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 study undertakes a systematic analysis of French prepositional connectors. It explains the tendency of prepositions to form connectors and provides a model of complementary semantic and pragmatic categories covering the types, functions, and usage of connectors across a variety of genres.

The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field. Written by experts from around the world, the 29 chapters cover key issues and approaches within the following areas: meaning and conceptualisation; meaning and context; lexical semantics; semantics of specific phenomena; development, change and variation. The Routledge Handbook of Semantics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.

This book aims to address the challenges of defining measurement in social sciences, presenting a conceptualization of the practice of measurement from the perspective of the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. The book reviews key questions regarding the scope and limits of measurement, emphasizing that if the trust that the public places on mea sures in the social sciences relies on their connection to the notion of measurement in the physical sciences, then the clarification of the similarities and differences between measurement in the physical and the social realms is of central importance to adequately contextualize their relative advantages and limitations. It goes on to present some of the most influential theories of measurement such as the "classical view" of measurement, operationalism, and the representational theory of measurement, as well as more methodological perspectives arising from the practice of researchers in the social sciences, such as the latent variable perspective, and from the physical sciences and engineering, represented by metrology. This overview illustrates that the concept of measurement, and that of quantitative methods, is currently being used across the board in ways that do not necessarily conform to traditional, classical definitions of measurement, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes our technical understanding of it. Moreover, what constitutes a technical understanding of measurement, and the theoretical commitments that it entails, must vary in different areas. In this context, disagreement on what is constitutive of measurement is bound to appear. Pragmatism is presented as a theoretical perspective that offers the advantage of being flexible and fallibilist, encouraging us to abandon the pursuit of a timeless and perfect definition that attempts to establish decontextualized/definitive demarcation criteria for what is truly measurement. This book will be of particular interest for psychologists and other human and social scientists, and more concretely for scholars interested in measurement and assessment in psychological and social measurement. The pragmatic perspective of measurement presents a conceptual framework for researchers to ground their assessment practices acknowledging and dealing with the challenges of social measurement.

This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressions of the type the largest part and nominal quantifiers of the type the majority. The authors argue in favour of a quantificational analysis of most, in contrast to many recent studies, but adopt a bipartition-cum-superlative analysis for the largest part. The volume is a large-scale crosslinguistic investigation, offering typological insights as well as case studies from a range of languages, including German, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Syrian Arabic. The findings have implications for the study of number marking, partitivity, kind reference, (in)definiteness marking, and other crucial issues in linguistic theory.

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.

Natural languages - idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language - allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference - the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves - and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.

This book provides a refreshingly new perspective for investigating linguistic texts, which foregrounds models of the human. It presents a close reading of major linguistic theories in the twentieth century with a focus on three main themes: linguistic system and the individual speaker; social order; and linguistic creativity. The examination of these three fundamental themes concerning language and human nature, on the one hand, provides a fine-textured exposition on the implicit and explicit models of human nature endorsed by major theorists; on the other, it reveals the methodological dilemmas faced by linguistics. In light of the fact that the importance of considering posthumanist ideas is increasingly being underscored today, both within and outside linguistics, this focus on the human makes the book highly topical.

Acquiring Pragmatics offers a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics. It introduces the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics and explores the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs which have been developed to address them. While each chapter covers each topic in depth, it also places a strong emphasis on the underlying methodological aspects of each issue, which will help the reader to develop their own experimental designs. Key topics covered include: The interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisition The social aspects of pragmatic competence The cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence The acquisition of pragmatics in autistic spectrum disorders and second language acquisition Acquiring Pragmatics is key reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying pragmatics and language acquisition.

This book is the first English monograph to systematically explore Chinese Multiword expressions (MWEs) by applying corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches. It reveals the unique characteristics of Chinese MWEs by examining their core attributes, identification and classification, and knowledge framework. It also assesses, for the first time, the distribution and density of Chinese MWEs in textbooks. By doing so, the book provides important insights into Chinese language learning, with implications for natural language processing, lexicography, and psychology. Moreover, it offers a framework for linguists, language teachers and learners, computer scientists, lexicographers, and psychologists to explore their own areas of interest.

This volume comprises a selection of contributions to the theorizing about argumentation that have been presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam in July 2018. The chapters included provide a general theoretical perspective on central topics in argumentation theory, such as argument schemes and the fallacies. Some contributions concentrate on the treatment of the concept of conductive argument. Other contributions are dedicated to specific issues such as the justification of questions, the occurrence of mining relations, the role of exclamatives, argumentative abduction, eudaimonistic argumentation and a typology of logical ways to counter an argument. In a number of cases the theoretical problems addressed are related to a specific type of context, such as the burden of proof in philosophical argumentation, the charge of committing a genetic fallacy in strategic manoeuvring in philosophy, the necessity of community argument, and connection adequacy for arguments with institutional warrants. The volume offers a great deal of diversity in its breadth of coverage of argumentation theory and wide geographic representation from North and South America to Europe and China.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This volume sets out to provide a semantics for the "future-directed opining verbs", a novel class whose members are used to describe subjects' externally attested opinions toward future possibilities. Including verbs like recommend, promise, and permit, the class can be situated within a broader range of opinion verbs, including the well-known propositional attitudes, and key to the investigation here are differences among these groups along the lines of available event types, interaction with the common ground, and restrictions on subjects and objects. Other important semantic topics implicated in the discussion are dispositions, free choice disjunction, and Neg-raising/embedded NPI licensing, and the host of new data associated with the future-directed opining verbs prompts surveys of the expanded scope of these phenomena, and corresponding re-evaluation of existing theories. Collectively, the contributions of this work deepen our understanding of predicates that describe opinion and disposition, and how these interact with fundamental logical operations like negation and disjunction, highlighting the crucial role of contextual factors like relevance for these processes.

This volume explores the progress of cross-linguistic research into the structure of complex nominals since the publication of Chomsky's 'Remarks on Nominalization' in 1970. In the last 50 years of research into the division of labour between the mental lexicon and syntax, the specific properties of nominalized structures have remained a particularly central question. The chapters in this volume take stock of developments in this area and offer new perspectives on a range of issues, including the representation of morphological complexity in the syntax, the correlation of nominal affixes with different types of nominalizations, and the modelling of non-compositional meaning within syntactic approaches to word formation. Crucially, the contributors base their analyses on data from typologically diverse languages, such as Archi, Greek, Hiaki, Icelandic, Mebengokre, Turkish, and Udmurt, and explore the question of whether, cross-linguistically, nominalizations have a uniform core to their structure that can be syntactically described.

This innovative book examines the discourse of reality television, and the elasticity of language in the popular talent show The Voice from a cross-cultural perspective. Analysing how and why elastic language is used in persuasion and comforting, a comparison between Chinese and English is made, and the authors highlight the special role that elastic language plays in effective interactions and strategic communication. Through the lens of the language variance of two of the world's most commonly spoken languages, the insights and resources provided by this book are expected to advance knowledge in the fields of contrastive pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and inform strategies in bridging different cultures. This study highlights the need to give the elastic use of language the attention it deserves, and reveals how language is non-discrete and strategically stretchable. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students engaged in elastic/vague language studies, cross-cultural pragmatics, media linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and communication studies.

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics. The first part focuses on fundamental issues in lexical semantic research, while the second features articles highlighting various aspects of the lexical category systems in Chinese. The third part discusses application-oriented research on lexical semantics. Presenting the latest research in the field, the book is a valuable resource for specialists in Chinese lexical semantics, as well as for researchers and students interested in grammar, theory of lexical semantics, and word/meaning processing.

This edited volume focuses on the hypothesis that performativity is not a property confined to certain specific human skills, or to certain specific acts of language, nor an accidental enrichment due to creative intelligence. Instead, the executive and motor component of cognitive behavior should be considered an intrinsic part of the physiological functioning of the mind, and as endowed with self-generative power. Performativity, in this theoretical context, can be defined as a constituent component of cognitive processes. The material action allowing us to interact with reality is both the means by which the subject knows the surrounding world and one through which he experiments with the possibilities of his body. This proposal is rooted in models now widely accepted in the philosophy of mind and language; in fact, it focuses on a space of awareness that is not in the individual, or outside it, but is determined by the species-specific ways in which the body acts on the world. This theoretical hypothesis will be pursued through the latest interdisciplinary methodology typical of cognitive science, that coincide with the five sections in which the book is organized: Embodied, enactivist, philosophical approaches; Aesthetics approaches; Naturalistic and evolutionary approaches; Neuroscientific approaches; Linguistics approaches. This book is intended for: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, scholars of art and aesthetics, performing artists, researchers in embodied cognition, especially enactivists and students of the extended mind.

This book explores the use of discourse markers - lexical items where drawing a distinction between propositional and non-propositional, syntactically-semantically integrated and discourse-pragmatic uses is especially relevant. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, descriptive and critical (CDA) perspectives, and manual annotation and automatized analyses, the author argues that Discourse Markers (DMs) cannot be effectively studied in isolation, but must instead be contextualised with reference to other discourse-pragmatic devices and their language and genre backgrounds. This book will be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of DM research and critical discourse studies, and will also appeal to scholars working in areas such as genre studies, second language acquisition (SLA), literary analysis, contemporary cinematography, Tolkien scholarship, and Bible studies.

This book offers a concise but comprehensive entry-level guide to the study of meaning in context. There can be a big difference between what a speaker says and what they mean - i.e. between literal meaning and intended meaning. A speaker who says I need coffee can mean anything from 'Please buy more coffee' to 'I'm really sleepy'. How is a hearer to know? In this book, Betty Birner explores how we get from what is said to what is meant, from the perspective of both the speaker and the hearer, dealing with a range of context-dependent issues in language along the way: literal and non-literal meaning, implicature, speech acts, reference, definiteness, presupposition, and information structure. She reveals how language users can infer each other's meanings using not just what is being said but also the context and an assumption of rationality and cooperation. This slim guide summarizes the most important and foundational theories in the field of linguistic pragmatics, illustrated with plenty of real-life examples, and including a helpful glossary of key terms. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will appeal to a wide range of readers, from undergraduate and graduate students of pragmatics to general readers interested in how we successfully communicate with one another.

Are the past participial forms that occur in passive and perfect periphrases substantially identical or should they rather be distinguished into accidentally homophonous passive and perfect(ive) participles? This book discusses the long-standing mystery of past participial (non-)identity on the basis of a broad range of synchronic data from Germanic and Romance, eventually focussing on German and English as these draw the most relevant distinctions (e.g. auxiliary alternation, a passive auxiliary that is not BE). Together with some contrastive insights from Slavic as well as the diachrony of passive and perfect periphrases, this clearly points to an identity-view. The novel approach that is laid out suggests that past participles conflate diathetic and aspectual properties. The former cause the suppression of an external argument, whereas the latter impose event-structure sensitive perfectivity, which only induces the completion of a situation if the underlying eventuality denotes a simple change of state. An approach along these lines sheds light on the intricate properties of past participles and the auxiliaries they occur with, the determinants of auxiliary selection as well as the interplay of argument and event structure.

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking 'enunciative' tradition and the English-speaking 'pragmatic' tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

, , . , - . - ( ) . , . - . , , , . A l'epoque du developpement de la linguistique de corpus, de l'elaboration de corpus de textes annotes qui contiennent un volume important de donnees, l'application des methodes quantitatives d'analyse devient une partie inherente de toute etude linguistique. Le livre contient les resultats de l'etude contrastive (russe-francais) des connecteurs avec l'utilisation des methodes quantitatives qui a ete menee dans le cadre du projet de recherche conjoint (Suisse-Russie) soutenu par le FNS et par la Fondation pour la recherche fondamentale de la Federation de Russie (RFBR). Les donnees statistiques pour l'etude contrastive des connecteurs ont ete obtenus grace a une nouvelle ressource informatique: une base de donnees des connecteurs qui contient des textes paralleles en russe et en francais. Le premier chapitre decrit la base de donnees, ses fonctionnalites et les possibilites qu'elle offre aux linguistes pour l'analyse contrastive, qualitative et quantitative, des connecteurs. Le deuxieme et le troisieme chapitres presentent les resultats de l'application de ce type d'analyse des connecteurs russes et francais en tant que marqueurs des relations discursives de concomitance et de reformulation. Dans le quatrieme chapitre ces methodes sont appliquees a l'analyse des resultats de traduction automatique, un domaine de recherche qui se trouve actuellement au centre des interets de la linguistique de corpus et de la linguistique computationnelle.

This book focuses on information literacy for the younger generation of learners and library readers. It is divided into four sections: 1. Information Literacy for Life; 2. Searching Strategies, Disciplines and Special Topics; 3. Information Literacy Tools for Evaluating and Utilizing Resources; 4. Assessment of Learning Outcomes. Written by librarians with wide experience in research and services, and a strong academic background in disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences, information technology, and library science, this valuable reference resource combines both theory and practice. In today's ever-changing era of information, it offers students of library and information studies insights into information literacy as well as learning tips they can use for life.