Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth's idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry's untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant," colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash," to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliche. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way?
In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.

In The Black God Trope and Rhetorical Resistance: A Tradition of Race and Religion, Armondo R. Collins theorizes Black Nationalist rhetorical strategies as an avenue to better understanding African American communication practices. The author demonstrates how black rhetors using writing about God to create a language that reflects African Americans’ shifting subjectivity within the American experience. This book highlights how the Black God trope and Black Nationalist religious rhetoric function as an embodied rhetoric. Collins also addresses how the Black God trope functions as a gendered critique of white western patriarchy, to demonstrate how an ideological position like womanism is voiced by authors using the Black God trope as a means of public address. Scholars of rhetoric, African American literature, and religious studies will find this book of particular interest.

This book takes Korean as a basis to provide a detailed universal Determiner Phrase (DP) structure. Adnominal adjectival expressions are apparently optional noun dependents but their syntax and semantics have been shown to provide an important window on the internal structure of DP. By carefully examining data from Korean, an understudied language, as well as from other unrelated languages, the book provides a broad perspective on the phenomenon of noun modification and its cross-linguistic variations. Furthermore, it offers not only a thorough syntactic analysis but also a formal semantic analysis of noun modifiers that extends beyond a single language. This book will be of great interest to researchers interested in theoretical syntax, its interfaces with semantics, pragmatics, linguistic typology, and language variation.

The subjects of rhetoric, history, and theology intersect in unique ways within New Testament and early Christian literature. The contributors of this volume represent a wide range of perspectives but share a common interest in the interpretation of these texts in light of their rhetorical, historical, and theological elements. What results is a fresh and perceptive reading of the New Testament and early Christianity literature.

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these languages to languages without them. They look at how such systems arise or disappear and provide areal overviews of Eurasia, the Americas, and the south-west Pacific, the areas where semantically aligned languages are concentrated. This book will interest typological and historical linguists at graduate level and above.

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Series Editor: Curry Stephenson Malott, Queens College/CUNY Students in public schools serving poor and working-class students are inundated by the effects of high-stakes examinations. Teachers are demoralized and students suffer substandard curricular and pedagogical experiences. These effects are articulated by students and teachers in the high school that provided the setting for the critical ethnography on which this text is based. Teachers resent being judged on the basis of students' performance on standardized assessments. They are deprofessionalized as their roles are oriented toward working-class norms. Students feel alienated by content that is meaningless and test-based pedagogies that are disempowering. While these findings are disturbing, critical theory provides a foundation for seeking hope. By incorporating inquiry and dialogue, this theoretical framework opens a space where resistance can be revealed and examined. In this case, the study exposed glimmers of resistance, spaces in the structure of schooling where students and teachers critique the system and suggest ways of subverting the negative effects of the neoliberal reforms through dialogic, empowering, culturally responsive pedagogies. Collective resistance, achieved through dialogic pedagogies that build on understandings of resistance and power, can cultivate theoretical and material spaces where a cycle of praxis can enhance possibilities for social justice. To that end, the conclusion is devoted to the implementation of critical, dialogic approaches to literacies, approaches intended to interrupt the hegemonic influences that perpetuate social reproduction by capitalizing on the potential for solidarity and collective agency among the students and teachers who populate and educate the working classes. This book would interest teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators.

Fundamental to oral fluency, pragmatic markers facilitate the flow of spontaneous, interactional and social conversation. Variously termed 'hedges', 'fumbles' and 'conversational greasers' in earlier academic studies, this book explores the meaning, function and role of 'well', 'I mean', 'just', 'sort of', 'like' and 'you know' in British English. Adopting a sociolinguistic and historical perspective, Beeching investigates how these six commonly occurring pragmatic markers are used and the ways in which their current meanings and functions have evolved. Informed by empirical data from a wide range of contemporary and historical sources, including a small corpus of spoken English collected in 2011-14, the British National Corpus and the Old Bailey Corpus, Pragmatic Markers in British English contributes to debates about language variation and change, incrementation in adolescence and grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation. It will be fascinating reading for researchers and students in linguistics and English, as well as non-specialists intrigued by this speech phenomenon.

This book attempts to marry truth-conditional semantics with cognitive linguistics in the church of computational neuroscience. To this end, it examines the truth-conditional meanings of coordinators, quantifiers, and collective predicates as neurophysiological phenomena that are amenable to a neurocomputational analysis. Drawing inspiration from work on visual processing, and especially the simple/complex cell distinction in early vision (V1), we claim that a similar two-layer architecture is sufficient to learn the truth-conditional meanings of the logical coordinators and logical quantifiers.
As a prerequisite, much discussion is given over to what a neurologically plausible representation of the meanings of these items would look like. We eventually settle on a representation in terms of correlation, so that, for instance, the semantic input to the universal operators (e.g. and, all)is represented as maximally correlated, while the semantic input to the universal negative operators (e.g. nor, no)is represented as maximally anticorrelated. On the basis this representation, the hypothesis can be offered that the function of the logical operators is to extract an invariant feature from natural situations, that of degree of correlation between parts of the situation. This result sets up an elegant formal analogy to recent models of visual processing, which argue that the function of early vision is to reduce the redundancy inherent in natural images.
Computational simulations are designed in which the logical operators are learned by associating their phonological form with some degree of correlation in the inputs, so that the overall function of the system is as a simple kindof pattern recognition. Several learning rules are assayed, especially those of the Hebbian sort, which are the ones with the most neurological support. Learning vector quantization (LVQ) is shown to be a perspicuous and efficient means of learning the patterns that are of interest. We draw a formal parallelism between the initial, competitive layer of LVQ and the simple cell layer in V1, and between the final, linear layer of LVQ and the complex cell layer in V1, in that the initial layers are both selective, while the final layers both generalize.
It is also shown how the representations argued for can be used to draw the traditionally-recognized inferences arising from coordination and quantification, and why the inference of subalternacy breaks down for collective predicates.
Finally, the analogies between early vision and the logical operators allow us to advance the claim of cognitive linguistics that language is not processed by proprietary algorithms, but rather by algorithms that are general to the entire brain. Thus in the debate between objectivist and experiential metaphysics, this book falls squarely into the camp of the latter. Yet it does so by means of a rigorous formal, mathematical, and neurological exposition - in contradiction of the experiential claim that formal analysis has no place in the understanding of cognition. To make our own counter-claim as explicit as possible, we present a sketch of the LVQ structure in terms of mereotopology, in which the initial layer of the network performs topological operations, while the final layer performs mereological operations.
The book is meant to be self-contained, in the sense that it does not assume any priorknowledge of any of the many areas that are touched upon. It therefore contains mini-summaries of biological visual processing, especially the retinocortical and ventral /what?/ parvocellular pathways; computational models of neural signaling, and in particular the reduction of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations to the connectionist and integrate-and-fire neurons; Hebbian learning rules and the elaboration of learning vector quantization; the linguistic pathway in the left hemisphere; memory and the hippocampus; truth-conditional vs. image-schematic semantics; objectivist vs. experiential metaphysics; and mereotopology. All of the simulations are implemented in MATLAB, and the code is available from the book's website.
-The discovery of several algorithmic similarities between visison and semantics.
-The support of all of this by means of simulations, and the packaging of all of this in a coherent theoretical framework.

No legacy from antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages was more pervasive, or more enduring, than that of grammar and rhetoric. Cicero's son would have felt at home in a Tudor schoolroom, and the classical curriculum is readily recognizable in that of the Tudor schoolroom. And yet, grammatical and rhetorical theory and practice did change during those 1500 years, in ways that continue to demand, and richly reward, investigation. The twelve essays in this book contribute to the rapidly growing body of knowledge about the teaching and uses of grammar and rhetoric in the Latin West from late antiquity to the dawn of a new era in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since grammar and rhetoric dominated (indeed, almost monopolized) schooling from Cicero's Rome until the twelfth-century revival of Roman law and the rise of universities, clearly a collection of essay examining aspects of these two subjects will, by definition, enrich the larger history of education as well.This transitional period of profound cultural change throughout the former Roman Empire-including the spread of Christianity, the decline of public schools, and the influx of non-Latin-speaking peoples-rewards a diachronic focus on delimited, sharply focused topics. Each author considers such questions as: How did medieval teachers and writers interpret or "repurpose" grammatical and rhetorical texts they inherited from antiquity? What innovations, what new attitudes, did they bring to the task of teaching these two foundational subjects? The book should appeal to students and teachers of classics and late antiquity, rhetoric, the history of education, monasticism, and medieval studies in general.

The Rhetoric of Antisemitism focuses on the initial struggle Christianity experienced with Judaism, intensifying a hatred thereof, and settling on a religious dogma of eternal guilt meant to perpetuate antisemitism for eternity. Kiewe tackles the similar approach Islam has taken in its tension with Judaism and how it was turned centuries later into the Arab-Israeli conflict, significantly with the help of Nazi-antisemitism and propaganda. This book discusses the significant rise of antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the forgery pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that promoted the charge of Jewish world domination, and the more recent Durban Conference (2001) as a major turning point in conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism, including the linguistic games used to merge antisemitism with anti-Israelism. Scholars of religious studies, history, and rhetorical studies will find this book particularly useful.

In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873).
The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people', and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources - classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, treatises on crowd theory - this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism.
Matthew Bevis focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending political demands in and through their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary detachment that could gain critical purchase on political arguments. Providing a close reading of the relations between printed words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a major study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible political conduct.

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.

Modifiers and modification have been a major focus of inquiry for as long as the formal study of semantics has existed, and remain at the heart of major theoretical debates in the field. Modification offers comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics, including vagueness and gradability, comparatives and degree constructions, the lexical semantics of adjectives and adverbs, crosscategorial regularities, and the relation between meaning and syntactic category. Morzycki guides the reader through the varied and sometimes mysterious phenomena surrounding modification and the ideas that have been proposed to account for them. Presenting disparate approaches in a consistent analytical framework, this accessibly written work, which includes an extensive glossary of technical terms, is essential reading for researchers and students of all levels in linguistics, the philosophy of language and psycholinguistics.

This book deals with adjectival suffixes in English. Its scope of analysis is confined to the formation of adjective pairs that share a single root but end in different suffixes. Theoretically, the book adopts cognitive semantics and attempts to substantiate some of its tenets. One tenet is that a linguistic item is polysemous by nature. On this basis, the goal is to show that an adjectival suffix forms a category consisting of multiple senses, which gather around a centre. Another tenet is that the meaning of a linguistic item is described relative to the domain of knowledge to which it belongs. In this respect, the goal is to group the adjectival suffixes into sets, where they stand for one concept but differ in the specifics. A further tenet is that the use of a linguistic item is governed by the particular construal imposed on its content. In this regard, the goal is show that no two adjectives are synonymous even if they share the same root or look similar. They differ, as evidenced by corpus data, in terms of the alternate ways the speaker construes their common root. Empirically, the book adopts corpus linguistics, which helps to identify the distinctive collocates associated with the members of an adjective pair and, consequently, reveals the subtle differences in meaning between them.

This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information structure interface. It examines theories of information structure and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and considers their properties from different theoretical perspectives. She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of grammar, information structure, word order, the interface between lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of information structure. In her balanced and readable account, the author critically compares the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

This work links the role of civic discourse and communication to civil society, both domestically and globally. It covers: intercultural, multicultural and global communication theories; cultural diversity - ethnicity, race and gender; and comparative studies of culture and communication.

How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Conti examines presidential rhetoric on trade, providing a detailed analysis of presidential trade arguments and strategies throughout American history. She then concentrates on the rhetoric of contemporary presidents, who have had to contend with both the burgeoning trade deficit and the displacement of military competitiveness with post-cold war economic competitiveness. Despite vast disparities in governing philosophies and strategies, Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton all preached the virtues of free trade while continuing a policy of select protectionist actions. As Conti suggests, the arcane details of trade policy, the continuing pervasiveness of nontariff barriers, and the impending negotiation of international trade agreements combine to make presidential leadership on economic issues critical. How effective that leadership can be is, in large part, dependent upon the effectiveness of presidential rhetoric. Students, scholars, and researchers in the field of speech communication and rhetoric, political communication, public affairs, and the presidency will find this a stimulating survey.

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).

This book combines studies on referential as well as relational coherence and includes approaches to written and to spoken language, to production and to comprehension, to language specific and to cross-linguistic issues, to monolingual, bilingual and L2-acquisition. The theoretical issues and empirical findings discussed are of importance not only for theoretical linguistics, but also have a broad potential of practical implication.

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'.

Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven "metaphysical" poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can't exist without poetry's specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love's radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage-to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears. Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close-even too close-attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.

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.