This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional "tenseless" languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guarani and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching

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

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

Although there is still no general agreement on the exact functions of linguistic pragmatics and the fields of activity it covers, it can generally be understood as the relationship of language to its users and the resultant practical applications of language. Thus it is one of the main concerns of research in this field to achieve a better understanding and account of the influence of extra-linguistic factors on language. In this introduction to the field, "pragmalinguistics" is seen as a field within the more general subject of "pragmatics." The book aims to familiarize those interested in linguistics with the problems and methods of what is still an "open" field of enquiry and to present its main topic areas - pragmalinguistics as a general semiotic theory, as speech act theory, as the linguistics of conversation, and as text linguistics.

This volume is the first book to focus specifically on the topic of comparative glossing. It brings together new research on glossing practices from traditions in both the West and East Asia, with a focus on Japan. It also touches on the relation between glossing in the medieval manuscript tradition and the modern linguistic use of the gloss. Its purpose is to present a sample of the most recent studies on glossing as it is practiced across very different parts of the world, highlighting the many shared features found across space and time. Glosses take many forms and serve numerous functions according to when and where they are produced. They constitute a cross-cultural phenomenon anchored in language, and are the manifestation of hermeneutic processes involved in the transfer of knowledge from one linguistic area to another. Glosses are an integral part of all the stages of this transfer, which is characterized by the necessity to decode and explain the message, encompassing basic grammatical commentary and wider exegetical discussions.

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

How is meaning constructed discursively by participants in problem discourse? To which discursive resources do they resort in order to accomplish their complicated tasks of problem presentation and negotiation of possible solutions? To what extent are these resources related to the interactional and meaningful construction of problems and solutions? Irit Kupferberg and David Green- a discourse analyst and a clinical psychologist- have explored naturally-occurring media, hotline, and cyber troubled discourse in a quest for answers. Inspired by a constructivist-interpretive theoretical framework grounded in linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, narrative inquiry, and clinical psychology as well as their professional experience, the authors put forward three novel claims that are illustrated by 70 attention-holding examples. First, sufferers often present their troubles through detailed narrative discourse as well as succinct story-internal tropes such as metaphors and similes- discursive resources that constitute two interrelated versions of the troubled self. Particularly interesting are the intriguing figurative constructions produced in acute emotional states or at crucial discursive junctions. Second, such figurative constructions often 'lubricate' the interactive negotiation of solutions. Third, when the figurative and narrative resources of self-construction are employed in the public arena they are used and sometimes abused by the media representatives, depending on a plethora of contextual resources identified in this book.

Our understanding of the concept of narrative has undergone a significant transformation over time, particularly today as new communication technologies are developed and popularized. As new narrative genres are born and old ones undergo great change by the minute, a thorough understanding can shed light on which storytelling elements work best in what format. That deep understanding can then help build strong, satisfying stories. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions is an essential publication that examines the relationships between types of narratives in a shifting and widening scope of storytelling forms. While highlighting a wide range of topics including contemporary culture, advertising, and transmedia storytelling, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, content creators, advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

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

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), in over 100 Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects spoken in Italy. It comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, definiteness effects, and the linking between semantics and syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The authors test influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence; they argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, even though they display similar morphosyntactic features. The volume also provides the historical background of Romance there sentences, relying on the findings of the analysis of a substantial corpus of early Italo-Romance vernacular texts. Couched in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, the discussion fully engages with the vast available literature on existentials and locatives, thus being of interest to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Through the investigation of existentials and locatives, the volume addresses key issues in linguistic theory, while offering an invaluable source of data for research on the Romance languages and a model in fieldwork-based microvariational analysis.

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

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

This book presents a new cross-linguistic analysis of gender and its effects on morphosyntax. It addresses questions including the syntactic location of gender features; the role of natural gender; and the relationship between syntactic gender features and the morphological realization of gender. Ruth Kramer argues that gender features are syntactically located on the n head ('little n'), which serves to nominalize category-neutral roots. Those gender features are either interpretable, as in the case of natural gender, or uninterpretable, like the gender of an inanimate noun in Spanish. Adopting Distributed Morphology, the book lays out how the gender features on n map onto the gender features relevant for morphological exponence. The analysis is supported by an in-depth case study of Amharic, which poses challenges for previous gender analyses and provides clear support for gender on n. The proposals generate a typology of two- and three-gender systems, with the various types illustrated using data from a genetically diverse set of languages. Finally, further evidence for gender being on n is provided from case studies of Somali and Romanian, as well as from the relationship between gender and other linguistic phenomena including derived nouns and declension class. Overall, the book provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the morphosyntax of gender.

This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. Daniela Isac argues that the specificity of imperative clauses cannot be the result of a unique imperative Force feature; instead, the `type' of imperative clauses can be traced back to a plurality of finer grained features, such as Modality and phi-features, hosted by the Mod, Infl, and Speech Event heads, among others. The data are drawn from a wide range of languages including various Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, as well as Finnish and Inuktitut. The analysis accounts for recurrent patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses. The approach, which focuses exclusively on morphosyntactic rather than semantic features, is potentially transferable to the analysis of other clause types, such as exclamatives, interrogatives, and declaratives.

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content. According to this theory, the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. Propositions are types of these actions, which we use to classify and individuate our attitudes and speech acts. Hanks abandons several key features of the traditional Fregean conception of propositional content, including the idea that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-conditions, the distinction between content and force, and the concept of entertainment. The main difficulty for this traditional conception is the problem of the unity of the proposition, the problem of explaining how propositions have truth conditions and other representational properties. The new theory developed here, in its place,explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

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

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

Time in Natural Language investigates the relationship between the syntactic and semantic representations of sentences within the domain of tense. Assuming that tenses are semantically composed of three distinct times, Thompson proposes that these times map onto the syntax in a regular fashion: each time is associated with a unique syntactic head. Adopting the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory, this approach makes possible insightful analyses of syntactic structures involving temporal dependency. Thompson argues that, depending on their adjunction site, temporal adverbials modify different parts of the tense structure of the clause. Locating the Event time within VP, it is correctly predicted that an adverbial that modifies the Event time is adjoined to VP. On the other hand, since the Reference time is argued to be within AspP, when an adverbial is adjoined to AspP, it modifies the Reference time. The syntax of temporal adjunct clauses is accounted for in a similar fashion; they may be adjoined either to VP, where they are interpreted as simultaneous with the matrix event, or to AspP, where they are interpreted as nonsimultaneous. Thompson shows that the analysis sheds light on the less-studied issue of the temporal syntax of arguments. Subjects with gerundive relative clauses are claimed to be interpreted in VP at LF when the relative clause is temporally dependent on the Event time of the main clause, and in TP when the relative clause is dependent on the Speech time of the main clause. By extending the syntactic proposal to investigate the discourse-level effects of tense, an original analysis of the discourse representation of tense is proposed. Thompson argues that the discourse representation of tense is based on same primitives and subject to the same principles as the syntactic representation of tense, based on an in-depth examination of the structure and meaning of the temporal discourse adverb then.

How did Ronald Reagan go from calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in his first term as president to saying the US had "forged a satisfying new closeness" with the Soviets by the end of his second term? In Reagan's Soviet Rhetoric: Telling the Soviet Redemption Story, rhetorical scholar Mark LaVoie examines the ways Reagan negotiated his shift from a vehemently anti-communist discourse to a rhetoric of guarded optimism about the future of US-Soviet relations that ultimately revealed a Soviet redemption narrative. Following Reagan's Soviet rhetoric from his 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee to his Farewell Address in 1989, LaVoie considers the President's use of "Soviet/Nazi analogy," "historical narrative," "reciprocity," and other rhetorical strategies in creating the narrative. Scholars and students of rhetoric, history, and international relations will find this book particularly interesting.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no overt degree morphology. John is tall is evaluative because it entails that John is tall relative to a contextually valued standard. John is taller than Sue and John is as tall as Sue are not evaluative because both could be used even if John and Sue were short. Previous accounts of evaluativity have assumed that it is not part of the inherent meaning of adjectives, but is contributed by a null morpheme. Jessica Rett argues against this analysis, proposing that no null morpheme is required. Instead, evaluativity is explained on the basis of assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation; the analysis is couched in recent approaches to Gricean conversational implicature.

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no overt degree morphology. John is tall is evaluative because it entails that John is tall relative to a contextually valued standard. John is taller than Sue and John is as tall as Sue are not evaluative because both could be used even if John and Sue were short. Previous accounts of evaluativity have assumed that it is not part of the inherent meaning of adjectives, but is contributed by a null morpheme. Jessica Rett argues against this analysis, proposing that no null morpheme is required. Instead, evaluativity is explained on the basis of assumptions that speakers and hearers make about the relationship between the simplicity of a situation and the simplicity of the language used to describe that situation; the analysis is couched in recent approaches to Gricean conversational implicature.

This book introduces the principles and practice of writing a comprehensive reference grammar. Several thousand distinct languages are currently spoken across the globe, each with its own grammatical system and its own selection of diverse grammatical structures. Comprehensive reference grammars offer a basis for understanding linguistic diversity and can provide a unique perspective into the structure and social and cognitive underpinnings of different languages. Alexandra Aikhenvald describes the means of collecting, analysing, and organizing data for use in this type of grammar, and discusses the typological parameters that can be used to explore relationships with other languages. She considers how a grammar can made to reflect and bring to life the society of its speakers through background explanation and the judicious choice of examples, as well as by showing how its language, history, and culture are intertwined. She ends with a full glossary of terms and guidance for those wanting to explore a particular linguistic phenomenon or language family. The Art of Grammar is the ideal resource for students and teachers of linguistics, language studies, and inductively-oriented linguistic, cultural, and social anthropology.

How can humans learn to function most effectively in their individual and social lives and best approach important ethical and social concerns? "Developing Sanity in Human Affairs" answers this question through application of general semantics to the fields of education, counseling, communication, critical thinking, journalism, and ethics.

General semantics, developed by Alfred Korzybski, is concerned with how humans can learn to evaluate and act more responsibly in conducting their individual and social lives. The chapters in this collection deal with these issues in education and counseling, social and cultural areas, critical thinking, communications, humanism, and ethics. Highlights include the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which bridges past and present work in general semantics and applications to important current problems in media and other areas of communication. Traditional and revisionist perspectives on foundations in general semantics are presented, as are dialogues on critical thinking and general semantics.

Metasemantics comprises new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics, by a diverse group of established and emerging experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content. The science of semantics aspires to systematically specify the meanings of linguistic expressions in context. The paradigmatic metasemantic question is accordingly: what more basic or fundamental features of the world metaphysically determine these semantic facts? Efforts to answer this question inevitably raise others. Where are the boundaries of semantics? What is the essence of the meaning relation? Which framework should we use for semantic theorizing? What are the intrinsic natures of semantic values? Are the semantic facts metaphysically determinate? What is semantic competence? Metasemantic inquiry has long been recognized as a central part of the philosophy of language, but recent developments in metaphysics and semantics itself now allow us to approach these classic questions with an unprecedented degree of precision. The essays collected here provide promising new perspectives on old problems, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and taken together, greatly sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.

This piece of work began life as a doctoral thesis written at the University of Texas between 1976 and 1978. Now after a year in Dublin it is to become a book. Of the many people in the Department of Linguistics at Texas who shaped my interests and who helped me through the writing of the thesis, I must single out Lee Baker, Lauri Karttunen, Bill Ladusaw, Sue Schmerling and Stanley Peters for special gratitude. All of them have provided specific suggestions which have improved this work, but perhaps more .importantly they provided a uniquely stimulating and harmonious environment in which to work, and a demanding set of professional standards to live up to. To Ken Hale lowe a particular debt of gratitude - for two years of encour agement and suggestions, and particularly for a set of detailed comments on an earlier version of the book which led to many changes for the better. I also thank my friends Per-Kristian Halvorsen and Elisabet Engdahl, both of whom took the trouble to provide me with detailed criticisms and comments. In Dublin I am grateful to the School of Celtic Studies of the Institute for Advanced Studies for giving me the opportunity of teaching a seminar on many of the topics covered in the book and of exposing the material to people whose knowledge of the language is unequalled. Donal 6 Baoill and Liam Breatnach have been particularly helpful."