​This book presents research on the situation minority language schoolchildren face when they need to learn languages of international communication, in particular English. The book takes minority languages as a starting point and it bridges local and global perspectives in the analysis of multilingual education contexts. It examines the interaction of minority languages and cultures, majority languages and lingua franca-s in a variety of settings across different regions and countries on all continents. Even though all chapters in this book involve minority languages, the issues discussed are relevant to any context in which more than language is used in education. The book reveals challenges and opportunities of multilingual education by discussing issues such as Northern and Southern concepts, language education policies, language diversity, interethnic understanding, multimodal language practices, power, conflict, identity and prestige, among many others. “This is the volume that finally accounts for multilingual education from a truly multilingual perspective by involving proposals and research from a variety of multilingual speech communities in the world. The (linguistically) rich Ethiopia and Mexico can teach the poor Europe and other Northern countries about multilingual education. CLIL promoters may learn from Finnish Sámi and Canadian Innu and Mi’gmaq indigenous communities as well as from Basque results. Speakers and teachers of minority and international languages will certainly be glad to hear the news. There is no need for a monolingual bias or tunnel vision in acquiring English in non-English speaking communities. This volume includes new challenging pedagogical perspectives while pointing to interesting conclusions for worldwide educational authorities�. Maria Pilar Safont Jordà, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain

This volume provides the reader with exclusive insights into Ernest Sosa's latest ideas as well as main aspects of his philosophical work of the last 50 years. Ernest Sosa, one of the most distinguished contemporary philosophers, is best known for his ground-breaking work in epistemology, and has also contributed greatly to metaphysics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of language. This book, resulting from the 18th Munster Lectures in Philosophy, includes an original article by Sosa on his most recent work in epistemology, and seven critical papers that target a wide range of topics from Sosa's oeuvre, as well as Sosa's responses. As regards his epistemology, the issues discussed include his solution of the sceptical problem in his most recent work and the question of how to integrate a sensible account of testimony to Sosa's virtue epistemology. The selected topics from his other fields of inquiry include his view on empirical challenges to human rationality, his defense of the scientific status of philosophy, his concept of causality as considered against the background of the current debate, his suggestion of a middle-way between existential relativism and absolutism and his externalistic internalism in the philosophy of mind and language.

This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy. It does this not only by describing its mode of operation and explaining its legitimating rationale, but also by substantiating its claims by a series of instructive case studies. The unifying insight of this approach is that the natural criterion of merit within any goal-oriented enterprise-be its orientation practical or cognitive-pivots on its contribution to the effective and efficient realization of the aims at issue. The aim of this volume is to describe and illustrate this broadened conception of pragmatism as a far-reaching and many-sided approach to philosophical inquiry. Theoretical considering apart, it offers a variety of case studies to illustrate the range and fertility of this approach. Nicholas Rescher has published extensively on the history and theory of pragmatism and on its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy over the last 30 years.

This book collects research contributions concerning quantitative approaches to characterize originality and universality in language. The target audience comprises researchers and experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. Creativity might be considered as a morphogenetic process combining universal features with originality. While quantitative methods applied to text and music reveal universal features of language and music, originality is a highly appreciated feature of authors, composers, and performers. In this framework, the different methods of traditional problems of authorship attribution and document classification provide important insights on how to quantify the unique features of authors, composers, and styles. Such unique features contrast, and are restricted by, universal signatures, such as scaling laws in word-frequency distribution, entropy measures, long-range correlations, among others. This interplay between innovation and universality is also an essential ingredient of methods for automatic text generation. Innovation in language becomes relevant when it is imitated and spread to other speakers and musicians. Modern digital databases provide new opportunities to characterize and model the creation and evolution of linguistic innovations on historical time scales, a particularly important example of the more general problem of spreading of innovations in complex social systems. This multidisciplinary book combines scientists from various different backgrounds interested in quantitative analysis of variations (synchronic and diachronic) in language and music. The aim is to obtain a deeper understanding of how originality emerges, can be quantified, and propagates.

This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements?

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.

This monograph deals with argument drop in the German prefield and it presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic dropped elements. Major issues are (inter alia) the drop of structurally vs. obliquely cased arguments and the question on which basis nominative/accusative and dative/genitive can be kept apart. Furthermore, it is shown that the (im)possibility of phi-feature mismatches concerning the antecedent and gap in topic drop dialogues allows to differentiate between coreference and "real" (quantifier) binding. Aside from topic drop, (1st/2nd vs. 3rd person) null subjects are investigated across a couple of unrelated languages, also focusing on the presence of syncretisms within verbal inflectional paradigms. It is proven that 1st/2nd person null subjects in German are not an instance of antecedent-dependent topic drop but that they are licensed by discrete verbal inflectional endings. Thus, according to this property, German can be classified as a partial pro-drop language. Next to theoretical discussions and considerations this book offers a broad (empirically covered) data basis, which makes it suitable for both theoretically and empirically interested (generative) linguists.

This book introduces Meaningful Purposive Interaction Analysis (MPIA) theory, which combines social network analysis (SNA) with latent semantic analysis (LSA) to help create and analyse a meaningful learning landscape from the digital traces left by a learning community in the co-construction of knowledge. The hybrid algorithm is implemented in the statistical programming language and environment R, introducing packages which capture - through matrix algebra - elements of learners' work with more knowledgeable others and resourceful content artefacts. The book provides comprehensive package-by-package application examples, and code samples that guide the reader through the MPIA model to show how the MPIA landscape can be constructed and the learner's journey mapped and analysed. This building block application will allow the reader to progress to using and building analytics to guide students and support decision-making in learning.

This book examines the concept of meaning and our general understanding of reality in a legal and philosophical context. Starting from the premise that meaning is a matter of linguistic and other forms of articulation, it considers the inherent philosophical consequences. Part I presents Klages', Derrida's, Von Hofmannsthal's and Wittgenstein's explorations of silence as a source of articulation and meaning. Debates about 20th century psychologism gave the attitude concept a pivotal role; it illustrates the importance of the discovery that a word is globally qualified as 'the basic unit of language'. This is mirrored in the fact that we understand reality as a matter of particles and thus interpret the real as a component of an all-embracing 'particle story'. Each chapter of the book focuses on an aspect of legal semiotics related to the chapter's theme: for instance on the meaning of a Judge's 'Saying for Law', on law students training in varying attitudes or on the ties between law and language. Part II of the book illustrates our general understanding of reality as a matter of particles and partitioning, and examines texts that prove that particle thinking is basic for our meaning concept. It shows that physics, quantum theory, holism, and modern brain research focusing on human linguistic capabilities, confirm their ties to the particle story. In contrast, the book concludes that partitions and particles are neither a fact in the history of the cosmos nor a determinant of knowledge and the sciences, and that meaning is a process: a constellation rather than a fixation. This is manifest once one understands meaning as the result of continuously changing attitudes, which create our narratives on cosmos and creation. The book proposes a new key for meaning: a linguistic occurrence anchored in dimensions of human narrativity.

This volume discusses some crucial ideas of the founders of the analytic philosophy: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the 'golden trio'. The book shows how these 'old' ideas are still present and influential in the current philosophical debates and to what extent these debates echo the original ideas. The collection aim is twofold: to better understand these fruitful ideas by placing them in the original setting, and to systematically examine these ideas in the context of the current debates animating philosophical discussions today. Divided into five sections, the book first sets the stage and offers a general introduction to the background influences, as well as delimitations of the initial foundational positions. This first section contains two papers dedicated to the discussion of realism and the status of science at that time, followed by two papers that tackle the epistemic status of logical laws. The next three sections constitute the core of the volume, each being dedicated to the most important figures in the early analytic tradition: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. The last section gathers several essays that discuss either the relation between two or more analytic thinkers, or various important concepts such as 'predicativism' and 'arbitrary function', or the principles of abstraction and non-contradiction.

This volume offers the reader a singular overview of current thinking on indirect reports. The contributors are eminent researchers from the fields of philosophy of language, theoretical linguistics and communication theory, who answer questions on this important issue. This exciting area of controversy has until now mostly been treated from the viewpoint of philosophy. This volume adds the views from semantics, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. Authors address matters such as the issue of semantic minimalism vs. radical contextualism, the attribution of responsibility for the modes of presentation associated with Noun Phrases and how to distinguish the indirect reporter's responsibility from the original speaker's responsibility. They also explore the connection between indirect reporting and direct quoting. Clearly indirect reporting has some bearing on the semantics/pragmatics debate, however, there is much controversy on "what is said", whether this is a minimal semantic logical form (enriched by saturating pronominals) or a much richer and fully contextualized logical form. This issue will be discussed from several angles. Many of the authors are contextualists and the discussion brings out the need to take context into account when one deals with indirect reports, both the context of the original utterance and the context of the report. It is interesting to see how rich cues and clues can radically transform the reported message, assigning illocutionary force and how they can be mobilized to distinguish several voices in the utterance. Decoupling the voice of the reporting speaker from that of the reported speaker on the basis of rich contextual clues is an important issue that pragmatic theory has to tackle. Articles on the issue of slurs will bring new light to the issue of decoupling responsibility in indirect reporting, while others are theoretically oriented and deal with deep problems in philosophy and epistemology.

This book presents a cutting-edge critical analysis of the trope of miscegenation and its biopolitical implications in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literature, poetry, and discourse. The relationship between nationalism and demographics are examined through the narrative and poetic intrigue of intimacy between Arabs and Jews, drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, including public sphere theory, orientalism, and critical race studies. Revisiting the controversial Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre, who championed miscegenation in his revisionary history of Brazil, the book deploys a comparative investigation of Palestinian and Israeli writers' preoccupation with the mixed romance. Author Hella Bloom Cohen offers new interpretations of works by Mahmoud Darwish, A.B. Yehoshua, Orly Castel-Bloom, Nathalie Handal, and Rula Jebreal, among others.

Frege's puzzle concerning belief reports has been in the middle of the discussion on semantics and pragmatics of attitude reports: The intuition behind the opacity does not seem to be consistent with the thesis of semantic innocence according to which the semantic value of proper names is nothing but their referent. Main tasks of this book include providing truth-conditional content of belief reports. Especially, the focus is on semantic values of proper names. The key aim is to extend Crimmins's basic idea of semantic pretense and the introduction of pleonastic entities proposed by Schiffer. They enable us to capture Frege's puzzle in the analysis without giving up semantic innocence. To reach this conclusion, two issues are established. First, based on linguistic evidence, the frame of belief reports functions adverbially rather than relationally. Second, the belief ascriptions, on which each belief report is made, must be analyzed in terms of the measurement-theoretic analogy.

This volume presents 50 contributions on the themes of reasonableness and effectiveness and their connections, which are central issues in argumentation theory. It discusses van Eemeren's views on the study of argumentation; the approach to argumentation adopted in pragma-dialectics; pragma-dialectical perspectives on the dialectical and pragmatic dimensions of argumentative discourse; the notion of strategic maneuvering; the pragma-dialectical method of analyzing argumentative discourse; the treatment of fallacies as violations of rules for critical discussion; pragma-dialectical views on context, the role of logic, verbal indicators of argumentative moves and argument schemes; and the process of writing and rewriting argumentative texts. The pragma-dialectical quantitative approach to empirical research on argumentative discourse is illustrated by reporting on selected, illustrative experimental studies, as well as qualitative studies of historical cases.

This work represents the first integrated account of how deixis operates to facilitate points of view, providing the raw material for reconciling index and object. The book offers a fresh, applied philosophical approach using original empirical evidence to show that deictic demonstratives hasten the recognition of core representational constructs. It presents a case where the comprehension of shifting points of view by means of deixis is paramount to a theory of mind and to a worldview that incorporates human components of discovering and extending spatial knowledge. The book supports Peirce's triadic sign theory as a more adequate explanatory account compared with those of Buhler and Piaget. Peirce's unitary approach underscores the artificiality of constructing a worldview driven by logical reasoning alone; it highlights the importance of self-regulation and the appreciation of otherness within a sociocultural milieu. Integral to this semiotic perspective is imagination as a primary tool for situating the self in constructed realities, thus infusing reality with new possibilities. Imagination is likewise necessary to establish postures of mind for the self and others. Within these imaginative scenarios (consisting of overt, and then covert self dialogue) children construct their own worldviews, through linguistic role-taking, as they legitimize conflicting viewpoints within imagined spatial frameworks.

The Intelligent Mind conceives the psychological reality of thought and language, explaining how intelligence develops from intuition to representation and then to linguistic interaction and thinking. Overcoming the prevailing dogmas regarding how discursive reason emerges, this book secures the psychological possibility of the philosophy of mind.

Exploring the key debates surrounding human nature, epistemology, the nature of social knowledge, foreign policy, the Propaganda Model, the anarchist tradition and the revolutionary transformation of society, this book reveals and explains the structure and power of Chomsky's work.

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.

This book presents the theory of the validity of legal norms, aimed at the practice of law, in particular the jurisdiction of the constitutional courts. The postpositivist concept of the validity of statutory law, grounded on a critical analysis of the basic theories of legal validity elaborated up to now, is introduced. In the first part of the book a contemporary German nonpositivist conception of law developed by Ralf Dreier and Robert Alexy is analysed in order to answer the question whether the juristic concept of legal validity should include moral standards or criteria. In the second part, a postpositivist concept of legal validity and an innovative model of validity discourse, based on the juristic presumption of the validity of legal norms, are proposed. The book is a work on analytical legal theory, written from a postpositivist, detached point of view.

Writing tends to make people anxious, and with good reason. The first sentence of a job application letter can consign it to the bin. A speech intended to rouse can put a room to sleep. A mistimed tweet can cost you your job. And a letter to a beloved may aim to convey feelings of tenderness but end up making the recipient laugh rather than melt.

In this complete guide to persuasive writing, Sam Leith shows how to express yourself fully across any medium, and how to maximise your chances of getting your way in every situation. From work reports to Valentine cards, and from emails of condolence to tweets of complaint, Leith lays bare the secrets to successful communication, eloquence and off- and online etiquette. How do you write a job application, a thank-you card, or an email to your bank manager, to your children's headteacher, to your clients or your boss? How do you prepare a speech to win the argument, get the vote of confidence, or embarrass the bridegroom? Getting these things right - or wrong - can be life-changing.

Succinct treatments of the most general principles of style and composition, as well as examinations of specific modes of address (What is a subtweet? How do I write a moving elegy?) are accompanied by concrete and well-illustrated dos and don'ts and examples of wins and fails. Astute, sprightly and illuminating, Write to the Point will give you the skills and confidence you need to get your message across on every occasion.

This collection is a major contribution to the understanding and evaluation of Ernest Sosa's profound and wide-ranging philosophy, in epistemology and beyond. A balanced, fair and critical volume, it offers a sensitive appreciation of his wide philosophical purview, a nuanced assessment of the detail of his thought, and a spur to exploring the linkages between the varied topics explored by the subtle mind of this great American scholar. The papers explore a wealth of Sosa's academic interests, including his work on philosophical method, the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and value theory, in addition to his output on epistemology itself. It offers, for example, a rebuttal of the counterarguments to Sosa's reliabilist theory of introspective justification, which itself concludes with some objections to Sosa's stated views on the 'speckled hen' problem. Other authors track the connections of his virtue theory to his advocacy of bi-level epistemology, provide reflections on Sosa's views on the epistemological tradition, and examine the nexus of his beliefs on intuition and philosophical methodology. This volume is an insightful reckoning of Sosa's academic account.

This collection is devoted to Gilbert Ryle's philosophy of mind and language. It features essays from prominent scholars on the topics of category mistakes, hypotheticals, dispositions, emotion, thinking, perception, and the task-achievement distinction.

This volume examines the concept of falsification as a central notion of semantic theories and its effects on logical laws. The point of departure is the general constructivist line of argument that Michael Dummett has offered over the last decades. From there, the author examines the ways in which falsifications can enter into a constructivist semantics, displays the full spectrum of options, and discusses the logical systems most suitable to each one of them. While the idea of introducing falsifications into the semantic account is Dummett's own, the many ways in which falsificationism departs quite radically from verificationism are here spelled out in detail for the first time.

The volume is divided into three large parts. The first part provides important background information about Dummett s program, intuitionism and logics with gaps and gluts. The second part is devoted to the introduction of falsifications into the constructive account and shows that there is more than one way in which one can do this. The third part details the logical effects of these various moves. In the end, the book shows that the constructive path may branch in different directions: towards intuitionistic logic, dual intuitionistic logic and several variations of Nelson logics. The author argues that, on balance, the latter are the more promising routes to take.

"Kapsner s book is the first detailed investigation of how to incorporate the notion of falsification into formal logic. This is a fascinating logico-philosophical investigation, which will interest non-classical logicians of all stripes."

Graham Priest, "Graduate Center, City University of New York" and "University of Melbourne""

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject-predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

Dummett argues that the aim of philosophy is the analysis of thought and that, with Frege, analytical philosophy learned that the route to the analysis of thought is the analysis of language. Here are bold and deep readings of the subject's history and character, which form the topic of this volume.