Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson's basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation.

Dieser Sammelband befasst sich mit dem bislang wenig beachteten Forschungsfeld der Fremdsprachenpragmatik. Er thematisiert sprachliche und didaktische Aspekte der pragmatischen Kompetenz im schulischen Fremdsprachenunterricht und eroertert sie theorie- und forschungsbezogen. Die Beitrage sind an der Schnittstelle von Linguistik und Fremdsprachendidaktik verortet und diskutieren Vermittlungsaspekte und Erwerbsmechanismen, Unterrichtspraktiken und Lehrmaterialien, Bewertungsmoeglichkeiten, Wissen und Einstellungen von Lehrkraften sowie Vorschlage fur die Lehrkraftebildung. Der Band beleuchtet sowohl die Primar- als auch die Sekundarstufe (inklusive Foerderbedarfe) und leistet damit einen fundamentalen Beitrag zur Foerderung kommunikativer Kompetenzen im schulischen Fremdsprachenunterricht.

The Corruption of Ethos in Fortress America: Billionaires, Bureaucrats, and Body Slams argues that authoritarian strains of U.S. governance violate the idea of ethos in its ancient, collectivist sense. Christopher Carter posits that this corrupts the cultural "dwelling place" through public relations strategies, policies on race and immigration, and a general disregard for environmental concerns. Donald Trump's presidency provides a signal instance of the problem, refashioning the dwelling place as a fortress while promoting sweeping forms of exclusion and appealing to power for power's sake. Carter's analysis shows that, emboldened by the purported flexibility of truth, Trump's authoritarian rhetoric underwrites unrestrained policing, militarized borders, populist nationalism, and relentless assaults on investigative journalism. These trends bode ill for human rights and critical education as well as progressive social movements and the forms of life they entail. Worse yet, the corruption of ethos threatens life in general by privileging corporate prerogatives over ecological attunement. In response to those tendencies, Carter highlights modes of activism that merge antiracist and labor rhetoric to offer a more fluid, unpredictably emergent vision of social space, allying with ecofeminism in ways that make that vision durable. Scholars of rhetoric, political science, history, ecology, race studies, and American studies will find this book particularly useful.

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.

In North America, Africa, and across the globe, many societies are deeply divided along racial, ethnic, political, or religious lines as a result of violent/oppressive histories. Bridging such divides requires symbolic action that transcends, reframes, redeems, and repairs-often drawing upon resources of faith. Speaking to Reconciliation showcases this tradition through speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Ireland's President Mary McAleese, and others. Some of these speeches set forth principles or spiritual practices of reconciliation. Others acknowledge injustice, make apologies for historical wrongs, call for reparations, or commend the power of forgiveness. Speaking to Reconciliation presents a conceptual framework for doing analysis and critique of reconciliation discourse and applies this framework in introductions to the speeches, offering readers a springboard for further study and, potentially, inspiration to promote justice and reconciliation in their own spheres.

This accessible introduction to formal, and especially Montague, semantics within a linguistic framework, presupposes no previous background in logic, but takes students step-by-step from simple predicate/argument structures and their interpretation to Montague's intentional logic.

In North America, Africa, and across the globe, many societies are deeply divided along racial, ethnic, political, or religious lines as a result of violent/oppressive histories. Bridging such divides requires symbolic action that transcends, reframes, redeems, and repairs-often drawing upon resources of faith. Speaking to Reconciliation showcases this tradition through speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Ireland's President Mary McAleese, and others. Some of these speeches set forth principles or spiritual practices of reconciliation. Others acknowledge injustice, make apologies for historical wrongs, call for reparations, or commend the power of forgiveness. Speaking to Reconciliation presents a conceptual framework for doing analysis and critique of reconciliation discourse and applies this framework in introductions to the speeches, offering readers a springboard for further study and, potentially, inspiration to promote justice and reconciliation in their own spheres.

This book shows how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can benefit from the cooperation with a variety of other language-related disciplines, such as cognitive linguistics, appraisal theory, corpus stylistics and cultural studies. From different perspectives, each chapter will contribute to the understanding of the importance of corpus linguistics as an outstanding tool for the study of language, both alone and in combination with other academic and scientific disciplines.

This book is unique in its kind. It is the first scholarly work to attempt a comprehensive and fairly detailed look into the lingering legacies of the communist totalitarian modes of thought and expression in the new discourse forms of the post-totalitarian era. The book gives also new and interesting insights into the ways the new, presumably democratically-minded political elites in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe, Russia, and China manipulate language to serve their own political and economic agendas. The book consists of ten discrete discussions, nine case-studies or chapters and an introduction. Chapter 1 discusses patterns of continuity and change in the conceptual apparatus and linguistic habits of political science and sociology practiced in the Czech Republic before and after 1989. Chapter 2 analyzes lingering effects of communist propaganda language in the political discourse and behavior in post-communist Poland. Chapter 3 analyzes the legacy of Soviet semantics in post-Soviet Moldovan politics through the prism of such politically contested words as "democracy," "democratization," and "people." Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the way in which communist patterns of thought and expression manifest themselves in the new political discourse in Romania and Bulgaria, respectively. Chapter 6 examines phenomena of change and continuity in the socio-linguistic and socio-political scene of post-Soviet Latvia. Chapter 7 analyzes the extent to which the language of the post-communist Romanian media differs from the official language of the communist era. Chapter 8 examines the evolution of Russian official discourse since the late eighties with a view of showing "whether or not new phenomena in the evolution of post-Soviet discourse represent new development or just a mutation of the value-orientations of the old Soviet ideological apparatus." Chapter 9 gives a detailed and lucid account of the evolution of both official and non-official discourse in China since the end of the Mao era.

"The contributors to the volume, coming from different areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, address several timely and important issues that bring together richly diverse perspectives and advance current debates in a range of fields, by carefully decoding literary texts covering a large timespan, as well as political discourse, the discourse of advertising, the discourse of education, and transpersonal discourse." -Professor Arleen Ionescu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Every transdisciplinary study on voyage and/or emotion will offer new insights into the multifarious facets of these two concepts. Taking a sociolinguistic turn, this volume prompts the audience to cross the borders of a variety of genres in order to discover new strands of thought. While the first part highlights the multiple facets of the voyage as initiatory journey, as a quest for an existence code, as a spiritual passage that the traveller experiences in search for the Self or for the Other, the second part of the volume seeks to address the temporality and spatiality of emotions, the ideological dimension of the public and private space, outlining at the same time the perception of the voyage as an intercultural and interlinguistic exchange.

In the sixteenth century the modern meaning of courtship - 'wooing someone' - developed from an older sense - 'being at court'. The Rhetoric of Courtship takes this semantic shift as the starting point for an incisive account of the practice and meanings of courtship at the court of Elizabeth I, where 'being at court' pre-eminently came to mean the same as 'wooing' the Queen. Exploring the wider context of social anthropology, philology, cultural and literary history, Catherine Bates presents courtship as a judicious, sensitive and rhetorically conscious understanding of public and private relations. Gascoigne, Lyly, Sidney, Leicester, Essex, and Spenser are shown to reflect in the fictional courtships of their poetry and prose the vulnerabilities of court life that were created by the system of patronage. The Rhetoric of Courtship thus makes an important contribution to Renaissance cultural history, using the court of Elizabeth I as a test case for representations of the courtier's role and power in the literature of the period.In the sixteenth century the modern meaning of courtship - 'wooing someone' - developed from an older sense - 'being at court'. The Rhetoric of Courtship takes this semantic shift as the starting point for an incisive account of the practice and meanings of courtship at the court of Elizabeth I, where 'being at court' pre-eminently came to mean the same as 'wooing' the Queen. Exploring the wider context of social anthropology, philology, cultural and literary history, Catherine Bates presents courtship as a judicious, sensitive and rhetorically conscious understanding of public and private relations. Gascoigne, Lyly, Sidney, Leicester, Essex, and Spenser are shown to reflect in the fictional courtships of their poetry and prose the vulnerabilities of court life that were created by the system of patronage. The Rhetoric of Courtship thus makes an important contribution to Renaissance cultural history, using the court of Elizabeth I as a test case for representations of the courtier's role and power in the literature of the period.

The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between an institutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These roles dictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collected volume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a range of methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-and using as data not just medical, legal, and educational environments, but also less-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism (i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing.
An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issues as: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discourse function; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degree to which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; and how questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and to serve the institutional goals of speakers.
Why Do You Ask? will appeal to linguists and others interested in institutional discourse, as well as those interested in the grammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.

Today's leading theories of meaning, chiefly those of Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, depend crucially upon Gottlob Frege's distinctions between sense and reference, sense and utterance-force, and sense and tone. But while the notions of reference, sense, and force have dominated the discussion, the subtle workings of tone have received scant attention. Long overdue, this is the first comprehensive study of tone. Careful analysis of the more than two dozen varieties identified by Frege and Dummett reveals serious weaknesses in their explanatory framework. The author sketches a broader conception in terms of speakers correctly making things out to be a certain way, a formulation that avoids the demonstrated shortcomings of Fregean truth-conditional accounts while capturing the representational character of meaning as this applies right across the language-not only to words and sentences, but to discreet linguistic components such as word-order, mood of the verb, and patterns of intonation and stress.

The modern published editions in which we read the great literary works of the distant and recent past almost invariably embody the work of a textual editor. Recent literary theory has called into question most of the assumptions on which the practice of textual editing has historically depended. Notions of authorial intention, authority, the status of annotation and commentary, the relationship between 'literary' and non-literary works (such as letters and dictionaries), and hence the concept of literature itself, are central to this debate. This volume of essays, written by practising textual editors and scholars, addresses the practical implications of these theoretical issues, taking a variety of texts as examples for the particular editorial problems they pose. The works of authors as various as Shakespeare and John Clare, Samuel Johnson and D. H. Lawrence, Milton and Oscar Wilde are invoked to demonstrate the practical basis of an editorial discipline which requires theoretical sophistication but resists reduction to any single theory.

"Empirical Methods in Language Studies" presents 22 papers employing a broad range of empirical methods in the analysis of various aspects of language and communication. The individual texts offer contributions to the description of conceptual strategies, syntax, semantics, non-verbal communication, language learning, discourse, and literature.

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.

Der mit der Digitalisierung der Kommunikation einhergehende Wandel von Kommunikations- und Medienkulturen beeinflusst die Produktionsbedingungen und den Rezeptionsrahmen von Texten sowie kommunikative Praktiken und kommunikatives Handeln. Um kommunikative Praktiken zu vollziehen und kommunikatives Handeln möglichst effektiv zu gestalten, entstehen vielfältige diskursive Kommunikationsräume, in denen mediale Akteure zu verschiedenen Zwecken miteinander agieren. Mit der Verlagerung der kommunikativen Praktiken in die digitale Welt kommt es zur Verlinkung von Texten zu Diskursen, die multisemiotisch und multimedial geprägt und auf Interaktion ausgerichtet sind. Dieses Buch ist solchen diversen textuellen und diskursiven Erscheinungsformen der massenmedialen Kommunikation gewidmet, die auf der Grundlage erschlossener Textkorpora interdisziplinär untersucht werden. Gegenstand der breit gefächerten Diskussion sind hier einzelne Texte und zusammenhängende Textformate in verschiedenen Medien sowie diskursiv organisierte Textwelten diverser multimodaler und -medialer Ausgestaltung.

This book documents changes and trends in English predicate complementation. In-depth case studies of grammatical patterns presented here uncover new links between form and meaning in these constructions, offering fresh insights into explanatory principles to account for variation and change in the system of English predicate complementation.

A major premise of this book is that language use is critically conditioned by affective content and cognitive factors rather than being a case of objective computation and manipulation of structures. The 21 chapters of this book deals with how language interacts with emotion, and with mind and cognition, from both intralingual and cross-linguistic perspectives. The second major focus is the theoretical framework, best-suited for research relationships between language, cognition, and emotion as well as the effect that emotion has on the conceptualizer who constructs meanings based on language stimuli. Furthermore, the authors investigate how emotion and rational projections of events interact and what their consequences are in the conceptual world, media discourse, and translation.

The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape. This book contains concise yet thorough and lucid overviews of ancient Near Eastern languages united by alphabetic writing and illuminates their interaction during the first 1000 years of their attestation. All chapters are informed by the most recent scholarship, contain fresh insights, provide numerous examples from the most pertinent sources, and share a clear historical framework that makes it easier to trace processes of contact and convergence in this highly diversified speech area. They also address non-specialists. The following topics are discussed: Alphabetic writing (A. Millard), Ugaritic (A. Gianto), Phoenician and Hebrew (H. Gzella), Transjordanian languages (K. Beyer), Old and Imperial Aramaic (M. Folmer), Epigraphic South Arabian (R. Hasselbach), Old Persian (M. de Vaan/A. Lubotsky), Greek (A. Willi).

Like many other human activities, translation is related to different forms of power. It can be the ability to control and set the rules. With written translations of significant works of culture, it has often been the powerholders who supported and promoted or impeded them, depending on their own preferences or their understanding of the actual sociopolitical needs. The powerholders in question are individual or collective decision-makers at various levels of the sociopolitical hierarchy who determine policies and allocate funds for approved projects. This book focuses on the possiblities of various approches to translation and power as a research topic within Translation Studies.

This is the first textbook that approaches natural language semantics and logic from the perspective of Discourse Representation Theory, an approach which emphasizes the dynamic and incremental aspects of meaning and inference. The book has been carefully designed for the classroom. It is aimed at students with varying degrees of preparation, including those without prior exposure to semantics or formal logic. Moreover, it should make DRT easily accessible to those who want to learn about the theory on their own. Exercises are available to test understanding as well as to encourage independent theoretical thought. The book serves a double purpose. Besides a textbook, it is also the first comprehensive and fully explicit statement of DRT available in the form of a book. The first part of the book develops the basic principles of DRT for a small fragment of English (but which has nevertheless the power of standard predicate logic). The second part extends this fragment by adding plurals; it discusses a wide variety of problems connected with plural nouns and verbs. The third part applies the theory to the analysis of tense and aspect. Many of the problems raised in Parts Two and Three are novel, as are the solutions proposed. For undergraduate and graduate students interested in linguistics, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Suitable for students with no previous exposure to formal semantics or logic.

This title explores the roles and discursive strategies that politicians enact in political discourse in order to achieve their specific goals. Politicians enact three main roles in political discourse - narrator, interlocutor and character - to achieve specific goals. This book explains these roles and how they constitute discursive strategies, correlating with political aims. In short, politicians evoke voices in discourse to strategically position themselves in relation to social actors and events. The book describes these strategies and analyzes the manner in which they are employed by three very different politicians - Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and George W. Bush. The roles are studied cross-culturally and from different ideological backgrounds. This book explains how political ideologies are constructed, defined and redefined by linguistic means, showing specific ways in which politicians manipulate language to achieve the goals on their political agenda. It applies new methodological approaches to the analysis of political discourse and also contributes to the sparse literature on political discourse analysis of Spanish-speaking politicians.