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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour.

The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems.

The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

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.

This two-volume collection showcases a wide range of modern approaches to the philosophical study of language. Contributions illustrate how these strands of research are interconnected and show the importance of such a broad outlook. The aim is to throw light upon some of the key questions in language and communication and also to inspire, inform, and integrate a community of researchers in philosophical linguistics. Volume one concentrates on fundamental theoretical topics. This means considering vital questions about what languages are and how they relate to reality, and describing some of the key areas of thought in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Contributors also discuss how philosophy influences related fields such as translation, pragmatics, and argumentation.