiletical approaches emerging in conversation with racially-minoritized scholarship and racially subjugated knowledge and practice. By reading this book, preachers and professors of preaching will encounter alternative, non-dominant homiletical pathways toward a more just future for the church and the world.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

This monograph presents Old English renderings of Christian words found in interlinear glosses, especially the Gospels and the Psalter glosses. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs in biblical contexts are included through dialectal (Northumbrian, Mercian, and West Saxon) diachronic (early and late West Saxon) and idiolectal (i.e. scribal) comparison. By using interlinear glosses, the correspondence between the original Latin word and the Old English rendering can be recognised more clearly than in ordinary prose, and at the same time, a flexible choice of renderings can be seen in some contexts. The author tries to show which Old English words were chosen as renderings, while some Latin words were accepted without translation.