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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > General
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.
'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.
This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating
the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining
theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of
alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the
cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In
a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows
that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape
the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a
fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in
semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.
A Rhetoric of Ruins contributes to an interdisciplinary
conversation about the role of wrecked and abandoned places in
modern life. Topics in this book stretch from retro- and post-human
futures to a Jeremiadic analysis of the role of ruins in American
presidential discourse. From that foundation, A Rhetoric of Ruins
employs hauntology to visit a California ghost-town,
psychogeography to confront Detroit ruins, heterochrony to survey
Pennsylvania's once (and future) Graffiti Highway, an expanded
articulation of heterotopia to explore the pleasurable
contamination of Chernobyl, and an evening in Turkmenistan's
Doorway to Hell that stretches across time from Homer's Iliad to
Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally." Written to engage scholars and
students of communication studies, cultural geography,
anthropology, landscape studies, performance studies, public
memory, urban studies, and tourism studies, A Rhetoric of Ruins is
a conceptually rich and vividly written account of how broken and
derelict places help us manage our fears in the modern era.
Drawing ideas from the works of George Herbert Mead, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and the American pragmaticism philosophers,
Dialogues, Dramas, and Emotions: Essays in Interactionist Sociology
argues that the verbal interactions of human agents are
characterized by addresses and rejoinders, which Bakhtin called
dialogues. These moves conform to what Burke called dramatism.
Robert Perinbanayagam uses examples both from dramatic literature
and everyday conversations to demonstrate how everyday interactions
are inescapably dramas, conducted through the use of dialogues in
order to promote mutual understanding. Along with analyzing the
dialogues themselves, the author also examines what comes to play
in these interactions and shows the various consequences of these
emotionalities in ongoing human relationships.
Brian Loar (1939-2014) was an eminent and highly respected
philosopher of mind and language. He was at the forefront of
several different field-defining debates between the 1970s and the
2000s-from his earliest work on reducing semantics to psychology,
through debates about reference, functionalism, externalism, and
the nature of intentionality, to his most enduringly influential
work on the explanatory gap between consciousness and neurons. Loar
is widely credited with having developed the most comprehensive
functionalist account of certain aspects of the mind, and his
'phenomenal content strategy' is arguably one of the most
significant developments on the ancient mind/body problem. This
volume of essays honours the entirety of Loar's wide-ranging
philosophical career. It features sixteen original essays from
influential figures in the fields of philosophy of language and
philosophy of mind, including those who worked with and were taught
by Loar. The essays are divided into three thematic sections
covering Loar's work in philosophy of language, especially the
relations between semantics and psychology (1970s-80s), on content
in the philosophy of mind (1980s-90s), and on the metaphysics of
intentionality and consciousness (1990s and beyond). Taken
together, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the leading
minds of the latter-20th century, and a timely reflection on Loar's
enduring influence on the philosophy of mind and language.
This volume aims to showcase research as to the study of
perspectivization in English language academic articles in the
field of tourism. A key aspect of this study is the way in which
writers elaborate and organize information following their
editorial traditions. Interestingly, complete scientific articles
in the field have not received much scholarly attention. A first
task, therefore, that this book undertakes is the characterization
of the article in terms of unctional stages, according to a
framework of functional linguistics. The methodology also involves
the use of corpus linguistics tools to analyze linguistic stance
devices and to draw data for their illustration. These linguistic
stance strategies are examined by genre stage to highlight possible
variation in these stages. The results of this research hopefully
would impact on the study of specialized English for tourism and on
the design of new teaching materials.
This volume explores the emergent process of developing
translanguaging repertoires among teacher educators, pre- and
in-service teachers in different U.S. teacher education contexts.
Its empirically based chapters adopt various qualitative methods to
unpack the opportunities and challenges and provide implications
for critical teacher education. It will be of interest to
researchers and teachers in bilingual education, TESOL and social
justice.
The main purpose of the book is to explore whether native
speakerism has an influence on Polish language schools, using the
explanatory mixed-methods design. The findings show that the
ideology is present in Poland, but it is manifested in complex and
subtle ways. Most prominent findings indicate a wage gap between
teachers considered native speakers and their Polish counterparts,
and the discrepancy between the levels of education required of the
two groups, with native speakers often being employed without
necessary qualifications. Finally, the findings suggest that Polish
teacher education programmes should expose budding teachers to
relevant literature regarding native speakerism and other issues
related to native and non-native speaker status so that they can
critically examine them.
Fringe Rhetorics: Conspiracy Theories and the Paranormal identifies
these rhetorical similarities of conspiracy theories and paranormal
accounts by delving into rhetorical, psychosocial, and political
science research. Identifying something as "fringe" indicates its
proximal placement within accepted norms of contemporary society.
Both conspiracy theories and paranormal accounts dwell on the
fringes and both use surprisingly similar persuasive techniques.
Using elements of the Aristotelian canon as well as Oswald's
strengthening and weakening strategies, this book establishes a
pattern for the analysis of fringe rhetorics. It also applies this
pattern through rhetorical analyses of several documentaries and
provides suggestions for countering fringe arguments.
This volume presents the results of the international symposium
Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's
contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half
of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting
important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of
language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated
items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's
enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two
contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including
material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles
cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more
theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign
language teaching and the computational application of the insights
about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an
important role. The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and
relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research
from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical
linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and
foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary
view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.
Among the most prolifically treated topics in grammaticalization
approaches to semantic change is the development of periphrastic
past constructions, particularly the 'have'-perfects in Romance and
other Indo-European languages. This issue is an intriguing one for
language researchers since it offers the opportunity to observe
language change both as an incipient process that involves the
transition of some lexical element into a more 'grammatical' role
as well as a process of semantic generalization without the
necessity of overt structural reorganization. This book explores
the development of the periphrastic past (or preterito perfecto
compuesto) in Spanish, with special attention to its
cross-dialectal distribution vis-a-vis the simple perfective past
(or preterito), and assumes a multi-disciplinary perspective,
drawing on insights from semantic and pragmatic as well as
sociolinguistic approaches to language change. The resulting
proposals, developed on the basis of spoken language data from
cross-dialectal samples of Spanish, address the nature of language
change and the variable forces that shape it.
This book defends a version of linguistic idealism, the thesis that
the world is a product of language. In the course of defending this
radical thesis, Gaskin addresses a wide range of topics in
contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical
logic, and syntax theory. Starting from the context and
compositionality principles, and the idea of a systematic theory of
meaning in the Tarski-Davidson tradition, Gaskin argues that the
sentence is the primary unit of linguistic meaning, and that the
main aspects of meaning, sense and reference, are themselves
theoretical posits. Ontology, which is correlative with reference,
emerges as language-driven. This linguistic idealism is combined
with a realism that accepts the objectivity of science, and it is
accordingly distinguished from empirical pragmatism. Gaskin
contends that there is a basic metaphysical level at which
everything is expressible in language; but the vindication of
linguistic idealism is nuanced inasmuch as there is also a derived
level, asymmetrically dependant on the basic level, at which
reality can break free of language and reach into the realms of the
unnameable and indescribable. Language and World will be of
interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics,
philosophy of language, and linguistics.
By asking internationally respected scholars from a range of traditions in discourse studies to respond to the same interview material, this book reveals key differences in methodology and theoretical perspective. The use of interviews to explore attitudes towards race allow contributors to bring up sensitive issues regarding the development and interpretation of interviews on controversial topics.
The study offers an analysis of three grammatical constructions
specifically employed in direct performance of directive speech
acts in Polish. Constructions of this type have not yet been widely
analyzed, as research pertaining to the relation between the
grammatical structure of an utterance and its pragmatic effects has
focused mainly on indirect speech acts. The study combines a
discussion of a wide range of corpus examples with a detailed
analysis of hand-picked examples situated in specific contexts. The
aim is to show how the grammatical make-up of a construction
functions with contextual factors to bring about a range of
pragmatic effects pertaining to the speakers' interaction and their
interpersonal relation. The framework of the study is the theory of
cognitive grammar.
This volume explores the interpretation of indefinites and the
constraints on their distribution by paying particular attention to
key issues in the interface between syntax and semantics: the
relation between the semantic properties of indefinite determiners
and the denotation of indefinite DPs, their scope, and their
behaviour in generic and conditional sentences. Examples come from
French, other Romance languages and English. Central to the
proposed analyses is a distinction between two types of entities,
individualized entities and amounts. Weak indefinites are analyzed
as existential generalized quantifiers over amounts and strong
indefinites as either Skolem terms or generalized quantifiers over
individualized entities. The up-to-date review of the literature
and the new falsifiable proposals contained in this book will be of
particular interest to linguistics students and scholars interested
in the cross-linguistic semantics of indefinites.
This book, which emerges in the context of the European research
network LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence), is
concerned with European multilingualism both as a political concept
and as a social reality. It features cutting-edge studies by
linguists and anthropologists who perceive multilingualism as a
discursive phenomenon which can be revealed and analyzed through
empirical fieldwork. The book presents a fresh perspective of
European multilingualism as it takes the reader through key themes
of social consciousness - identity, policy, education, economy -
and relevant societal levels of organization (European, national,
regional). With its distinct focus on post-national society caught
in unifying as well as diversifying socio-political currents, the
volume problematizes emerging contradictions inherent in the idea
of a Europe beyond the nation state -between speech minorities and
majorities, economic realities, or socio-political ideologies.
In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in
unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be
placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the
first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and
functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in
conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative
with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the
present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials
in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar
to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates
whether different medial positions are associated with distinct
discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or
different focus meanings.
This volume highlights the dynamic nature of the field of English
Linguistics and features selected contributions from the 8th
Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of
Contemporary English. The contributions comprise studies (i) that
focus on the structure of linguistic systems (or subsystems) or the
internal structure of specific construction types, (ii) that take
an interest in variation at all linguistic levels, or (iii) that
explore what linguistic findings can tell us about human cognition
in general, and language processing in particular. All chapters
represent state-of-the-art research that relies on rigorous
quantitative and qualitative analysis and that will inform current
and future linguistic practice and theory building.
This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms and antonyms in text.
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