While the general public may feel uncomfortable discussing sexual assault and violence with neighbors or coworkers, the popularity of Twitter, Snapchat, and a host of other social media platforms suggests that we are not shy about expressing our opinions online. Debates that just a few years ago would have taken place in real life have been relocated online; allowing eager commenters to share their thoughts on guilt or innocence with legions of virtual strangers. Crowdsourcing the Law explores how everyday participants interpret and apply law in the influential online court of public opinion. Engaging a multidisciplinary, case study approach, the book analyzes social media comments about public figures such as Bill Cosby, Brock Turner, and Harvey Weinstein to address ambitious questions like: How are rape myths being challenged, reinforced, and reinvented on social media? What is the promise and peril of the #MeToo movement for transforming the law? And can due process be afforded in the face of an increasingly powerful virtual jury?

Rhetoric and Governance under Trump: Proclamations from the Bullshit Pulpit analyzes the rhetoric of Donald Trump to argue that Trump's deeply illiberal rhetoric, cruel policies, corruption, disruptive foreign policy, and disdain for the rule of law makes him a textbook populist. However, his embrace of mainstream conservative policies and the culture war narratives that come with them made him a rather conventional Republican. Being more plutocrat than populist, Trump had to bridge this fundamental contradiction by employing populist and polarizing rhetoric, alongside fabricated crises, to uphold the veneer of being an anti-status quo politician. Bernd Kaussler, Lars J. Kristiansen, and Jeffrey Delbert argue that, for Trump, bullshit, confrontational politics, and fear has emerged as a vital political strategy. Through an analysis of Trump's first three years in office, the authors find that President Trump governed using a communication strategy that a) denied facts, relied heavily on bullshit, lies, and fabricated counter-narratives; b) attacked news outlets and the opposition to foster identity-based polarization in order to sideline critics and stir up factions for specific political ends; and c) dismissed legitimate criticism of policies and the conduct of the administration and the president himself as "fake news." Kaussler, Kristiansen, and Delbert argue that the repeated use of this strategy, along with a mixture of public complacency and concerted efforts on the part of his own party, has allowed Trump to work toward normalizing these lies and cover-ups throughout his tenure, only further exacerbating the highly polarized and partisan political environment in the United States. Scholars of rhetoric, communication, political science, and media studies will find this book particularly useful.

A state-of-the-art collection of works on institutional discourse across the Spanish-speaking world. This volume focuses on how language is used in the media, politics and the workplace; what discursive identities are constructed; and how interpersonal relations are negotiated.

Bound and Referential Pronouns.- Logical Form and Barriers in Navajo.- Towards a Modular Theory of Coreference.- Head Government in LF-Representations.- Logical Structure in Syntactic Structure: The Case of Hungarian.- In Defense of the Correspondence Hypothesis: Island Effects and Parasitic Constructions in Logical Form.- Construing WH.- Two Properties of Clitics in Clitic-Doubled Constructions.- LF Movement in Iraqi Arabic.- List of Contributors.

Semiotics has had a profound impact on our comprehension of a wide range of phenomena, from how animals signify and communicate, to how people read TV commercials. This series features books on semiotic theory and applications of that theory to understanding media, language, and related subjects. The series publishes scholarly monographs of wide appeal to students and interested non-specialists as well as scholars. AAS is a peer-reviewed series of international scope.

This volume presents research into the syntax and semantics of English deverbal compound adjectives based on the passive and active participles, e.g. pencil-drawn, action-packed, risk-taking, time-consuming. The study, couched in the current Distributed Morphology framework, uses rich linguistic data to investigate the syntactic behaviour of English participial compounds, in particular their ability to occur in typically adjectival and verbal contexts. The main claim of this work is that the verbal syntactic layers are not universally projected in the internal structure of adjectival synthetic compounds, the most important consequence of which is that linguistic formations derived from lexical verbs, even in combination with their arguments, need not be deverbal in the morphosyntactic sense.

Eine Studie zur linguistischen Semantik, geschrieben von herausragenden Experten des Fachgebiets. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics untersucht detailliert die fur die Entwicklung der modernen Semantik und ihrer Schnittstellen zentralen Fragestellungen und Phanomene. Fuhrende Fachexperten beschaftigen sich ausfuhrlich mit konkurrierenden Analysen und Ansatzen, betrachten und bewerten dabei die zu Grunde liegenden Konzepte im Zusammenhang mit verschiedenen Sprachen. Mit diesem massgebenden Referenzwerk erweitern und vertiefen Wissenschaftler und Studenten der linguistischen Semantik sowie Experten aus verwandten Fachbereichen wie Syntaktiker ihr Wissen in dem Fachgebiet und zu den jungsten Entwicklungen. Die Kapitel mit ihren uber 100 Fallstudien sind alphabetisch geordnet und erleichtern so das Auffinden relevanter Inhalte. Dieses Referenzwerk - beschaftigt sich detailliert mit den wichtigsten Entwicklungen in der linguistischen Semantik der letzten Jahrzehnte. - zeigt, wie die Forschung Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in einer Vielzahl von Sprachen erkennt. - prasentiert Studien, die sich auf klar begrenzte empirische Bereiche beziehen und eine wichtige Rolle im theoretischen Diskurs spielen. - erlautert Themenkomplexe anhand beruhmter Beispielsatze. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics ist ein wertvolles Referenzwerk fur Wissenschaftler, Forscher, Lehrpersonal und Studenten der Fachrichtung Linguistik und verwandter Disziplinen.

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.

This volume explores the compositional semantics of clausal complementation, and proposes a theory in which clause-embedding predicates are uniformly "question-oriented", i.e., they take a set of propositions as their semantic argument. This theory opens up new horizons for the study of embedded questions and clausal complementation, and presents a successful case study on how lexical semantics interacts with syntax and compositional semantics. It offers new perspectives on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language, such as the relationship between know-wh and know-that and the nature of attitudinal objects in general. Cross-linguistically, attitude predicates such as know, tell and surprise, can embed both declarative and interrogative clauses. Since these clauses are taken to represent different semantic objects, like propositions and questions, the embedding behavior of these predicates poses puzzles for the compositional semantics of clausal complementation. In addition, the fact that some verbs "select for" a certain complement type poses further challenges for compositional semantics. This volume addresses these issues based on a uniformly question-oriented analysis of attitude predicates, and proposes to derive their variable behaviors from their lexical semantics. The book is essential reading for linguists working on the syntax and semantics of clausal complementation, as well as those interested in the role of lexical semantics in compositional semantics. It will also be valuable for philosophers who are interested in applying linguistic tools to address philosophical problems.

This book addresses an important aspect of how language is used in written communication: the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. This is known as METADISCOURSE. Metadiscourse is a key resource in language, as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways. Writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. This helps the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Metadiscourse is therefore crucial to successful communication. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis. Learning how to use metadiscourse in writing is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book has four main purposes: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic. - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers.

Semiotics, or the study of signs, plays an increasingly important role within marketing as a guide to psychological and social aspects of communication. Jean-Marie Floch provides an introduction to the potential offered by a semiotic approach to a variety of marketing and communication problems or situations. Key semiotic concepts and principles are gradually introduced using real life studies.

'A wide-ranging, erudite and multi-faceted analyses of the fundamental problem of who gets to be counted as human' - Kate Evans Refugee Talk explores cultural responses to the ongoing refugee crisis. Looking at ethical questions and political rhetoric surrounding the refugee experience, the authors uncover the reality behind the fraught discussions taking place today. With an understanding of how to meaningfully negotiate responses through philosophy, media representations, art, activism and literature, the authors insist that a radically different approach is needed, advocating for, along with other reorientations, a new refugee vocabulary as a launching pad for interventions into polarised debates. By centring conversation as a method and ethical practice to engage in the discourses surrounding refugees, Refugee Talk is structured around dialogues with academics, activists, journalists and refugee artists and writers, creating a comprehensive humanities approach that places ethics and aesthetics at its core.

"Caged in Our Own Signs: A Book About Semiotics" is a primer of semiotics, intended for general readers as well as communication majors. The first five chapters introduce the basic constructs, models, assumptions, frameworks for semiotic thinking, and other elements that underpin contemporary semiotics. This volume also provides the reader with semiotic methodology to analyze issues of postmodernism, of text semiotics, and of mass cultural semiotics. This book is written in such a way that the reader may easily apply the semiotic knowledge to the everyday conversation and discourse.

The success of VietnaM's August Revolution of 1945 can be attributed in part to Ho Chi Minh's reconstitutive rhetoric, a form of rhetorical discourse that gave the Vietnamese people a new sense of identification. This reawakened identity in turn influenced a renewed demand for nationalism and independence. This study explores the reconstitutive rhetoric of Ho Chi Minh. In doing so, it advances rhetorical theory founded on nonWestern premises and examines the cultural differences responsible for creating a rhetoric whose focus is nonEurocentric.

Most current thinking on reconstitutive discourse has focused on Western premises. Decaro challenges some of these premises and adds a new dimension to reconstitutive understanding. Ho Chi Minh utilized the cultural heritage of the Vietnamese people as a means of creating his persona--a powerful aspect of his ability to persuade. In understanding Ho Chi Minh's unique form of discourse, it is then possible to see how he was able to unify his country in order to sustain a protracted conflict with the goal of securing national independence.

Nothing will ever replace the active pleasure of telling and listening to stories. Only a live storyteller can impart to a tale that very human touch that brings a gleam of understanding to the listener's eye. The wonderful world of storytelling is revealed in this resource manual for beginners and seasoned performers. Many ideas for finding, writing, adapting and presenting stories are included. Three parts including: Choosing Stories to Tell, Developing Original Ideas and Presenting the Story. Story examples and exercises are given throughout. Each chapter is concluded with discussion questions and activities. A comprehensive textbook for oral interpretation. Sample chapters: What Is Storytelling?: Choosing a Story to Tell; Types of Stories and Where to Tell Them; The Situation, Audience and Location; Analyzing the Story; Ideas from Experience; Creating Character.

Fracking and the Rhetoric of Place investigates the rhetorical strategies of speakers at public hearings on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") in order to understand how places shape and are shaped by citizens as they engage in their democracy. As an important argumentative resource in environmental controversy, the rhetoric of place helps citizens situate themselves within local contexts and raise their voices in times of social conflict. Justin Mando uses rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and corpus analysis to offer scholars of place-based rhetoric and environmental communication a heuristic approach to studying their own sites. This approach reveals that place-based arguments are a ubiquitous rhetorical resource in the dispute over hydraulic fracturing that shapes how the issue is perceived. Pro-frackers and anti-frackers use rhetoric of place in striking ways that reveal their values, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. Place functions as an interface of potential common ground that connects the local to the global, what is here to what is there. Scholars and students of rhetoric, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly interesting.

In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors studies how marginalized groups use rhetorical strategies to craft legitimacy for themselves and how those in positions of power work to maintain their authority. Kinney uses archival research to parse the rhetorical devices employed by Mormon feminist women. The author assumes a pan-historical methodology by examining four unique examples of notable Mormon feminist rhetors that stretch across the 189-year history of this religion: Emmeline B. Wells (1828-1921), Fawn Brodie (1915-1981), Sonia Johnson (1936-present), and Kate Kelly (1980-present). Backed by intensive analysis, the author finds Mormon feminist women take up the ancient rhetorical canons as a heuristic to cultivate a position of authority for themselves: Wells employs arrangement patterns, Brodie engages with memory, Johnson draws upon invention practices, and Kelly applies delivery strategies. Scholars and students of communication, rhetoric, religion, and women's studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian. Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors? The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means.

This book offers an examination of the signature weapon of Barack Obama's presidency: his speeches. It provides an in-depth, analytical look at the words of Barack Obama through the social and cultural contexts that made the content of his speeches timeless. The book draws on the oral tradition of the Black church in order to help explain aspects of the president's speaking style and to establish a direct link between the president's words and actions.

GOAL This is the funniest book I have ever written - and the ambiguity here is deliberate. Much of this book is about deliberate ambiguity, described as unambiguously as possible, so the previous sentence is probably the fIrst, last, and only deliberately ambiguous sentence in the book. Deliberate ambiguity will be shown to underlie much, if not all, of verbal humor. Some of its forms are simple enough to be perceived as deliberately ambiguous on the surface; in others, the ambiguity results from a deep semantic analysis. Deep semantic analysis is the core of this approach to humor. The book is the fIrst ever application of modem linguistic theory to the study of humor and it puts forward a formal semantic theory of verbal humor. The goal of the theory is to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms, for a text to be funny. In other words, if a formal semantic analysis of a text yields a certain set of semantic proptrties which the text possesses, then the text is recognized as a joke. As any modem linguistic theory, this semantic theory of humor attempts to match a natural intuitive ability which the native speaker has, in this particular case, the ability to perceive a text as funny, i. e. , to distinguish a joke from a non-joke.