This volume is intended for students who desire a practical introduction to the use of language in daily and professional life. It may be used either as part of a course or as an aid to independent study. Readers will find that concepts relating to language and discourse are highlighted in the text, explained clearly, illuminated through examples and practice exercises, and defined in the "Glossary/Index" at the back of the book.
Divided into two parts, this text presents an introduction to the elements and practice of discourse analysis in general, as well as an introduction to the actual kinds of discourse crucial to personal and professional life. In Part I, examples and practice exercises are used which make use of a variety of genres common in daily and professional life. Genres included are advertising, biography, travel guide, news clipping, prose fiction, students' writing, telephone conversation, poetry, police-suspect interview, face-to-face conversation, war cry, political speech, medical text, legislation, textbook, discourse of the mentally disturbed, and detective fiction among others. Wherever feasible, authentic examples are used. Part II of the book applies the principles and techniques of Part I to an investigation of discourse in daily use. Chapters include discourse in education, medicine, law, the media, and literature. Not only will these be of particular interest to students planning to enter any of these professions, but will also be of general interest, since all of us encounter them in daily life. As a result, this is a very practical book.

This book is a collection of eleven chapters which together represent an original contribution to the field of (multimodal) spoken dialogue systems. The chapters include highly relevant topics, such as dialogue modeling in research systems versus industrial systems, evaluation, miscommunication and error handling, grounding, statistical and corpus-based approaches to discourse and dialogue modeling, data analysis, and corpus annotation and annotation tools. The book contains several detailed application studies, including, e.g., speech-controlled MP3 players in a car environment, negotiation training with a virtual human in a military context, application of spoken dialogue to question-answering systems, and cognitive aspects in tutoring systems. The chapters vary considerably with respect to the level of expertise required in advance to benefit from them. However, most chapters start with a state-of-the-art description from which all readers from the spoken dialogue community may benefit. Overview chapters and state-of-the-art descriptions may also be of interest to people from the human-computer interaction community.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

This book provides descriptions and illustrations of cutting-edge text analysis methods for communication and marketing research; cultural, historical-comparative, and event analysis; curriculum evaluation; psychological diagnosis; language development research; and for any research in which statistical inferences are drawn from samples of texts. Although the book is accessible to readers having no experience with content analysis, the text analysis expert will find substantial new material in its pages. In particular, this collection describes developments in semantic and network text analysis methodologies that heretofore have been accessible only among a smattering of methodology journals.
The book's international and cross-disciplinary content illustrates the breadth of quantitative text analysis applications. These applications demonstrate the methods' utility for international research, as well as for practitioners from the fields of sociology, political science, journalism/communication, computer science, marketing, education, and English. This is an "ecumenical" collection that contains applications not only of the most recent semantic and network text analysis methods, but also of the more traditional thematic method of text analysis. In fact, it is originally with this volume that these two "relational" approaches to text analysis are defined and contrasted with more traditional "thematic" text analysis methods. The emphasis here is on "application." The book's chapters provide guidance regarding the sorts of inferences that each method affords, and up-to-date descriptions of the human and technological resources required to apply the methods. Its purpose is as a resource for making quantitative text analysis methods more accessible to social science researchers.

The volume combines a historical and philosophical study of Russell's theory of descriptions. It defends, develops and extends the theory as a contribution to natural language semantics while also arguing for a reassessment of the important of linguistic inquiry to Russell's philosophical project.

This book deals with the narrative discourse--specifically lifestories--of 16 patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). It attempts to understand the discourse of these patients in contextual terms. Thus far, the dominant explanation for "incoherence" in AD speech has been largely provided by research in psycholinguistics, much of which has understood AD speech in terms of the progressively deteriorating nature of the disease. This study provides a complementary view by examining ways in which some social factors--audiences, setting, and time--influence the extensiveness and meaningfulness of AD talk.
By offering both an examination of interactions across the data as well as analyzing particular cases in detail, this unusual study attempts to juxtapose some general insights regarding AD discourse with case-specific ones. Sociolinguistic analyses of the data demonstrate how certain audiences and particular settings set in motion discourse activities that either facilitate the patients' ability to recall their pasts or impede it. This analysis also includes a critical look at the researcher's contribution in negotiating and reinforcing these activities. Ethnographic details about the social worlds of some of these patients shed light on how larger social contexts at least indirectly contribute to exacerbating the patients' conditions or stabilizing them. The analyses of both context and language provides a more global understanding of the Alzheimer experience. This study also discusses some interactional strategies by which professionals can begin to engage AD patients in meaningful talk as well as ways by which they can better "hear" AD patients' cues at narrating. Throughout, this book underscores the need to factor in social factors when making assessments regarding AD patients' communicative abilities.

In Signs, Language and Communication readers familiar with the arguments of Professor Harris' previous work, including Signs of Writing, will find those ideas developed here to cover not just writing, but aspects of art, design and manufacture.
Roy Harris proposes a new theory of communication. He begins with the premise that the mental life of an individual should be conceived as a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the past and future. He concludes by arguing that communication should be viewed as both a product and a resource of this constant act of integration.

The grandmother granddaughter conversation examined in this book makes explicit what the detailed study of interaction reveals about two social problems--"bulimia" and "grandparent caregiving." For the first time, systematic attention is given to interactional activities through which family members display ordinary yet contradictory concerns about health and illness:
* a grandmother's (who is also a registered nurse) attempts to initiate, confront, and remedy her granddaughter's lack of responsibility in admitting bulimic "problems" and committing to professional medical assistance;
* a granddaughter's methods for avoiding ownership of the alleged bulimic problems by discounting the legitimacy of her grandmother's expressed concerns.
Through analysis of a single audio-recorded and transcribed conversation, Wayne Beach reveals the altogether pervasive and often troubled talk surrounding family medical predicaments. From a careful review of extant theories that seek to explain eating disorders and grandparent caregiving, it becomes clear that an overreliance on self-report data has promoted underspecified understandings of "social contexts" -- conceptualizations void of real time practices and interactional consequences mirroring how families manage their daily affairs and understandings regarding health and illness. In contrast, this volume draws attention to family members' embodied interactional activities. Here it is seen, for example, how methods for expressing concern and caring by "individuals" may nevertheless eventuate in interactional troubles and problems "between" family members. The analysis reveals that, while displays of basic concerns for others' health and well being are routine occurrences between family members in home environments -- and of course, across friendship and various support networks -- even the delicate and well-intended management of such occasions guarantees neither agreement on the nature of the alleged "problems" nor, consequently, a commitment to seek professional help as a means of remedying a medical condition. In such cases, the very existence of an illness is itself a matter of some contention to be interactionally worked out. And it is perhaps both predictable and symptomatic that those explicitly denying (or as with the granddaughter, indirectly failing to admit) that problematic health behaviors exist, also somehow let it be made known that far too much attention is being given to possibilities and consequences of illness in the first instance.
Implications of this investigation extend well beyond "bulimia" and "grandparent caregiving" to a vast array of casual and institutional involvements between family members, friends, and bureaucratic representatives such as those involved in long-term caregiving, dealing with cancer and Alzheimer's disease, or conducting psychiatric interviews and HIV/AIDS counseling sessions. Findings regarding the interactionally organized nature of talk about bulimia, as well as the problematic nature of caregiving, will be of value to researchers focusing on language and social interaction, health practitioners, and families alike.
This volume includes the full transcript of the conversation in the case study. A copy of the audio-recording is available for classroom adoption and/or personal purchase by contacting: Wayne A. Beach, School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4516.

Conversational analysis is an interdisciplinary field that draws on cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, pragmatics, and the ethnography of communication. These various disciplines provide both qualitative and quantitative foundations for conversational analysis. The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate what communication is: what its goals are, why people talk, and how conversational goals are achieved. The primary concerns of this study are to investigate the interactions among cognition, emotion, and social norms, using the floor model proposed by Edelsky (1981) and Schultz, Florio, and Erickson (1982), and to further develop their model for the analysis of conversational interaction.

This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive handbook of discourse analysis available. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the handbook, it is suitable for a wide range of courses such as English Language and Literature and Applied Linguistics. Unlike competing titles, the handbook consists of especially commissioned chapters written by a range of contributors from around the world.

The book contributes to a fuller description and a uniformed analysis of Mandarin cleft constructions. The book provides the first Mandarin empirical data towards some heated theoretical debates. The book yields a good combination of theoretical formal semantics, semantic-pragmatic interface studies, corpus analyses, and the newly emerging experimental semantics. Typologically speaking, Mandarin shi...(de) presents some characteristics of the that are rarely found with its counterparts in other languages.

The volume explores key convergences between cognitive and discourse approaches to language and language learning, both first and second. The emphasis is on the role of language as it is used in everyday interaction and as it reflects everyday cognition. The contributors share a usage-based perspective on language - whether they are examining grammar or metaphor or interactional dynamics - which situates language as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organization of social life and human thought. While sharing fundamental assumptions about language, the particulars of the areas of inquiry and emphases of those engaged in discourse analysis versus cognitive linguistics are diverse enough that, historically, many have tended to remain unaware of the interrelations among these approaches. Thus, researchers have also largely overlooked the possibilities of how work from each perspective can challenge, inform, and enrich the other. The papers in the volume make a unique contribution by more consciously searching for connections between the two broad approaches. The results are a set of dynamic, thought-provoking analyses that add considerably to our understanding of language and language learning. The papers represent a rich range of frameworks within a usage-based approach to language. Cognitive Grammar, Mental Space and Blending Theory, Construction Grammar, ethnomethodology, and interactional sociolinguistics are just some of the frameworks used by the researchers in this volume. The particular subjects of inquiry are also quite varied and include first and second language learning, signed language, syntactic phenomena, interactional regulation and dynamics, discourse markers, metaphor theory, polysemy, language processing and humor. The volume is of interests to researchers in cognitive linguistics, discourse and conversational analysis, and first and second language learning, as well as signed languages.

How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached--not as one-time testimony--but as an ongoing, deepening conversation.

Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now--burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is "not" a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be "made" a story. "On Listening to Holocaust Survivors" shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and--just as important--the ways they are not able to do so.

What is the basis of our ability to assign meanings to words or to objects? Such questions have, until recently, been regarded as lying within the province of philosophy and linguistics rather than psychology. However, recent advances in psychology and neuropsychology have led to the development of a scientific approach to analysing the cognitive bases of semantic knowledge and semantic representations. Indeed, theory and data on the organisation and structure of semantic knowledge have now become central and hotly debated topics in contemporary psychology.
This special issue of Memory brings together a series of papers from established laboratories that are at the forefront of semantic memory research. The collection includes papers presenting theoretical overviews of the field as well as papers containing new experimental findings. A variety of approaches to the problems of analysing semantic knowledge and semantic representations are included in this volume. For example, experimental studies of normal subjects are included together with neuropsychological investigations of patients with impaired semantic memory and computational models of the representation of knowledge in normality and disease. This collection will therefore be essential reading for researchers and others who are interested in memory function. It will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, linguists, philosophers and others who have puzzled over the many complex and central questions that probe the roots of our ability to understand meaning.

Memory has long been ignored by rhetoricians because the written word has made memorization virtually obsolete. Recently however, as part of a revival of interest in classical rhetoric, scholars have begun to realize that memory offers vast possibilities for today's writers. Synthesizing research from rhetoric, psychology, philosophy, and literary and composition studies, this volume brings together many historical and contemporary theories of memory. Yet its focus is clear: memory is a generator of knowledge and a creative force which deserves attention at the beginning of and throughout the writing process.
This volume emphasizes the importance of recognizing memory's powers in an age in which mass media influence us all and electronic communication changes the way we think and write. It also addresses the importance of the individual memory and voice in an age which promotes conformity. Written in a strong, lively personal manner, the book covers a great deal of scholarly material. It is never overbearing, and the extensive bibliography offers rich vistas for further study.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.

This volume presents a representative cross-section of the more than 200 papers presented at the 1994 conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. The contributors reflect multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives -- English, speech communication, philosophy, rhetoric, composition studies, comparative literature, and film and media studies. Exploring the historical relationships and changing relationships between rhetoric, cultural studies, and literacy in the United States, this text seeks answers to such questions as what constitutes "literacy" in a post-modern, high-tech, multi-cultural society?

Series Information:
Interface

This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors.
Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work:
* text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed,
* situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and
* the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.