This book presents the essential background for understanding semantic theories of mood. Mood as a category is widely used in the description of languages and the formal analysis of their grammatical properties. It typically refers to the features of a sentence-individual morphemes or grammatical patterns-that reflect how the sentence contributes to the modal meaning of a larger phrase, or that indicate the type of fundamental pragmatic function that it has in conversation. In this volume, Paul Portner discusses the most significant semantic theories relating to the two main subtypes of mood: verbal mood, including the categories of indicative and subjunctive subordinate clauses, and sentence mood, encompassing declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. He evaluates those theories, compares them, and draws connections between seemingly disparate approaches, and he formalizes some of the literature's most important ideas in new ways in order to draw out their most significant insights. Ultimately, this work shows that there are crucial connections between verbal mood and sentence mood which point the way towards a more general understanding of how mood works and its relation to other topics in linguistics; it also outlines the type of semantic and pragmatic theory which will make it possible to explain these relations. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology.

This volume presents an innovative approach to understanding the language socialization process of second language learners in study abroad programs, focusing on the case of study abroad programs in Japan. Study abroad experiences are so diverse that both macro and micro viewpoints are needed to capture such complexity. This book looks for a way forward by adopting a novel approach which integrates social network analysis and conversation nalysis and allows for a fuller, more nuanced understanding of varying experiences of study abroad participants. Chapters draw on data from a wide range of sources, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, social network surveys, and audio and visual recordings, to demonstrate the ways in which broader social forces, environmental factors, and individuals' dispositions interact in myriad social contexts within the study abroad experience. Taken together, the volume offers readers a comprehensive portrait of social processes in study abroad programs and their implications for language development, making this key reading for students and scholars in second language acquisition, pragmatics, and applied linguistics.

This book presents an in-depth fieldwork-based study of the Greek language spoken by immigrants in Cairns, Far North Queensland, Australia. The study analyzes language contact-induced changes and code switching patterns, by integrating perspectives from contact linguistics and interactional approaches to language use and code switching. Lexical and pragmatic borrowing, code mixing, discourse-related and participant-related code switching, and factors promoting language maintenance are among the topics covered in the book. The study brings to light original data from a speech community that has received no attention in the literature and sheds light on the variation of Greek spoken in diaspora. It will appeal across disciplines to scholars and students in linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and migration studies.

This collection of original research highlights the legacy of Michael Toolan's pioneering contributions to the field of stylistics and in so doing provides a critical overview of the ways in which language, text, and context are analyzed in the field and its related disciplines. Featuring work from an international range of contributors, the book illustrates how the field of stylistics has evolved in the 25 years since the publication of Toolan's seminal Language, Text and Context, which laid the foundation for the analysis of the language and style in literary texts. The volume demonstrates how technological innovations and the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies, including those from corpus, cognitive, and multimodal stylistics, point to the greater degree of interplay between language, text, and context exemplified in current research and how this dynamic relationship can be understood by featuring examples from a variety of texts and media. Underscoring the significance of Michael Toolan's extensive work in the field in the evolution of literary linguistic research, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in stylistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

This book focuses on the form and the function of commands-directive speech acts such as pleas, entreaties, and orders-from a typological perspective. A team of internationally-renowned experts in the field examine the interrelationship of these speech acts with cultural stereotypes and practices, as well as their origins and development, especially in the light of language contact. The volume begins with an introduction outlining the marking and the meaning of imperatives and other ways of expressing commands and directives. Each of the chapters that follow then offers an in-depth analysis of commands in a particular language. These analyses are cast in terms of 'basic linguistic theory'-a cumulative typological functional framework-and the chapters are arranged and structured in a way that allows useful comparison between them. The languages investigated include Quechua, Japanese, Lao, Aguaruna and Ashaninka Satipo (both from Peru), Dyirbal (from Australia), Zenzontepec Chatino (from Mexico), Nungon, Tayatuk, and Karawari (from Papua New Guinea), Korowai (from West Papua), Wolaitta (from Ethiopia), and Northern Paiute (a native language of the United States).

This volume is the most comprehensive reference work to date on Lexical Functional Grammar. The authors provide detailed and extensive coverage of the analysis of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, and information structure, and how these aspects of linguistic structure interact in the nontransformational framework of LFG. The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the syntactic theory and formal architecture of LFG, with detailed explanations and comprehensive illustration, providing an unparalleled introduction to the fundamentals of the theory. Part two explores non-syntactic levels of linguistic structure, including the syntax-semantics interface and semantic representation, argument structure, information structure, prosodic structure, and morphological structure, and how these are related in the projection architecture of LFG. Chapters in the third part illustrate the theory more explicitly by presenting explorations of the syntax and semantics of a range of representative linguistic phenomena: modification, anaphora, control, coordination, and long-distance dependencies. The final chapter discusses LFG-based work not covered elsewhere in the book, as well as new developments in the theory. The volume will be an invaluable reference for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and researchers in a wide range of linguistic sub-fields, including syntax, morphology, semantics, information structure, and prosody, as well as those working in language documentation and description.

This edited book presents contemporary empirical research investigating the use of language in professional settings, drawing on the contributions of a set of internationally-renowned authors. The book takes a critical approach to understanding professional communication in a range of fields and global contexts. Split into three parts, covering Business and Organisations, Healthcare, and Politics and Institutions, the contributors explore how and why academics engage in workplace research which takes the form of 'consultancy', 'advocacy' and 'activism'. In light of an ever-changing, ever-demanding global landscape, this volume offers new theoretical and methodological ways of conducting professional communication research with real-world impact. It will be of interest to linguistics and communication researchers and practitioners, particularly those working in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, business communication, health communication, political communication, language and the law and organisational studies.

This book focuses on the multifarious aspects of 'fuzzy boundaries' in the field of discourse studies, a field that is marked by complex boundary work and a great degree of fuzziness regarding theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the use of linguistic categories. Discourse studies is characterised by a variety of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields, research methodologies, and lexico-grammatical categories. The contributions in this book explore some of the nuances and implications of the fuzzy boundaries in these areas, resulting in a wide-reaching volume which will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies in fields including sociology, linguistics, international relations, philosophy, literary criticism and anthropology.

This book presents the first full-length study of the stylistically experimental and influential novelist George Moore's (1852-1933) repeated acts of rewriting. Moore extensively and repeatedly revised and re-issued many of his major works, sometimes years or even decades after they were initially published. This monograph provides new insights into how this process shaped and determined his work, and by extension into the creative significance of literary rewriting more generally. It also offers the first sustained application of linguistic pragmatics, the study of meaning in interaction, to the work of a single author, opening up questions about how analytical paradigms developed in pragmatics can explain how rewriting can affect the interactive relationship between a literary text and its readers. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of pragmatics, stylistics, literary history, English literature and Irish literature.

This book deals with intercultural pragmatics and how both nonnative teachers (NNTs) and native teachers (NTs) may enhance their classroom instruction regarding target language (TL) pragmatics. It focuses primarily on the experiences of instructors as they teach their learners about the pragmatics of the TL, both in second and foreign language learning settings. It makes clear that there are aspects of teaching pragmatics where it may help to be an NT and other areas where it may help to be an NNT and proposes creative ideas that both sets of teachers may draw on to compensate for gaps in their knowledge. Further themes in the book include ideas for motivating students who want to learn about pragmatics, the role of technology in teaching and learning pragmatics, the role of learning strategies, the assessment of pragmatics and ways to research pragmatics. The book will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators and students interested in researching and improving the teaching of pragmatics.

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

In the past decades, quotation theories have developed roughly along three lines-quotation types, meaning effects, and theoretical orientations toward the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Currently, whether the quoted expression is truth-conditionally relevant to the quotational sentence, and if there is a truth-conditional impact, whether it is generated via semantic or pragmatic processes, have become the central concerns of quotation studies. In this book, quotation is clearly defined for the first time as a constituent embedded within yet distinctive from the quotational sentence. Also, as the first monograph to address the semantics/pragmatics boundary dispute over quotation, it argues that the semantic content of quotation amounts to its contribution to the intuitive truth-conditional content of the quotational utterance via two modes of presentation, which are incarnated in the functioning of quotation marks and manifested as use and mention. The use/mention-based analysis in this book can shed light on the semantic theorizing of other metalinguistic phenomena, while the semantics/pragmatics perspective will provide methodological implications for other relevant studies. The new conception of quotation and thought-provoking analysis on use/mention, truth-conditional pragmatics, and the semantics/pragmatics boundary in this book will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy of language and linguistics. It will also serve as a clear guide to the current state of quotation studies and how to formulate a semantic theory of quotation.

Combining a variety of sounds to form words that can be understood by other individuals, language is one of the defining characteristics of the human species. However, since even highly educated people, great writers, and poets are not consistent regarding the meanings of words, we are unlikely to find consistent rules regarding word meanings by examining human language use. Therefore, deep semantics aims to study of the meanings of individual sounds and their role in creating the meanings of words. Deep Semantics and the Evolution of New Scientific Theories and Discoveries provides innovative insights into the mental processing of word meanings and lack of consistency in human use, while providing examples from different language sources such as, the Quran and Arabic text. This publication presents word roots, the human cognitive system, sound function, and knowledge process, and is designed for linguists, educators, speech professionals, researchers, students, and academics whose interests include topics on the study of people's imperfect views, feelings, and habits in using words.

Language and Meaning provides a clear, accessible and unique perspective on the philosophical and linguistic question of what it means to mean. Looking at relationships such as those between literal and non-literal meanings, linguistic form and meaning, and language and thought, this volume tackles the issues involved in what we mean and how we convey it. Divided into five easy-to-read chapters, it features: Broad coverage of semantic, pragmatic and philosophical approaches, providing the reader with a balanced and comprehensive overview of the topic; Frequent examples to demonstrate how meaning is perceived and manipulated in everyday discourse, including the importance of context, scientific studies of human language, and theories of pragmatics; Topics of debate and key points of current theories, including references to ongoing controversies in the field; Annotated further reading, allowing students to explore topics in more detail. Aimed at undergraduate students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, this book is essential reading for those studying this topic for the first time.

The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections: Methods and modalities Established fields Pragmatics across disciplines Applications of pragmatic research in today's world. With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.

First published in 1990, this collection investigates grammatical categories associated with the verb as they are used by speakers and writers in real discourses and texts. Focusing on tense, aspect, mood, and voice in French, Spanish, and Italian, each chapter underscores the importance of context in our understanding of how grammatical categories work. Above and beyond their basic 'grammatical functions', categories of the verb are shown to operate in such capacities as structuring information in discourse, establishing point of view in a text, and creating textual cohesion. Importantly, this volume reflects the crucial role discourse-pragmatics factors play in our interpretation of the meanings of categories of grammar.

First published in 1983, this book examines anaphora - a central issue in linguistic theory as it lies at the crossroads of several major problems. On the one hand it is believed that the same conditions that govern the interpretation of anaphora also govern syntactic movement rules but on the other, while anaphora is known to interact with various discourse and semantic considerations, it also provides a clear instance of the dependency of the semantic interpretation of sentences upon semantic properties of natural language. This book has two major goals: the first is a comprehensive analysis of sentence-level anaphora that addresses the questions posed above, and the second is an examination of the broader issues of the relations between the structural properties of sentences and their semantic interpretation within the hypotheses of the autonomy of syntax and of interpretative semantics shown by Chomsky.

First published in 1997, this book addresses the question: What is the interpretation of English there-existential construction? One of the principal goals is to develop an interpretation for the construction that will specifically address other properties of the postcopular DP. After outlining the problem, the author goes on to present a syntactic motivation for the claim that the postcopular DP is the sole complement to the existential predicate, as well as for the claim that the optional final phrase is a predictive adjunct. In chapter 3 the interpretation for the basic existential construction is developed and then compared to analyses that take the postcopular DP to denote an ordinary individual or a generalised quantifier of individuals. This analysis is then augmented to account for the contribution of the final XP and shows how the predicate restriction can be derived from a more general condition on depictive/circumstantial VP-adjuncts. The final chapter contain some speculative discussion of the broader implications of the proposal in the context of data such as "list" existential and "presentational-there" sentences.

First published in 1985, this book analyses temporal meaning in German. The framework is that of a model-theoretic semantics, more specifically one incorporating a multi-dimensional tense logic. The first chapter presents this logic and argues that three dimensions are optimal for the description of natural language temporalia. The second chapter applies this theory to the analysis of temporal meaning in German. Frame adverbials, the Present and Past Tenses, duratives, aspectual adverbials using in, and the adverbials particle schon are examined. Chapter 3 provides a formal syntax to bear the semantic analysis proposed in the second chapter and the final chapter explores syntactic and semantic extensions of the fragment, showing how the Perfect, the particle noch, the passive, and a distinct reading of frame adverbials may be accommodated.

First published in 1990, this dissertation presents an event-based model-theoretic semantics for plural expressions in English. The author defends against counterarguments the hypothesis that distributive predicates are predicates of groups, and not just individuals. By defining the collective/distributive distinction in terms of event structure, he solves formal problems with previous group-level analyses. The author notes that certain adverbials have a systematic ambiguity between a reading indicating collective action, and readings indicating spatial or temporal proximity; the event-based definition of collective action makes possible a parallel treatment of these readings. This book presents a formal proposal on the algebraic structure of groups and events, and a semantically based analysis of number agreement.

Mark Richard presents an original picture of meaning according to which a word's meaning is analogous to the biological lineages we call species. His primary thesis is that a word's meaning - in the sense of what one needs to track in order to be a competent speaker - is the collection of assumptions its users make in using it and expect their hearers to recognize as being made. Meaning is something that is spread across a population, inherited by each new generation of speakers from the last, and typically evolving in so far as what constitutes a meaning changes in virtue of the interactions of speakers with their (linguistic and social) environment. Meanings as Species develops and defends the analogy between the biological and the linguistic, and includes a discussion of the senses in which the processes of meaning change are and are not like evolution via natural selection. Richard argues that thinking of meanings as species supports Quine's insights about analyticity without rendering talk about meaning theoretically useless. He also discusses the relations between meaning as what the competent speaker knows about her language, meaning as the determinant of reference and truth conditions, and meaning qua what determines what sentence uses say. This book contains insightful discussions of a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, including: relations between meaning and philosophical analysis, the project of 'conceptual engineering', the senses in which meaning is and is not compositional, the degree to which to which referential meaning is indeterminate, and what such indeterminacy might tells us about propositional attitudes like belief and assertion.

This book explores and analyzes the ways fat acceptance activists have advocated through language and tactical action. Using Anthony Giddens' concept of Structuration in the make-up of ideology, the book identifies how fat acceptance activists use signification, domination, and legitimation to strengthen their cause. Thus, their actions are both rhetorical and tactical. Fat-considered a descriptor and not a negative label among activists-is highly stigmatized for arbitrary reasons in various areas of life ranging from the fashion industry to health care. This books shows how fat acceptance activists work to remedy this situation.

In our everyday speech we represent events and situations, but we also provide commentary on these representations, situating ourselves and others relative to what we have to say and situating what we say in larger contexts. The present volume examines this activity of discourse marking from an enunciative perspective, providing the first English-language study of the highly influential Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. This semantic/pragmatic theory is popular among academics who specialize in linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies and didactics in France, but has not yet been widely adopted elsewhere. The tools of this theory are applied to a variety of specific discourse markers in contemporary English and semantic hypotheses are tested using the data-based approach of corpus linguistics. This book therefore provides an English-speaking readership with the keys to understand the theory underlying the author's analysis of a selection of markers ('anyway', 'indeed', 'in fact', 'yet', 'still', 'like' and 'I think'). This book will provide a valuable resource for students and researchers in linguistics with an interest in discourse markers, natural language argumentation, formal semantics, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic theorisation and French - or "poststructural" - models of discourse analysis.

In Vague Language, Elasticity Theory and the Use of 'Some', Nguyet Nhu Le and Grace Qiao Zhang present the first comprehensive study of the word 'some', focusing on its elasticity. In particular, they consider how 'some' is both a quantifier and a qualifier, has positive or negative meanings, and has local and global interpretations. They show that the word is used across a meaning continuum and can be used to convey a range of states, including approximation, uncertainty, politeness, and evasion. Finally, they demonstrate that the functions of 'some' are also multi-directional and non-categorical, consisting of four major functions (right amount of information, mitigation, withholding information, and discourse management). Based on naturally-occurring classroom data of L1 (American English) and L2 (Chinese- and Vietnamese-speaking learners of English) speakers, Vague Language shows that L2 speakers used 'some' more than L1 speakers and explores the significance of this, particularly taking account of speakers' language ability and cultural backgrounds. While this book focuses on the single word 'some', the authors' discussion has important implications for language studies more generally, as they call for a rethinking of our approaches to language study and more attention to its elasticity.