This volume explores the discursive nature of post-1989 social change in Central and Eastern Europe. Through a set of national case studies, the construction of post-communist transformation is explored from the point of view of accelerating and unique dynamics of linguistic and discursive practices.

The fourth edition of this dynamic skills-based introduction to personal communication includes new content on virtual communication scenarios, inclusive language, conflict resolution, and leadership development Concise, affordable, and incredibly friendly in tone, this book makes communication natural and fun.

In Words and Meaning in Metasemantics, Juan Jose Colomina-Alminana puts forward a new way of understanding the linguistic and philosophical foundations of the study of language: the Interactive Theory. This theory states that the meaning of our sentences is much more than the truth values their components clauses carry. Since language is a human artifact, Words and Meaning in Metasemantics also explains the role that our reasons, dispositions, inferences, acts, and awareness have in the content-fixing of the sentences speakers employ to refer to the world in which they belong.

Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li's book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the variation of referential intuitions across different cultures, as well as the developmental trajectory and the underlying causes of the observed cultural differences. What she finds is that the cultural patterns of referential intuitions are already in place around age seven, and the differences are largely attributable to the distinct perspective-taking strategies favoured by easterners and westerners, rather than the moral valence of actions involved in the experimental materials. These results are taken to better support referential pluralism (in particular, the ambiguous view) than referential monism. By undertaking this fascinating research, Li's book provides new insights into the cognitive mechanism underlying people's referential usage of names. It will be valuable to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy of language and experimental philosophy, and in particular, to those who research into semantic intuitions and theories of reference.

With broad appeal, this innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Ambitious in scope, this book situates reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature.

This volume aims to provide information about and interpretations of the concept of evidentiality lexically realized with certain verbs and applied to the genre of medical posters. More specifically, issues relating to how knowledge is conveyed through language will be discussed and how evidence for such knowledge is linguistically transmitted in a set of specialised texts. This study uses some of the possibilities offered by electronic corpora in conjunction with concordance tools, which allow quantitative analysis. Thanks to this quantitative analysis, followed by a qualitative interpretation of the findings, we could detect the pragmatic function these evidential items have in contextual use, allowing us to see that evidentiality in medical discourse is intended in a slightly different way from general discourse.

In this original and highly accomplished study, first published in 1994, Marie Maclean studies the writings of social rebels and explores the relationship between their personal narratives and illegitimacy. The case studies which Maclean examines fall into four groups: those which stress alternative family structures and 'female genealogies' those which pair female illegitimacy and revolution those which question the deliberate refusal of the name of the father by the legitimate those which study the revenge of genius on the society which excludes it Skilfully interweaving feminist theory, French literary criticism, social and cultural history, deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, Maclean traces the place of these personal narratives of illegitimacy in history and their use in theory, from Elizabeth I to Freud, Sartre and Derrida. The Name of the Mother will be of vital interest and importance to any student of critical theory, feminist philosophy, French or cultural studies.

Semantics of Chinese Questions is the first major study of Chinese questions, especially wh-questions, within the framework of Alternative Semantics. It takes an interface approach to study the syntax, semantics, and phonology of questions and proposes a phonological scope-marking strategy in Chinese questions, based upon experimental data. It also incorporates historical linguistic data regarding the grammaticalization of sentence-final particles such as -ne and -ma to study the formal diachronic semantics of questions. Primarily suitable for scholars in the field of Chinese linguistics, this book makes new theoretical contributions to the study of questions.

The volume examines the discourse-based critique of coloniality. It brings together an extensive interdisciplinary dialogue that reveals what different research fields - such as sociology of language, social psychology, history and political science, among others - have to say about discourse criticism and de/coloniality. In doing so, it also invites a critique of critical thinking, acknowledging the relevance of dissonant voices that arise from this debate. The essays in this volume discuss possibilities to decolonize discursive studies without losing sight of its contradictions. The book delves into how one can, as an intellectual who enjoys the privileges of coloniality in academic environments of the Global North, deal with the limitations and paradox of a radical critique through discourse. It discusses how ideas, entrenched in privilege, can be extracted, shared and applied while ensuring the radicality of their local contextualization. These ideas then must not only make sense within themselves but also resonate with other contexts, readings and peoples, in the South, without repeating the mistakes of hermetic scholarly lexicons. A key reading on decoloniality, critical thinking, methodologies, ideas, ideologies, language and critical discourse analysis, this volume will be of immense interest to scholar and researchers of language and literature, political science, the social sciences and Global South Studies.

This book challenges the current consensus on the analysis of wh-questions and reflexives from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. An integrated approach incorporating analyses of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge is proposed. It argues that the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions and reflexives are not purely syntactic in nature but are regulated by principles operating at the syntax-semantics interface. Two general principles underlying our knowledge of language and cognition are proposed in this work. One is the Principle of Locality, and the other is the Principle of Prominence. It shows that although wh-quantification and reflexivization belong to two different domains of study in generative grammar, their derivation and interpretation are basically constrained by the complex interaction between prominence and locality in grammar. The first part of the book discusses how wh-questions are formed and interpreted in Chinese and English and shows that the formation and interpretation of wh-questions are constrained by the interaction between prominence and locality. It is shown that in wh-interpretation prominence is used to define the set generators so as to licence other wh-words in the pair-list reading in multiple wh-questions. It also discusses wh-island effects in English and Chinese, and unlike previous claims made in the literature (cf. Huang 1982a, 1982b), it argues that the so-called wh-island effects in English are also observed in Chinese. The second part of the book investigates the role that prominence and locality play in reflexive binding. It is shown that in reflexive binding, the binding domain of the reflexive is defined by prominence. It proposes a unified account for both the noncontrastive compound reflexive and the bare reflexive in Chinese and shows that they are constrained by the same reflexive binding condition proposed in this work, though they employ different definitions of the most prominent NPs to determine their binding domains. Prominence and Locality in Grammar: The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Quesitons and Reflexives is an important theoretical contribution to the syntax-semantics interface studies and can serve as a valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the field of Chinese, linguistics, and cognitive science.

One prominent function of natural language is to convey information. One peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly, but in a structured way, with information structuring formally recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an important parameter to determine how focus is structured in Cantonese. This book is aimed at advanced graduate students, researchers, and scholars working on Chinese linguistics, syntax and semantics, and comparative dialectal grammar.

This volume is a series of nine (9) contributions to our understanding of relativization strategies in eleven (11) languages of Cameroon spread into the seven (7) sub-branches of the Niger-Congo phylum: Ekoid, Mambiloid, Mamfe, Mbam, Narrow Bantu, Wide Grassfields, Yemne-Kimbi. As a productive strategy in the world's languages, and considering the evidence that the African language are either under-described, poorly described or not described at all, investigations into the forms, structures and functions of relative clauses and relativization start filling the gap of the absence of analytical descriptive works on the topic. The papers dwelt on the construction of relative clauses, their structure and constraints, their morphosyntactic properties, how they are used to give prominence to topics or participants that are thematic in a given discourse, and to mark the boundaries of units of text, and the formal characteristics of restrictive relative clause constructions. The findings generated so far constitute an endless tank for many fields of hyphenated linguistics including general linguistics, cognitive linguist, applied psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics and pragmatics.

This work supplies a concrete definition of Corporate Public Discourse, an idea that has always lacked true character. It explores how leading corporations use their own special language to define their cultures. The authors take this language, once considered a mere embellishment of speech, and use it to explore the inner workings of world-renowned organizations. This book bridges the gap between organizational studies and linguistics by analysing the communications of today's top companies. The book describes a weekly Saturday morning meeting at Wal-Mart, evaluates IBM's commitment to success, and looks into the social role of high-calibre CEOs. Broken into seven parts, including management, media, and analysis, the study efficiently frames the importance of corporate communication.

This book is a collection of papers by leading researchers in computational semantics. It presents a state-of-the-art overview of recent and current research in computational semantics, including descriptions of new methods for constructing and improving resources for semantic computation, such as WordNet, VerbNet, and semantically annotated corpora. It also presents new statistical methods in semantic computation, such as the application of distributional semantics in the compositional calculation of sentence meanings. Computing the meaning of sentences, texts, and spoken or texted dialogue is the ultimate challenge in natural language processing, and the key to a wide range of exciting applications. The breadth and depth of coverage of this book makes it suitable as a reference and overview of the state of the field for researchers in Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Intelligence. "

The concept of polarization has become an important topic of interest in politics, society, and discourse around the world today. In the European Union (EU), polarizing rhetoric has driven politics into divided camps on issues ranging from immigration to economic integration. In the United States, polarization has become a universal buzzword, and significant research has been done on it as a political and sociological phenomenon. But there has been little scholarly work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon since the late 1970s. At the same time, holes remain in contemporary rhetorical theory regarding the concept of the orator. In short, the discipline lacks a clearly defined category to deal with strategic communication by collective entities such as social and political movements. This work fills both gaps at once. It focuses on polarization as a rhetorical strategy that seeks to create division and solidarity in audiences. In doing so, it establishes and develops new theoretical categories for contemporary rhetoric, updates and refines existing work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon, and illustrates the utility of new concepts by providing a case study involving the tea party network in the United States.

This book argues that there is a common cognitive mechanism underlying all indexical thoughts, in spite of their seeming diversity. Indexical thoughts are mental representations, such as beliefs and desires. They represent items from a thinker's point of view or her cognitive perspective. We typically express them by means of sentences containing linguistic expressions such as 'this (F)' or 'that (F)', adverbs like 'here', 'now', and 'today', and the personal pronoun 'I'. While generally agreeing that representing the world from a thinker's cognitive perspective is a key feature of indexical thoughts, philosophers disagree as to whether a thinker's cognitive perspective can be captured and rationalized by semantic content and, if so, what kind of content this is. This book surveys competing views and then advances its own positive account. Ultimately, it argues that a thinker's cognitive perspective - or her indexical point of view - is to be explained in terms of the content that is believed and asserted as the only kind of content that there is which thereby serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. The Indexical Point of View will be of interest to philosophers of mind and language, linguists, and cognitive scientists.

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume's forty-one original chapters, written by many of today's leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

The primary objective of this study is to propose a comparative analysis of the political TV interview with reference to two distinct approaches: the theory of discourse (dialogue) games (Carlson 1983), an extension of game-theoretical semantics (GTS) as proposed by Jaakko Hintikka, specifically his strategic paradigm (1973, 1979, 2000), and the strategic perspective adopted by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff (1991, 2010 for business games with roots in the mathematical theory of games). Text-forming strategies utilised by the selected British and Polish political figures have been presented and the strategic repertoire of politicians have been systematised following the five master strategies of: cooperation, co-opetition, conflict/competition, manipulation and persuasion.

Provides ample evidence to show that persuasive discourse and rudimentary rhetorical techniques already existed in ancient China e.g. public speeches in Xia dynasty, oracle bone inscriptions in Shang dynasty, public debates about government policies in Han dynasty Explains how the Mandate of Heaven was inscribed at the core of Chinese rhetoric and has guided Chinese thoughts and expressions for centuries Demonstrates Chinese rhetorical wisdom by extracting many concepts and terms related to language expression, persuasive speech, morality and virtue, life and philosophy and so on from great Chinese literary works Many surprising facts are found by the author and revealed in the book

This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns. Drawing on the PhraseoRom international project on the phraseology of contemporary novels, the contributed chapters combine literary studies with corpus linguistics to analyse fantasy, romance, crime, historical and science fiction in French and English. The authors offer new insights into long-standing debates on genre distinction and the hybridization of genres by deploying a new, interdisciplinary methodology. Sitting at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a firm grounding in the digital humanities, this book will be of particular relevance to literary scholars, corpus stylists, contrastivists and lexicologists, as well as general readers with an interest in twentieth-century genre fiction.

This book provides a research-driven discussion of how the epistemic potential of multilingual writing strategies can be conceptualized, investigated, and leveraged in higher education. Research results are reported from an intervention study in two discipline-specific, writing-intensive HE content courses. The study triangulates survey data with think-aloud & screen-recording data and with product data in a pre/post design. Based on the research findings, the book details a multilingual teaching framework in which a translanguaging approach is enhanced with instructional practices from translation training.