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.

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.

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.

Ableism, a form of discrimination that elevates "able" bodies over those perceived as less capable, remains one of the most widespread areas of systematic and explicit discrimination in Western culture. Yet in contrast to the substantial body of scholarly work on racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism remains undertheorized and underexposed. In this book, James L. Cherney takes a rhetorical approach to the study of ableism to reveal how it has worked its way into our everyday understanding of disability. Ableist Rhetoric argues that ableism is learned and transmitted through the ways we speak about those with disabilities. Through a series of textual case studies, Cherney identifies three rhetorical norms that help illustrate the widespread influence of ableist ideas in society. He explores the notion that "deviance is evil" by analyzing the possession narratives of Cotton Mather and the modern horror touchstone The Exorcist. He then considers whether "normal is natural" in Aristotle's Generation of Animals and in the cultural debate over cochlear implants. Finally, he shows how the norm "body is able" operates in Alexander Graham Bell's writings on eugenics and in the legal cases brought by disabled athletes Casey Martin and Oscar Pistorius. These three simple equivalencies play complex roles within the social institutions of religion, medicine, law, and sport. Cherney concludes by calling for a rhetorical model of disability, which, he argues, will provide a shift in orientation to challenge ableism's epistemic, ideological, and visual components. Accessible and compelling, this groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of disability studies as well as to disability rights advocates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book provides an in-depth look at pragmatic development by second language learners of French through their production of French discourse markers. It showcases a holistic production-focused approach designed to provide a broad picture of learner discourse marker use in French. The book begins with a comprehensive description of the major theoretical frameworks in discourse marker research. It provides a detailed analysis of prior second language research on discourse markers in several languages and the dominant avenues of inquiry. Additionally, this book engages in a discussion of methodology that can serve as a guide for future researchers on the topic. The data presented in this book provide a broad picture of both native speaker and learner production of discourse markers with implications for theoretical and formal understandings of pragmatic meaning. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in pragmatics for both second language acquisition and formal or theoretical perspectives.

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.

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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.

Computational semantics is the art and science of computing meaning in natural language. The meaning of a sentence is derived from the meanings of the individual words in it, and this process can be made so precise that it can be implemented on a computer. Designed for students of linguistics, computer science, logic and philosophy, this comprehensive text shows how to compute meaning using the functional programming language Haskell. It deals with both denotational meaning (where meaning comes from knowing the conditions of truth in situations), and operational meaning (where meaning is an instruction for performing cognitive action). Including a discussion of recent developments in logic, it will be invaluable to linguistics students wanting to apply logic to their studies, logic students wishing to learn how their subject can be applied to linguistics, and functional programmers interested in natural language processing as a new application area.

From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world.

In her Beijing lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers represent 'cutting' and 'breaking' in different languages, and the relation of the Whorfian Hypothesis to cross-linguistic variations in the semantics of languages. Bowerman's over-riding concern throughout is with how children come to master the first language being spoken to them by their parents and caregivers.

Complex systems in nature and society make use of information for the development of their internal organization and the control of their functional mechanisms. Alongside technical aspects of storing, transmitting and processing information, the various semantic aspects of information, such as meaning, sense, reference and function, play a decisive part in the analysis of such systems. With the aim of fostering a better understanding of semantic systems from an evolutionary and multidisciplinary perspective, this volume collects contributions by philosophers and natural scientists, linguists, information and computer scientists. They do not follow a single research paradigm; rather they shed, in a complementary way, new light upon some of the most important aspects of the evolution of semantic systems. Evolution of Semantic Systems is intended for researchers in philosophy, computer science, and the natural sciences who work on the analysis or development of semantic systems, ontologies, or similar complex information structures. In the eleven chapters, they will find a broad discussion of topics ranging from underlying universal principles to representation and processing aspects to paradigmatic examples.

Doctors, nurses, and other caregivers often know what people with Alzheimer's disease or Asperger's 'sound like' - that is they recognise patterns in people's discourse, from sounds and silences, to words, sentences and story structures. Such discourse patterns may inform their clinical judgements and affect the decisions they make. However, this knowledge is often tacit, like recognising a regional accent without knowing how to describe its features. This is the first book to present models for comprehensively describing discourse specifically in clinical contexts and to illustrate models with detailed analyses of discourse patterns associated with degenerative (Alzheimer's) and developmental (autism spectrum) disorders. The book is aimed not only at advanced students and researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, speech pathology and clinical psychology but also at researchers, clinicians and caregivers for whom explicit knowledge of discourse patterns might be helpful.

This book offers a new way of doing African philosophy by building on an analysis of the way people talk. The author bases his investigation on the belief that traditional African philosophy is hidden in expressions used in ordinary language. As a result, he argues that people are engaging in a philosophical activity when they use expressions such as taboos, proverbs, idioms, riddles, and metaphors. The analysis investigates proverbs using the ordinary language approach and Speech Act theory. Next, the author looks at taboos using counterfactual logic, which studies the meaning of taboo expressions by departing from a consideration of their structure and use. He argues that the study of these figurative expressions using the counterfactual framework offers a particular understanding of African philosophy and belief systems. The study also investigates issues of meaning and rationality departing from a study on riddles, explores conceptual metaphors used in conceptualizing the notion of politics in modern African political thought, and examines language and marginalization of women and people with disabilities. The book differs from other works in African philosophy in the sense that it does not claim that Africans have a philosophy as is commonly done in most studies. Rather, it reflects and unfolds philosophical elements in ordinary language use. The book also builds African Conception of beauty and truth through the study of language.

Les genres discursifs, penses comme outil theorique necessaire pour faciliter la production et la reception des textes, evoluent dans le temps, mais egalement dans l'espace. Chaque aire linguistique et culturelle possede des specificites generiques qui se manifestent dans la realisation des discours mediatiques. En raison de la digitalisation grandissante, les discours mediatiques sont de plus en plus diffuses et consommes sous leur forme numerique, ce qui implique une reconfiguration des pratiques de production et de reception. Le present ouvrage se propose d'examiner les enjeux interculturels de ces discours mediatiques. Les textes reunis dans cet ouvrage font ressortir les contrastes entre le francais et l'allemand, mais egalement entre le francais et d'autres langues.

The papers compiled in the present volume reflect the key theme of the most recent Duo Colloquium sessions – contextuality. The psychological notion of context has been central to translation research for decades, and it has evolved along with the development of translational thought, translation types and tools. The theme of contextuality can be understood at any level, from the geopolitical to the textual, and embraced by both academic and professional considerations of translational and interpreting phenomena. It is centred on context, contexts and/or decontextualisation in translation and interpreting theory and practice from a variety of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. Discussing the above-mentioned notions is the subject of the present volume.

This volume offers a valuable overview of recent research into the semantic aspects of complex words through different theoretical frameworks. Contributions by experts in the field, both morphologists and psycholinguists, identify crucial areas of research, present alternative and complementary approaches to their examination from the current level of knowledge, and indicate perspectives of research into the semantics of complex words by raising important questions that need to be investigated in order to get a more comprehensive picture of the field. Recent decades have seen both extensive and intensive development of various theories of word-formation, however, the semantic aspects of complex words have, with a few notable exceptions, been rather neglected. This volume fills that gap by offering articles written by leading experts in the field from various theoretical backgrounds.

This volume focuses on the connection between participation constellations and identity construction as a specific, yet under-researched problem of text and media linguistics. It assembles empirical analyses of a wide range of corpora, ranging from naturally occurring talk-in-interaction over TV series and social media discourse to the linguistic landscapes of Namibia. In addition to insights into dynamic participation and identity constellations in the respective corpora, the articles develop new theoretical concepts and categories. This volume is of interest to advanced students and scholars in linguistics, media studies and sociology alike.