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.

Presents Recursive Frame Analysis, a new method of discourse analysis, which is a way of organizing and describing the multiple, recursive levels of meaning that emerge through face-to-face interaction. The primary application of this technique is in the understanding of medical discourse, e.g. pare

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.

Complementation has received a great deal of attention in the past fifteen to twenty years; various approcahes have been used to study it and different groups of complement-taking verbs have been examined. The approach taken here employs analytic techniques which have not been systematically applied before to this group of temporal aspectual verbs. In other works which have concentrated on these same verbs (perlmutter, 1968, 1970 and Newmeyer, 1969a, 1969b) few insights about the semantic properties of the verbs are formalized. In the present study, the various verbs and their complement structures as they appear in surface forms are considered for their associated presuppositions and consequences (entailments). The notions of presup position and consequence are defmed and used so as to take conversational interaction into consideration. This adds considerably to the information that can be obtained about the verbs in question. Furthermore, the analysis of these temporal aspectual verbs leads to a description of their complement structures in terms of 'events', a semantic category found to appropriately characterize the quality of most of these structures. In this analysis, events are described as consisting of several different temporal segments; thus the sentences contained in the complements of these verbs are described as naming events, each containing one or more of several possible temporal segments. The aspectualizers in tum, act as referentials, each referring to one or another of the event-segments named in their complements."

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.

Declamation was a staple of education and cultured literary life in the Roman world over many centuries. This book offers a radical re-evaluation of the genre, its social importance, and its role in the history of the Western self. Ironically, this genre obsessed with "growing up" has been rejected by its own posterity. Erik Gunderson explores the social and psychic dynamics of this refusal within the ancient world as well as beyond. The book is of interest to specialists in classics, rhetoric, queer studies, and psychoanalytic literary criticism.

Oral communication is quite different in its spontaneity and communicative power from textual and visual communication. Culturally-bounded expectations of ways of speaking and individual creativity provide the spark that can ignite revolution or calm the soul. This book explores, from a cross-cultural perspective, the centrality of orality in the ideological processes that dominate public discourse, providing a counterbalance to the debates that foreground literacy and the power of written communication.

Speech practices as discursive practices for meaning-making across domains, genres, and social groups is an under-researched, highly complex field of sociolinguistics. This field has gained momentum after innovative studies of adolescents and young adults with mixed ethnic and language backgrounds revealed that they "cross" language and dialectal or vernacular borders to construct their own hybrid discursive identities. The focus in this volume is on the diversity of emerging hybridizing speech practices through contact with English, predominantly in Europe. Contributions to this collected volume originate from the DFG funded conference on language contact in times of globalization (LCTG4) and from members of the editor's funded research group "Discursive Multilingualism".

The volume focuses on the interaction of different levels of linguistic analysis (syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and the interfaces between them, on the convergence of different theoretical models in explaining linguistic phenomena, and on recent interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic analysis. Its theoretical importance lies in bringing out and highlighting some of the common trends and directions found in recent theoretical frameworks which focus on themes traditionally downplayed by mainstream 20th century linguistics. It further familiarizes the reader with the methodology used in such frameworks and shows how methodology developed in different theoretical perspectives can often converge in yielding similar results. While representing different traditions, all papers in this volume assume a necessity for the study of language to be paired with the study of cognition and for linguistics to develop more substantive links to other disciplines, thereby creating converging trends into the new century. The structure of this volume reflects this assumption along a cline of theoretical models and methodologies, starting from those that view language as part of cognition and ending with those that consider the language faculty to be distinct from general cognition. Thus the volume is divided into five parts: (I) relaxing level boundaries, (II) focusing on level interaction, (III) drawing on different theories, (IV) exploring field interaction, and (V) interdisciplinary perspectives on modularity. The volume is of particular relevance to scholars and students who are interested in an in-depth overview of 20th century linguistics outside/beyond the generative paradigm, and in exploring the development of 20th century legacy into current work.

Increasingly, rhetorical scholars are using fieldwork and other ethnographic, performance, and qualitative methods to access, document, and analyze forms of everyday in situ rhetoric rather than using already documented texts. In this book, the authors argue that participatory critical rhetoric, as an approach to in situ rhetoric, is a theoretically, methodologically, and praxiologically robust approach to critical rhetorical studies. This book addresses how participatory critical rhetoric furthers understanding of the significant role that rhetoric plays in everyday life through expanding the archive of rhetorical practices and texts, emplacing rhetorical critics in direct conversation with rhetors and audiences at the moment of rhetorical invention, and highlighting marginalized voices that might otherwise go unnoticed. This book organizes the theoretical and methodological foundations of participatory critical rhetoric through four vectors that enhance conventional rhetorical approaches: 1) the political commitments of the critic; 2) rhetorical reflexivity and the role of the embodied critic; 3) emplaced rhetoric and the interplay between the field, text, and context; and 4) multiperspectival judgment that is informed by direct participation with rhetors and audiences. In addition to laying the groundwork and advocating for the approach, Participatory Critical Rhetoric also offers significant contributions to rhetorical theory and criticism more broadly by revisiting the field's understanding of core topics such as role of the critic, text/context, audience, rhetorical effect, and the purpose of criticism. Further, it enhances theoretical conversations about material rhetoric, place/space, affect, intersectional rhetoric, embodiment, and rhetorical reflexivity.

This compilation of invited contributions, gathering an international collection of cognitive and functional linguists, offers an outline of original empirical work carried out in grounding theory. Grounding is a central notion in cognitive grammar that addresses the linking of semantic content to contextual factors that constitute the subjective ground (or situation of speech). The volume illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to constructions establishing deixis and reference. It proposes a double focus on nominal and clausal grounding, as well as on ways of integrating analyses across these domains.

The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, by Dalia Gavriely-Nuri opens a window to how Israelis talk, write, and think about war. In the post-World War II period, Israel has taken part in eight wars, more than almost any other western democracy. In addition to "official" wars, Israel has experienced two Intifadas and repetitive long periods of bombings of its border-settlements. This book argues that such an intensive involvement in military actions provides a natural arena for a uniquely fertile war discourse. Gavriely-Nuri identifies a special war discourse: a "war-normalizing discourse" (WND). WND as a set of linguistic, discursive, and cultural devices aims at blurring the anomalous character of war by transforming it into an event perceived as "natural"- a "normal" part of life. Moreover, the WND is served as a unique rhetorical compass and illuminates one basic organizing principle underlying the Israeli war discourse. WND has been in use throughout Israel's history, in periods of war as well as in periods of relative peace. It has become a fundamental part of the Israeli public discourse concerning both peace and war and an integral part of Israeli identity. The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, is an essential investigation into how nations use rhetoric and tactical discourse to normalize their conflicts.

This book aims at bridging language research and language teaching and contains four sections. It opens with two papers which relate language to literature: one exploring childlike language, the second investigating the distinction between literary and non-literary text categorization principles. Next are the papers on multicultural and sociolinguistic topics, including a paper on English as an international language, and two papers on the perception of bilingualism in education. The third thematic section explores semantics, with two papers on prefixes and one on metaphor. The final thematic section is dedicated to syntax, with one paper on complex predicates, one on syntactic complexity in spontaneous spoken language and one of Croatian null and overt subject pronouns.

This book argues that a basic grasp of philosophy and logic can produce written and spoken material that is both grammatically correct and powerful. The author analyses errors in grammar, word choice, phrasing and sentences that even the finest writers can fail to notice; concentrating on subtle missteps and errors that can make the difference between good and excellent prose. Each chapter addresses how common words and long-established grammatical rules are often misused or ignored altogether - including such common words as 'interesting', 'possible', and 'apparent'. By tackling language in this way, the author provides an illuminating and practical stylistic guide that will interest students and scholars of grammar and philosophy, as well as readers looking to improve their technical writing skills.

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.

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.

Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in certain ways, to form meaningful complex expressions. This raises questions about what meanings are, how they can be combined, and what kinds of meanings lexical items can have. According to Pietroski, meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions. He argues that meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. More specifically, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predicates) that are massively conjunctive, while lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch concepts that are monadic or dyadic. This allows for polysemy, since a lexical item can be linked to an address that is shared by a family of fetchable concepts. But the posited combinatorial operations are limited and limiting. They impose severe restrictions on which concepts can be fetched for purposes of semantic composition. Correspondingly, Pietroski argues that in lexicalization, available representations are often used to introduce concepts that can be combined via the relevant operations.

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.

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.

No one knows more about comedy than Steve Allen. For more than five decades as a writer, performer, and keen observer of the social scene, he has looked into every aspect of who's funny, what's funny, and why. Allen shares his discoveries in How to Be Funny, the book designed to help everyone develop their special talent for funniness.
Now reissued in paperback, How to Be Funny covers all the basics, including joke telling, ad-libbing, writing humorously, performing comedy, emceeing, and much more. Allen takes you inside the world of comedy, from the early writings of Mark Twain, to the more contemporary work of Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Maher. Allen even provides homework assignments for the budding comic
Yet How to Be Funny is far more than just a book for aspiring comedians it will help anyone who wants to be a more amusing conversationalist, a more effective public speaker, and everyone who just wants to be the life of the party.

This textbook provides a survey of the Speech and Communication Studies areas of Communication, focusing on human communication through the transactional model of communication. Interpersonal Communication chapters constitute the largest portion of the book, with the Public Speaking chapters the next largest block, followed by the Intercultural and Small Group/Organizational Communication chapters. Homework and/or classroom exercises are provided in nearly every chapter to enable students to learn the related skills and/or reinforce their knowledge. There is a unique money talk section in the Relationship Communication chapter, an in-depth problem-solving exercise with sample content information in the Small Group/Organizational Communication chapter, an overview of controversial Intercultural topics in the Intercultural Communication chapter that can be optional reading, and a step-by-step process for learning how to write thesis sentences in one of the Public Speaking chapters. In addition, instructions for and samples of seven different types of speeches are provided, as well as evaluation forms, to give instructors suitable choices.

Do you use language corpora in your research or study, but find that you struggle with statistics? This practical introduction will equip you to understand the key principles of statistical thinking and apply these concepts to your own research, without the need for prior statistical knowledge. The book gives step-by-step guidance through the process of statistical analysis and provides multiple examples of how statistical techniques can be used to analyse and visualise linguistic data. It also includes a useful selection of discussion questions and exercises which you can use to check your understanding. The book comes with a Companion website, which provides additional materials (answers to exercises, datasets, advanced materials, teaching slides etc.) and Lancaster Stats Tools online (http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/stats), a free click-and-analyse statistical tool for easy calculation of the statistical measures discussed in the book.

Ancient Rome’s original archconservative. M. Porcius Cato (234–149 BC), one of the best-known figures of the middle Roman Republic, remains legendary for his political and military career, especially his staunch opposition to Carthage; his modest way of life; his integrity of character and austere morality; his literary works, composed in a style at once sophisticated and down-to-earth; his pithy sayings; and his drive to define and to champion Roman national character and traditions in the face of challenges from Greek culture. Cato’s legend derived to no small degree from his own distinctive and compelling self-presentation, which established a model later developed and elaborated by Cicero and by subsequent literary and historical authors for centuries to come. This volume and its companion (LCL 552) join the Loeb edition of Cato’s only extant work, On Agriculture (LCL 283), by supplying all testimonia about, and all fragments by or attributed to Cato. Highlights are Origines, the first historical work attested in Latin, a history of Rome from its founding to the onset of the first Punic War, as well as the origins of major Italian cities; his orations, regarded as the beginning of Roman oratory; To His Son Marcus, which inaugurated a Roman tradition of didactic pieces addressed by fathers to their sons; Military Matters; the Poem on Morals; letters; commentaries on civil law; and memorable sayings.