"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.

Stefano Predelli presents an original account of the relationships between the central semantic notions of meaning and truth. Part One begins with the study of phenomena that have little or nothing to do with the effects of meaning on truth. Predelli warns against what he calls 'the Fallacy of Misplaced Character', and is concerned with sentences such as 'there sometimes exist sentences containing exactly eight words', 'I am now uttering a non-contradictory sentence', or 'I exist'. In Part Two, he moves on to further cases which bear no interesting relations with questions of truth, but which, unlike those in Part One, have important repercussions on questions of meaning. The resulting 'Theory of Bias' is applied to expressive interjections (with a chapter about the logical properties of 'alas'), to instances of register and coarse slang, to honorifics and nicknames, and to derogatory slurs. Part Three draws from the previous two parts, and argues that some notorious semantic problems ought to be approached from the viewpoint of the Theory of Bias. Predelli starts with vocatives, dates, and signatures, and introduces the notion of 'obstinate indexicality', which then guides his solution to Quine's 'Giorgione' puzzle, his version of the demonstrative theory quotation, and his defence of the bare-boned approach to demonstratives and demonstrations.

Rhetoric of Masculinity: Male Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict lends depth and global nuance to discourse associated with the masculinity concept as it brings to bear on males' self-image, role in society, media representations of them, and the gender role stress/conflict experienced when they fail to measure up to social standards associated with what it means to be manly. Even though the concept of masculine gender role stress/conflict has received substantial scholarly attention in psychology, social learning effects of masculinity as it plays out in media warrant further study given that representations offer audiences restrictive male gender roles that may contribute to toxic masculinity. Men and boys are taught to be self-sufficient, to act tough, to be muscular, heterosexual, and to use aggression to resolve conflicts. Such contexts provide restrictive images that can result in self harm and an inflexible social milieu. Scholars and students of communication, rhetoric, and gender studies will find this book particularly interesting.

This book considers how language users express and understand literal and metaphorical spatial meaning not only in language but also through gesture and pointing. Researchers explore the ways in which theoretical developments in language and cognition, new empirical techniques, and new computational facilities have led to a greater understanding of the relationship between physical space and mental space as expressed in human communication.

This book provides a corpus-led analysis of multi-word units (MWUs) in English, specifically fixed pairs of nouns which are linked by a conjunction, such as 'mum and dad', 'bride and groom' and 'law and order'. Crucially, the occurrence pattern of such pairs is dependent on genre, and this book aims to document the structural distribution of some key Linked Noun Groups (LNGs). The author looks at the usage patterns found in a range of poetry and fiction dating from the 17th to 20th century, and also highlights the important role such binomials play in academic English, while acknowledging that they are far less common in casual spoken English. His findings will be highly relevant to students and scholars working in language teaching, stylistics, and language technology (including AI).

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.

The anthology 'Meaning and Analysis' addresses the key topics of H. Paul Grice's philosophy of language, such as rationality, non-natural meaning, communicative actions, conversational implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics distinction and recent debates concerning minimalist versus contextualist semantics.

Discursive Change in Hong Kong: Sociopolitical Dynamics, Metaphor, and One Country, Two Systems is a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of socio-political and discursive change in Hong Kong, a westernized Chinese society once under British rule, now decolonized but without independence, and with a constitution promising universal suffrage sometime in the future. Starting off with interesting and frequently contradictory debates surrounding the discussions on the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China, Jennifer Eagleton provides a stimulating, politically well informed, detailed, and comprehensive "insider" account of many aspects of the press media and official discourse on democracy and political change in Hong Kong as part of "One Country, Two Systems." The book shows how historical, cultural, and identity issues have shaped and molded post-1997 political discourse and how the seemingly dramatic changes in the city since 2020 may not have been that surprising for long-term observers of Hong Kong. By going beyond consideration of the purely linguistic dimension of the selected texts to encompass the larger historical and socio-political context, and incorporating textual, discursive, and metaphoric analysis over time, this book provides a comprehensive examination of Hong Kong political discourse and its constituent themes.

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.

This collection offers a comprehensive account of the development of intercultural communication strategies through Virtual English as a Lingua Franca, reflecting on the ways in which we make pragmatic meaning in today’s technology-informed globalized world. The volume places an emphasis on analyzing transmodal, transsemiotic, and transcultural discourse practices in online spaces, providing a counterpoint to existing ELF research which has leaned toward unpacking formal features of ELF communication in face-to-face interactions. Chapters explore how these practices are characterized and then further sustained via non-verbal semiotic resources, drawing on data from a global range of empirical studies. The book prompts further reflection on readers’ own experiences in online settings and the challenges of VELF while also supplying educators in these contexts with the analytical resources to better bridge the gap between formal and informal learning. Highlighting the dynamic complexity of online intercultural communication in the 21st century, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, language education, digital communication, and intercultural communication.

This is the first cross-linguistic study of imperatives, and commands of other kinds, across the world's languages. It makes a significant and original contribution to the understanding of their morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. The author discusses the role imperatives and commands play in human cognition and how they are deployed in different cultures, and in doing so offers fresh insights on patterns of human interaction and communication. Alexandra Aikhenvald examines the ways of framing commands, or command strategies, in languages that do not have special imperative forms. She analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of positive and negative imperatives and shows how these correlate with categories such as tense, information source, and politeness. She looks at the relation of command pragmatics to cultural practices, assessing, for example, the basis for Margaret Mead's assumption that the harsher the people the more frequently they use imperatives. Professor Aikhenvald covers a wide range of language families, including many relatively neglected examples from North America, Amazonia, and New Guinea. The book is accompanied by illustrations of some conventional command signs. Written and presented with the author's characteristic clarity, this book will be welcomed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. It will appeal to social and cultural anthropologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists.

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.

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.

Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and Composition of the Left Periphery uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages. Liliane Haegeman argues that the dissimilar surface characteristics of these languages (primarily English and Romance, but also Gungbe, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and others) can be explained by universal constraints, and that the same structures apply across the languages. Haegeman focuses on main clause transformations--movement operations that can only take place in main clauses.

Mind, Meaning, and Reality contains fifteen philosophical papers by D. H. Mellor, including a new defense of "success semantics," and an introduction arguing that metaphysics can and need only be justified by doing it and not by a "meta-metaphysics," which it needs no more than physics needs metaphysics. The papers are grouped into three parts. Part I is about how the ways we are disposed to act fixes both what we believe and what we use language to mean. Part II is about what there is: the reality of dispositions; what makes beliefs and sentences true; why there is only one universe; and how social groups, and other things composed of parts, are related to the people and other things that constitute them. Part III is about time, and includes discussions of twentieth century developments in the philosophy of time; why Kant was right about tense, even though he was wrong about time; why forward time travel is trivial and backward time travel impossible; and what gives time its direction.

This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham "in flesh and bone" construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis that sentences and propositions about the future have a definite truth value, without any ensuing commitment to determinism or fatalism. The second topic looks at the problem whether the branching-time model needs to countenance a privileged branch (the so-called Thin Red Line). Finally, the third topic considers the idea that there are so-called soft facts. These would be the subject matter of sentences and propositions verbally about the present or the past, but metaphysically about a later time, and which might change in the future. Overall, the book provides an updated and rigorous idea of the debate about Ockhamism. It gives readers a deeper understanding into this philosophical approach influenced by William of Ockham, characterized by the rejection of the Aristotelian idea that, in order to preserve the contingency of the future, future contingents must be deemed neither true nor false.

This book considers the phenomenon of sluicing. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material (as in Someone saw her, but I don't know who _.). Elliptical constructions of this type are now known to occur widely in the world's languages in some form or another, and create interesting problems for linguistic analysis, involving complex interactions between syntax, semantics and morphology, as well as prosody. The present volume brings together new research by leading experts who analyse sluicing constructions in English, Dutch, Frisian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Malagasy, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Bengali. The book expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar. In addition to the nine chapters dedicated to specific languages, the volume features an introductory chapter and Haj Ross's original (1969) landmark paper on sluicing.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Supporting you with varied features throughout, this intriguing new book provides a foundational understanding of politics and protest before focusing on step-by-step instructions for carrying out analysis on your own. It includes up to date cases, such as analysis of memes about Brexit, Trump and coronavirus, that cater for this quickly moving field.

Interpreting Motion presents an integrated perspective on how language structures constrain concepts of motion and how the world shapes the way motion is linguistically expressed. Natural language allows for efficient communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring a precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of qualitative spatial reasoning. It shows how motion descriptions in language are mapped to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. The authors provide an extensive discussion of prior research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, devoting chapters to the compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion, and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from textual descriptions. The book is written accessibly for a broad scientific audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and those working in fields such as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

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.