This monograph gives a unified account of the syntactic distribution of subjunctive mood across languages, including Romance, Balkan (South Slavic and Modern Greek), and Hungarian, among others. Starting from a close scrutiny of the environments in which subjunctive mood occurs and of its semantic contribution, we present a feature-based approach which reveals the common properties of the class of verbs which embed subjunctive, and which takes into account the variation in subjunctive-related complementizers. Two main proposals can be highlighted: (i) the lexical semantics of the main clause predicate plays a crucial role in mood selection. More specifically subjunctive mood is regulated by a specific property of the main predicate, the emotive property, which is associated with the external argument of the embedding verb (usually the Subject). The book proposes a nanosyntactic analysis of the internal structure of embedding verbs. (ii) Cross- and intra-linguistic variations are dealt with according to different patterns of lexicalization, i.e., variations depend on what portions of the verb's and complementizer's functional sequence is lexicalized and on how it is packaged by languages. In doing so, this approach provides a uniform account of the phenomenon of embedded subjunctives. The monograph takes a novel, feature-based approach to the question of subjunctive licensing, providing a detailed analysis of the features of the matrix verb, of the complementizer and of the embedded subjunctive clause. It is also based on a wide empirical coverage, ranging from the relatively well-studied groups of Romance and Balkan languages to less explored languages from non-Indo-European families (Hungarian).

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic constraint. Chapters in the book show how the syntactic predication relation is semantically interpreted, and how the predication relation explains constraints on DP-raising and on the distribution of pleonastics in English. The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew, of the use of be' in predicative and identity sentences in English, and concludes with a study of the meaning of the verb be'.

Eighteenth-century rhetorical theory and rhetoricians figured prominently in the development of contemporary composition and rhetoric. This reference provides critical overviews of the careers and contributions of all major and many minor British and American rhetoricians of the 18th century. The volume begins with an introduction that discusses the various rhetorical movements of the time, including the importance of women to rhetorical theory. The entries that follow are arranged alphabetically, and each provides a bibliography of important primary and critical sources. A bibliography of general sources on 18th-century rhetoric concludes the work.

In Making a New Man John Dugan investigates how Cicero (106-43 BCE) uses his major treatises on rhetorical theory (De oratore, Brutus, and Orator) in order to construct himself as a new entity within Roman cultural life: a leader who based his authority upon intellectual, oratorical, and literary accomplishments instead of the traditional avenues for prestige such as a distinguished familial pedigree or political or military feats. Eschewing conventional Roman notions of manliness, Cicero constructed a distinctly aesthetized identity that flirts with the questionable domains of the theatre and the feminine, and thus fashioned himself as a "new man."

How did Ancient Greek express that an event occurred at a particular time, for a certain duration, or within a given time frame? The answer to these questions depends on a variety of conditions - the nature of the time noun, the tense and aspect of the verb, the particular historical period of Greek during which the author lived - that existing studies of the language do not take sufficiently into account. This book accordingly examines the circumstances that govern the use of the genitive, dative, and accusative of time, as well as the relevant prepositional constructions, primarily in Greek prose of the fifth century BC through the second century AD, but also in Homer. While the focus is on developments in Greek, translations of the examples, as well as a fully glossed summary chapter, make it accessible to linguists interested in the expression of time generally.

This monograph is a defence of the Fregean take on logic. The author argues that Freges projects, in logic and philosophy of language, are essentially connected and that the formalist shift produced by the work of Peano, Boole and Schroeder and continued by Hilbert and Tarski is completely alien to Frege's approach in the Begriffsschrift. A central thesis of the book is that judgeable contents, i.e. propositions, are the primary bearers of logical properties, which makes logic embedded in our conceptual system. This approach allows coherent and correct definitions of logical constants, logical consequence, and truth and connects their use to the practices of rational agents in science and everyday life.

The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines contemporary approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished.

The Rhetoric of Official Apologies: Critical Essays focuses on the many challenges associated with performing a speech act on behalf of a collective and the concomitant issues of rhetorically tackling the multiple political, social, and philosophical issues at stake when a collective issues an official apology to a group of victims. Contributors address questions of whether collective remorse is possible or credible, how official apologies can be evaluated, who can issue apologies on behalf of whom, and whether there are certain kinds of wrongdoing that simply can't be addressed in the form of an official apology. Collectively, the book speaks to the relevance of conceptualizing official apologies more broadly as serving multiple rhetorical purposes that span ceremonial and political genres and represent a potentially powerful form of collective self-reflection necessary for political and social advancement.

Noam Chomsky's claim that ordinary speakers possess complex structures of linguistic knowledge was a trigger for the cognitive revolution in the mid-20th century. This and an associated claim, that linguistics is essentially in the business of rendering such knowledge explicit, have been the target of an evolving series of sceptical objections ever since.

Fay examines the unacknowledged political uses of language in modern culture that engender and effectuate power imbalances among speakers and listeners. She locates six strategies in which women are particularly targeted by politicized rhetoric and shows how they are used in a variety of language-informed social arenas. Using bell hooks' pedagogy of talking back, Eminent Rhetoric argues that women need not only to learn how to recognize victimizing rhetoric, but also to start to challenge it and its rhetors. Women must be shown how the everyday language of politicians, educators, and newscasters is not natural but is marked--designed for manipulative purposes that put women at risk.

The first usage-based approach of its kind, this volume contains twelve studies on key issues in Spanish syntax: word order, null arguments, grammatical-relation marking, inalienable possession, "ser" and "estar," adjective placement, small clauses and causatives. The studies are approached within a broad functionalist perspective. The studies strengthen the view that components of grammar intricately interact and that a usage-based approach to analyzing them offers new and insightful perspectives on some stubborn problems.

In this book, Nydia Flores-Ferran offers a comprehensive examination of linguistic intensification in Spanish and English communication. Flores-Ferran examines how intensification is defined as well as the various linguistic features, strategies, and devices we employ to escalate and amplify our oral and written communication. The book builds on a rich body of literature, exploring the conceptualization of linguistic intensification within socio-pragmatics and Persuasion Theory. This book also demonstrates the applicability of intensification in language learning by discussing techniques native speakers use to amplify the illocution of their communication.

This book investigates paradigms of person - both independent pronouns as well as bound person marking. Based on empirical and theoretical grounds, the author argues that the notion 'number' has to be redefined to deal with the cross-linguistic variation of person marking. Equipped with a new definition, a typology of the paradigmatic structure of person marking is presented, incorporating data from around 400 languages. Nothing appears to be impossible for the paradigmatic structure, although some patterns are clearly more probable than others are. Starting from the more commonly occurring patterns, the diachronic dynamics of paradigmatic structure are investigated by comparing close relatives that differ slightly in the structure of their person paradigms.

Truth and Norms: Normative Alethic Pluralism and Evaluative Disagreements engages three philosophical topics and the relationships among them. Filippo Ferrari first contributes to the debate on the nature and normative significance of disagreement, especially in relation to evaluative judgements such as judgements about basic taste, refined aesthetics, and moral matters. Second, he addresses the issue of epistemic normativity, focusing in particular on the normative function(s) that truth exerts on judgements. Third, he contributes to the debate on truth-more specifically, which account of the nature of truth best accommodates the norms relating judgements and truth. This book develops and defends a novel pluralistic picture of the normativity of truth: normative alethic pluralism (NAM). At the core of NAM is the idea that truth exerts different normative functions in relation to different areas of inquiry. Ferrari argues that this picture of the normativity of truth offers the best explanation of the variable normative significance that disagreement exhibits in relation to different subject matters-from a rather shallow normative impact in the case of disagreement about taste, to a normatively more substantive significance in relation to moral judgements. Last, Ferrari defends the view that NAM does not require a commitment to truth pluralism, since it is fully compatible with a somewhat refined version of minimalism about truth.

In recent years, the study of formal semantics and formal pragmatics has grown tremendously showing that core aspects of language meaning can be explained by a few principles. These principles are grounded in the logic that is behind - and tightly intertwined with - the grammar of human language. In this book, some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara H. Partee, offer new insights into the nature of linguistic meaning and pave the way for the further development of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Each chapter investigates various dimensions in which the logical nature of human language manifests itself within a language and/or across languages. Phenomena like bare plurals, free choice items, scalar implicatures, intervention effects, and logical operators are investigated in depth and at times cross-linguistically and/or experimentally. This volume will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.

While much has been written on illicit drug use, policy, and drugs' relationship to crime, this study examines the drug war as most Americans have experienced it--through mass-mediated rhetoric: presidential drug war declarations, news stories and hype, public service announcements, and the like. Such rhetoric influences public opinion about illegal drugs, drug users, presidents, and the drug war itself. And according to this author, such rhetoric is also used as a public relations campaign designed to increase the popularity of government officials and to assure quiescence regarding particular policy programs. This study demonstrates the underestimated influence of rhetoric, political uses of public relations and the powerful influence they have on public opinion and the policy process.

Computational semantics is concerned with computing the meanings of linguistic objects such as sentences, text fragments, and dialogue contributions. As such it is the interdisciplinary child of semantics, the study of meaning and its linguistic encoding, and computational linguistics, the discipline that is concerned with computations on linguistic objects.
From one parent computational semantics inherits concepts and techniques that have been developed under the banner of formal (or model-theoretic) semantics. This blend of logic and linguistics applies the methods of logic to the description of meaning. From the other parent the young discipline inherits methods and techniques for parsing sentences, for effective and efficient representation of syntactic structure and logical form, and for reasoning with semantic information. Computational semantics integrates and further develops these methods, concepts and techniques.
This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. It is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who want to know more about the algorithmic realisation of meaning in natural language and about what is happening in this field of research. There is a general introduction by the editors.

Language and silence have usually been understood as opposites and assigned different values, but which one is positive and which negative? When people equate silence with suppression or repression, they argue that it is through language that we discover meaning. Yet people who perceive deep wisdom in silence believe that words falsify experience. Ranging widely across time and languages, Andrew Vogel Ettin explores the ways in which various biblical and traditional works as well as modern and contemporary texts - Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and literary - treat the nature of silence and speech and the tension between them. He situates this tension at the heart of the creative process and argues that language and silence need each other and contribute to the power and meaning of one another. Critically examining the idea of a "Judeo-Christian" culture, Ettin shows how silence is imposed by a dominant culture on another culture and how the dominated culture - in this case Judaism - becomes excluded from the historical conversation about values and ideas. He also demonstrates the broader uses of both speech and silence as cultural weapons by the vulnerable or oppressed, who have no other means of defense or witness. We generally interpret silence as a void, but Ettin shows it to be a mode of communication that carries the potential for intense variety. The loss of a public voice has implications for both the dominant and the dominated culture. The author examines these implications in the following contexts: contemporary feminist attempts, especially within Judaism, to rectify the masculine language of worship and Godhead in order to end language-generated alienation; the situationof the Yiddish writer as exemplary of a writer in exile or a language that is marginalized; the Jewish impulse toward universalism, with its corresponding danger of loss of voice; and the values of silence and speech arising from the experiences of the Holocaust. In the process, he considers the implications for multicultural societies. Speaking Silences is a broadly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to scholars and readers interested in modern and contemporary literature, Jewish studies, religion and literature, and aesthetics.

In recent years the idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. Speaking of Events offers a vivid and up-to-date indication of this debate, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Each chapter has been written expressly for this volume by leading authors in the field, including Nicholas Asher, Pier Marco Bertinetto, Johannes Brandl, Denis Delfitto, Regine Eckardt, James Higginbotham, Alessandro Lenci, Terence Parsons, Alice ter Meulen, and Henk Verkuyl.

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought-the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world-and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines-cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory-join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines.

This open access book addresses three themes which have been central to Leydesdorff's research: (1) the dynamics of science, technology, and innovation; (2) the scientometric operationalization of these concept; and (3) the elaboration in terms of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. In this study, I discuss the relations among these themes. Using Luhmann's social-systems theory for modelling meaning processing and Shannon's theory for information processing, I show that synergy can add new options to an innovation system as redundancy. The capacity to develop new options is more important for innovation than past performance. Entertaining a model of possible future states makes a knowledge-based system increasingly anticipatory. The trade-off between the incursion of future states on the historical developments can be measured using the Triple-Helix synergy indicator. This is shown, for example, for the Italian national and regional systems of innovation.

The null subject has always been central to linguistic theory, because it tells us a great deal about the underlying structure of language in the human brain, and about the interface between syntax and semantics. Null subjects exist in languages such as Italian, Chinese, Russian and Greek where the subject of a sentence can be tacitly implied, and is understood from the context. In this systematic overview of null subjects, Jose A. Camacho reviews the key notions of null subject analyses over the past thirty years and encompasses the most recent findings and developments. He examines a balance of data on a range of languages with null subjects and also explores how adults and children acquire the properties of null subjects. This book provides an accessible and original account of null subject phenomena, ideal for graduate students and academic researchers interested in syntax, semantics and language typology.

Intercollegiate forensics is an extracurricular activity venerated in American higher education for producing influential thought leaders, public servants, and highly trained professionals. In spite of its sterling reputation, financial support for and student participation on intercollegiate forensics teams is in an alarming state of decline. The author argues that intercollegiate forensics coaches, in the face of enormous challenges which threaten the continued vitality of competitive speech and debate at institutions across the United States, must chart a strategic pathway forward for current and existing intercollegiate forensics teams. This book advocates for the application of empirically validated leadership frameworks to the nuances of leading speech and debate programs. The author explores the use of innovative pedagogical methods and coaching strategies rooted in modern perspectives of competitive access and inclusion to boost team participation from individuals and groups historically excluded from the activity. Through the recommendations laid out in this book, the author offers a framework for intercollegiate forensics coaches to use in navigating an uncertain future.

Empowering Women: Global Voices of Rhetorical Influence explores the topic of women’s empowerment, offers a theoretical foundation to understand empowerment, and addresses the value of applying a rhetorical analysis to understand women’s rights. In each chapter, Julia A. Spiker explores the rhetoric surrounding women’s empowerment by analyzing elite female political leaders from around the world, with each analysis incorporating a rhetorical empowerment framework to unveil key issues surrounding women’s empowerment. Spiker then links the rhetorical findings from each case to highlight similarities and differences in the challenges to women’s empowerment outlined by world leaders. The conclusion to Empowering Women synthesizes these findings to present an overarching, global picture of women’s empowerment. Scholars of gender studies, women’s studies, communication, rhetoric, international relations, and political science will find this volume especially useful.