This book provides a state of the art collection of constructional research on syntactic structures in German. The volume is unique in that it offers an easily accessible, yet comprehensive and sophisticated variety of papers. Moreover, various of the papers make explicit connections between grammatical constructions and the concept of valency which has figured quite prominently in Germanic Linguistics over the past half century.

David Charles presents a study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. They are also highly relevant to current debates in philosophy of language. Charles aims, on the basis of a careful reading of Aristotle's texts and many subsequent works, to reach a clear understanding of his claims and arguments, and to assess their truth and their importance to philosophy ancient and modern.

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersonal and textual meanings. Exploiting recent corpus-based research, it suggests that much humour can be accounted for by the overriding of lexical priming. Each chapter's discussion topics and suggestions for further reading encourage a critical approach to semantic and pragmatic theory. Written by an experienced lecturer on the linguistics of the English language, this is an entertaining and user-friendly textbook for advanced students of semantics, pragmatics and humour studies.

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, there was what could be considered an "early linguistic turn" in the seventeenth century, opening a place for the philosophy of language as part of the philosophical system under construction at that period. Skepticism and Language in Early Modern Philosophy: The Early Linguistic Turn also claims that the revival of ancient skepticism at the modern age contributed decisively towards this "linguistic turn" in so far as it attacked the "powers of the intellect" in representing reality and making knowledge possible. Marcondes argues that the concept of language itself becomes crucial to this investigation since during this period it was understood in different ways by different thinkers leading to the central role which will be given to the philosophy of language in contemporary philosophy.

This collection offers a comprehensive account of the development of intercultural communication strategies through Virtual English as a Lingua Franca, reflecting on the ways in which we make pragmatic meaning in today’s technology-informed globalized world. The volume places an emphasis on analyzing transmodal, transsemiotic, and transcultural discourse practices in online spaces, providing a counterpoint to existing ELF research which has leaned toward unpacking formal features of ELF communication in face-to-face interactions. Chapters explore how these practices are characterized and then further sustained via non-verbal semiotic resources, drawing on data from a global range of empirical studies. The book prompts further reflection on readers’ own experiences in online settings and the challenges of VELF while also supplying educators in these contexts with the analytical resources to better bridge the gap between formal and informal learning. Highlighting the dynamic complexity of online intercultural communication in the 21st century, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, language education, digital communication, and intercultural communication.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Discourse and Power: An Introduction to Critical Narratology: Who Narrates Whom? is both an introduction to discourse research and an application of the concept of discourse to the problem of power. Divided into two sections, Part One is a presentation of the most important theories of discourse in which the link between discourse and power or language and power is central. It provides a critical overview of the most important discourse theories: Foucault, Bourdieu, Fairclough and Greimas' structural semiotics. In Part two, the section on practice, the insights gained in the first part of the book are applied to analyses of particular discourses and their involvement in power relations. Ranging from psychiatric, legal, political, literary and scientific discourses, examples include the presidential speeches of Obama, Trump and Biden and the novels of Camus and Pirandello. The book demonstrates it is possible to reduce the power factor to a minimum, improve theoretical innovation and thus pave the way for new insights in social sciences. This is an important and timely text from a leading scholar, suitable for use on discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and rhetoric courses.

This book presents a complementary study of lexicalist approaches and constructionist approaches in Linguistics. Specific topics discussed include different versions of semantic roles, predicate decomposition, event structures, argument realizations, and cognitive construction grammars. For decades, the relationship between certain concepts and constructions along with related issues of verb-construction associations have been perennially taxing issues for both lexicalist and constructionist approaches alike. Indeed, in Chinese, unmatched verb-construction associations and the much richer alternate realizations pose very difficult problems. Based on a comparative study, the authors make an attempt to account for the possible correspondence between the delicacy of argument setting and the principles of their realization. They also account for the integration of construction with verbs in terms of their coherent conceptual contents. The resultant newly developed model throws new light on the thorny Chinese problems. The book will appeal to scholars and students studying cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, computational linguistics, and also natural language processing. The book also brings up some new analysis of Chinese data for both researchers and learners of Modern Chinese.

This is a second edition of the ground-breaking volume Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, which was the first published collection of chapters presenting critical discourse analysis theory and practice. Critical discursive approaches have now become the main trend in most discursive and semiotic investigations. It was then, and is especially now, predominantly concerned with identifying, demystifying and resisting the ways language and semiotic systems are used to reflect, create and sustain inequalities in specific contexts. This new collection presents contributions by all six of the living authors who were central to the first edition: Norman Fairclough, Theo van Leeuwen, Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard - plus an edited version of a jointly authored classic chapter originally authored by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress. There are four new chapters written by the other leading members of the foundational 1990s European Critical Discourse Analysis group: Phil Graham, Jay Lemke, David Machin and Louisa Rojo and two by young critical discourse researchers who have risen to prominence more recently: Rodrigo Borba and German Canale. Texts and Practices Revisited: Essential Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis provides a representative collection of work which, while authored by the pioneering researchers of the first wave of CDA, illustrates their most recent concerns and their latest analytical techniques. It is an essential text for all advanced students of English language, linguistics, media and cultural studies.

This impressive semantic study, with a useful glossary of special and technical terms, develops an original methodology, bringing new insights into the meaning of a much-discussed word. Working with an immense amount of data, obtained by examining every occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of 35 field elements, the author achieves a new degree of semantic refinement based on meticulous quantitative analysis of distribution, collocations, parallels and syntagms. Sense-relations are formulated between hesed and other related terms. This study provides much material for a better understanding of this crucial term for Hebrew thought, and also makes an important theoretical contribution to Hebrew lexicography.

Felix Guattari (1930-1992) was a radical analyst, social theorist and activist-intellectual. Best known for his collaborations with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on "Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus" and "What is Philosophy?, The Guattari Reader" makes available for the first time the broad canvas of Guattari's formidable theoretical and activist writings, many previously untranslated, to provide an indispensable companion to the existing literature.

Aside from illustrating the salience of Guattari's collaborative work with Deleuze and other European intellectuals, this volume charts Guattari's own solo writing career - from his tenure as Lacan's analysand in the 1950s and his prominent role in the international anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s through his participation in queer politics, outlaw radio, and the formation of subversive collective organizations. This volume provides an important register of Guattari's more political side, documenting his interventions in particular political conflicts in contemporary Europe.

Guattari's ideas and projects defy disciplinary boundaries and escape compartmentalization. They will appeal to those working in and between politics, philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.

This book discusses the application of various statistical methods to texts, rather than numbers, in various fields in behavioral science. It proposes an approach where quantitative methods are applied to data whereas previously such data were analyzed only by qualitative research methods. To emphasize the quantitative aspects of semantics, and the possibilities of conducting scientific interferences, the book introduces the concept of statistical semantics and presents the reader with a subset of techniques found in that domain. More specifically, the book focuses on methods that allow the investigation of semantic relationships between words, based on empirical corpus data. It shows the reader how to apply various statistical methods on texts, for example statistical tests to ascertain whether two sets of text are statistically different, ways to predict variables from text, as well as how to summarize and graphically illustrate texts. Thus, the book presents an accessible hands-on introduction to a selection of techniques, indispensable for cognitive psychologists, linguists, and social psychologists.

In The Rhetoric of the Opioid Crisis, Rachel Sussman Kaplan explores the opioid crisis through modernity. This book argues the stakeholders in this crisis have a different rhetorical bias and each group has contributed some willingly in the name of corporate profit and others inadvertently while trying to help patients.

Pluralities begins with a concise introduction to recent theories of the semantics of plurals. The author argues, contrary to many of those theories, that plural discourse involves entities corresponding to sets of individuals but nothing corresponding to higher order sets. In the course of the book, the reader will become acquainted with the linguistics data that lies at the heart of this debate including extensive discussion of reciprocals and of collectives (such as the committee). In addition, a unique account of distributivity is proposed in which collective/distributive ambiguities are analyzed in pragmatic terms. The account capitalizes on the idea that the universe may be partitioned differently at different points in a discourse. Pluralities should be accessible to those with an introductory level background in model-theoretic semantics.

Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision. Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes: the complexity of social work talk the issue of participation in language discordant meetings communicative interaction the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity. It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

This book helps readers to understand communication and society in contemporary China through systematic analysis of multimodal discourse at the national, institutional, and individual levels. China has undergone profound changes during the past decade or so. Politically, the Chinese government has been more proactive in domestic governance and foreign policies, as manifested in the Chinese Dream campaign and the national image publicity films respectively. Hand-in-hand with the socio-political change is the rapid development of new media, which has been changing how corporates do business, how institutions brand their images, as well as how individuals construct their identities and social relations. These developments have brought about significant changes to the discursive practices at the national, institutional, and individual level, characterized by the extensive use of multimodal resources and distinct promotional purposes. Feng systematically investigates and discusses the new discursive features in relation to relevant socio-cultural contexts. The analysis and discussion provide researchers with a social semiotic perspective on various aspects of communicative and social changes in contemporary China. The book also contributes to the growing field of multimodality by developing a set of cross-disciplinary analytical frameworks to deal with complex discourse forms in print media, moving images, and new media. The research findings provide a unique Chinese perspective on a broad spectrum of issues such as discursive governance, nation branding, university marketization, and identity performance. The book is relevant not only to discourse analysis and multimodality, but also to other disciplines which will benefit from a systematic understanding of Chinese discourse, such as cultural studies, communication studies and area/China studies.

The goal of this book is to ascertain Lessing's views on argumentation and rhetoric. I intend to establish that these views constitute a systematic and coherent theory and to argue that for Lessing rhetoric in argument can yield philosophical truth. Analysis of Lessing's views also sheds light on the general significance of rhetoric in the 18th century. The denial that rhetoric has claims to truth is a long-standing prejudice of Western thought. This position is evident in Kant's rejection of rhetoric in philosophical discourse. But in my view, the situation in the 18th century in Germany was somewhat more complex. Rhetoric did not die a quiet death but was very much alive in polemical tracts, and Lessing was a pivotal figure in a culture dominated by argument and disputation. I asked myself why and how this polemical age came to an end and how does the rejection of polemics by the 19th century affect our understanding of the 18th century? In the Introduction, I address some of these questions and establish a historical framework for the development of polemics in the 18th century. Another reason this polemical age has traditionally been seen as problematic for the scholars of the period is because argument, disputation and debate cannot be submitted to the same easy analysis as the systematic treatises produced at the end of the century.

This book focuses on how we should treat philosophy’s theoretical representations. It argues in favor of an instrumentalist attitude towards pivotal cases of theoretical representation in philosophy that are commonly regarded under a realist attitude. Philosophy is awash with theoretical representations, which raises the question of how we should regard them. This book argues that representations in philosophy should not be regarded under a realist attitude by default as individually disclosing the nature of what they represent. Ori Simchen introduces the reader to the general theme of representations in philosophy and our attitudes towards them via case studies: numbers, modality, and belief. He offers a framework for deciding when a realist attitude towards a theoretical representation is warranted and concludes that the representations deployed in the case studies fail the proposed test. The next part of the book illustrates the attractiveness of attitudinal instrumentalism towards representations in semantics, in the philosophy of mind, and within the problematics of rule-following. Philosophical Representation will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophical methodology.

Japanese is well known for its array of argument encoding types - but how is speakers' choice of encoding types to be described? This book investigates the encoding of subject and direct object in conversational Japanese and attempts to explain Japanese argument encoding as a unified system. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of a bank of conversation are provided, with the emphasis on speakers' use of the encoding types rather than their acceptability for given arguments.

Non-literal language is ubiquitous in everyday life, and while hyperbole is a major part of this, it has so far remained relatively unexplored. This volume provides the first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on data from genres such as spoken conversation, TV, newspapers, and literary works from Chaucer to Monty Python. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, it uses approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, to investigate in detail both speaker-centered and emotive aspects of hyperbole, and also addressee-related aspects, such as interpretation and interactional uptake. Illustrated with a range of diachronic case studies, hyperbole is also shown to be a main means of linguistic creativity, and an important contributor to language change. The book concludes with an exploration of the role of hyperbole in political speaking, humour, and literature. Original and in-depth, it will be invaluable to all those working on meaning, discourse, and historical linguistics.

• 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.

Drawing on data from Africa, Latin America, North America, and the Arab Levant, this book demonstrates how members of marginalized (disempowered) groups sculpt a positive image for themselves, engage in solidarity formation for group empowerment, and (re)construct their experiences in a manner that gives them voice, agency, and a positive identity. It argues for a more interventionist stance in ideologically oriented discourse analysis and demonstrates why (critical) discourse analysts must not only expose and resist the inequities or injustices in society but, more crucially, also adopt an activist-scholar posture in order to push for positive social change. The book brings into focus: (a) how discourse can be used to center the voice and agency of minority groups, (b) how feminists re-make gender relations in our world, (c) how non-dominant groups actively resist injustices and discriminatory discourses directed against them, (d) how discourse can be used to advance the goals of repressed groups in order to instigate progressive social change, and (e) access to forms of discourse that can be empowering for marginalized groups’ participation in social domains. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics in (critical) discourse studies, communication, and media studies as well as non-academics such as activists, journalists, and sociopolitical commentators. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

This book explores the interplay between various semiotic modes in multimodal texts and the ways in which they are employed to express cultural translation, seeking to expand prevailing views of translation and adaptation in light of everchanging social realities. Drawing on work from multimodal discourse studies, translation studies and adaptation studies, Kohn and Weissbrod shed a light on the increasing prominence of the visual in multimodal texts in the act of translation in a broad sense, and specifically, in conveying cultural translation, broadly understood as the processes and experiences which communities and individuals undergo in the face of social and cultural upheavals which require them to become acquainted with new signs, uniquely encoded across different contexts. Each example showcases individual sociocultural domains while also engaging in the active role of the audience and the respective spaces these works inhabit. The book brings together work from translation and adaptation studies and multimodality and opens up avenues for new research, making it of interest to scholars in these disciplines as well as fields such as media studies, migration studies and cultural studies.