Human societies name and classify colours in various ways. Knowing this, is it possible to retrieve colour systems from the past? This book presents the basic principles of modern colour semantics, including the recognition of basic vocabulary, subsets, specialised terms and the significance of non-colour features. Each point is illustrated by case studies drawn from modern and historical languages from around the world. These include discussions of Icelandic horses, Peruvian guinea-pigs, medieval roses, the colour yellow in Stuart England, and Polynesian children's colour terms. Major techniques used in colour research are presented and discussed, such as the evolutionary sequence, Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Vantage Theory. The book also addresses whether we can understand the colour systems of the past, including prehistory, by combining various semantic techniques currently used in both modern and historical colour research with archaeological and environmental information.

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is a comprehensive critical survey of the field of L2 pragmatics, collecting a number of chapters that highlight the key theories, methods, pedagogies, and research findings throughout its development over the last four decades. Demonstrating the ways in which pragmatics has long served as a lens through which to examine patterns of L2 development, the volume is divided into six parts which reflect the field's structure and evolution: * Constructs and units of analysis * Theoretical approaches * Methodological approaches * Pedagogical approaches * Contexts and individual considerations * L2 pragmatics in the global era The handbook has a particular focus on covering not only traditional topics in the field, such as constructs of pragmatic competence (e.g., speech acts, implicature), teaching and assessment, and pragmatics learning in a study abroad program, but also emerging areas of study, including interactional pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, usage-based approaches, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Each chapter introduces the topic and follows with a description of its theoretical underpinnings, an overview of existing literature, appraisal of current practice, concluding with a discussion of future directions for research and key readings. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is an essential resource for those with an interest in second language acquisition, pragmatics, and language teaching.

Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.

A short history of cynicism, from the fearless speech of the ancient Greeks to the jaded negativity of the present. Everyone's a cynic, yet few will admit it. Today's cynics excuse themselves half-heartedly-"I hate to be a cynic, but..."-before making their pronouncements. Narrowly opportunistic, always on the take, contemporary cynicism has nothing positive to contribute. The Cynicism of the ancient Greeks, however, was very different. This Cynicism was a marginal philosophy practiced by a small band of eccentrics. Bold and shameless, it was committed to transforming the values on which civilization depends. In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ansgar Allen charts the long history of cynicism, from the "fearless speech" of Greek Cynics in the fourth century BCE to the contemporary cynic's lack of social and political convictions. Allen describes ancient Cynicism as an improvised philosophy and a way of life disposed to scandalize contemporaries, subjecting their cultural commitments to derision. He chronicles the subsequent "purification" of Cynicism by the Stoics; Renaissance and Enlightenment appropriations of Cynicism, drawing on the writings of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Rousseau, de Sade, and others; and the transition from Cynicism (the philosophy) to cynicism (the modern attitude), exploring contemporary cynicism from the perspectives of its leftist, liberal, and conservative critics. Finally, he considers the possibility of a radical cynicism that admits and affirms the danger it poses to contemporary society.

Routledge Applied Linguistics is a series of comprehensive textbooks, providing students and researchers with the support they need for advanced study in the core areas of English language and applied linguistics. Each book in the series guides readers through three main sections, enabling them to explore and develop major themes within the discipline. Section A: Introduction, establishes the key terms and concepts and extends readers' techniques of analysis through practical application. Section B: Extension, brings together influential articles, sets them in context, and discusses their contribution to the field. Section C: Exploration, builds on knowledge gained in the first two sections, setting thoughtful tasks around further illustrative material. This enables readers to engage more actively with the subject matter and encourages them to develop their own research responses. Throughout the book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven and deconstructed, with the reader's understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions. Pragmatics: provides a broad view of pragmatics from a range of perspectives, gathering readings from key names in the discipline, including Geoffrey Leech, Michael McCarthy, Thomas Kohnen, Joan Manes and Nessa Wolfson covers a wide variety of topics, including speech acts, pragmatic markers, implicature, research methods in pragmatics, facework and politeness, and prosody examines the social and cultural contexts in which pragmatics occurs, such as in cross-cultural pragmatics (silence, indirectness, forms of address, cultural scripts) and pragmatics and power (the courtroom, police interaction, political interviews and doctor-patient communication) uses a wide range of corpora to provide both illustrative examples and exploratory tasks is supported by a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/archer featuring extra activities and additional data for analysis, guidance on undertaking corpus analysis and research, including how to create your own corpus with CMC, and suggestions for further reading. Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, Pragmatics provides an essential resource for students and researchers of applied linguistics.

How were social media posts, scripted speeches, traditional news media and political cartoons used and understood during the Brexit campaign? What phrases and metaphors were key during and after the 2016 Brexit referendum? How far did the Remain and Leave campaigns rely on metaphor to engage with supporters in communicating their political positions? These questions, and many others, can be answered only through a systematic analysis of the actual language used in relation to Brexit by the different parties involved. By drawing on a range of data sources and types of communication, and presenting them as 'frames' through which individuals can attempt to understand the world, the author provides the first book-length examination of the metaphors of Brexit. This book takes a detailed look at the rhetorical language behind one of the major political events of the era, and it will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics and political science, as well as anyone with a special interest in metaphor, rhetoric, Brexit, or political communication more broadly.

Tod und Sterben gelten in unserer Gesellschaft immer noch als Tabu. Zum Sterben wird gerne auf Institutionen wie Krankenhaus oder Pflegeheim zuruckgegriffen. Durch die Palliativmedizin und den immer starkeren Einfluss der Hospizbewegung andert sich mittlerweile das Bewusstsein fur die letzte Phase des Lebens. Diese Studie betrachtet den Umgang mit den Begriffen Tod und Sterben in der Medizin. Auch werden die damit in Zusammenhang stehenden Begriffe Lebensqualitat, Sterbehilfe und Sterbebegleitung in ihrer historischen Entwicklung thematisiert. Den Abschluss der Arbeit bildet eine ausfuhrliche Betrachtung der historischen und aktuellen Bedingungen einer Kommunikation mit Sterbenden.

The boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been important since the early twentieth century, but in the last twenty-five years it has become the central issue in the philosophy of language. This anthology collects classic philosophical papers on the topic, along with recent key contributions. It stresses not only the nature of the boundary, but also its importance for philosophy generally.

This book introduces the essential principles and techniques of formal semantics. In formal semantics, structure is treated as the essential ingredient in the creation of sentence meaning from individual word meaning. This approach synthesizes the traditions of logical language analysis with the scientific findings of contemporary empirical linguistics and introduces new ways to understand language meaning. Designed as a quick yet thorough introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of research in modern linguistics today this volume reveals the beauty and elegance of the mathematical study of meaning. It contains examples and exercises. It offers an accessible style that is aimed at students developing knowledge of formal semantics. It can be applied to logic, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Salvatore Attardo takes a broad approach to the topic, exploring not only theoretical linguistic analyses, but also pragmatic and semantic aspects, conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. The volume begins with chapters that introduce the terminology and conceptual and methodological apparatus, as well as outlining the major theories in the field and examining incongruity and resolution and the semiotics of humor. The second part of the book explores humor competence, with chapters that cover semantic and pragmatic topics, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, and puns and their interpretation. The third part provides an in-depth discussion of the applied linguistics of humor, and examines social context, discourse and conversation analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects. In the final part of the book, the discussion is extended beyond the central field of linguistics, with chapters discussing humor in literature, in translation, and in the classroom. The volume brings together the multiple strands of current knowledge about humor and linguistics, both theoretical and applied; it assumes no prior background in humor studies, and will be a valuable resource for students from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those coming to linguistics from related disciplines.

This book investigates the phenomenon of actuality inferences, in which claims of ability are-in certain temporal contexts-interpreted as descriptions of actual events, instead of as descriptions of potentialities or possibilities. Although actuality inferences evidently arise in the interaction between modality and aspect, they have long resisted compositional explication in standard treatments of these semantic categories. Prerna Nadathur here pursues a new approach, in which actuality inferences are linked to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence relations. The account is developed through a comparative, crosslinguistic semantic analysis of three predicate classes that license similar inferences: implicative verbs in Finnish and English, enough/too predicates in French and English, and (modal) ability predicates in French, Hindi, and English. Similarities in the inferential profiles of these predicates are tied to their shared causal background structure, while their differences-including in sensitivity to grammatical aspect-derive from differences in asserted content and associated aspectual class contrasts. The central argument is that a complex causal structure for ability interacts with the compositional requirements of aspect to derive the observed actuality-ability ambiguity. The volume shows that causal structure and causal relationships shape patterns of linguistic inference beyond the overtly causal domain, and thus contributes to a new and growing body of research in which formal, computational causal models are employed as an analytic tool for lexical and compositional semantics.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book characterizes a notion of type that covers both linguistic and non-linguistic action, and lays the foundations for a theory of action based on a Theory of Types with Records (TTR). Robin Cooper argues that a theory of language based on action allows the adoption of a perspective on linguistic content that is centred on interaction in dialogue; this approach is crucially different to the traditional view of natural languages as essentially similar to formal languages such as logics developed by philosophers or mathematicians. At the same time, he claims that the substantial technical advantages made by the formal language view of semantics can be incorporated into the action-based view, and that this can lead to important improvements in both intuitive understanding and empirical coverage. This enterprise uses types rather than possible worlds as commonly employed in studies of the semantics of natural language. Types are more tractable than possible worlds and offer greater potential for understanding the implementation of semantics both on machines and in biological brains.

What are words? Where do words come from? How are they used? Answering these questions and more, this book guides you through the key concepts in the lexicology of modern English. Providing an overview which encompasses all aspects of English vocabulary, this book explains the sources of modern English words and shows how the vocabulary has developed over time. Thoroughly updated throughout to keep pace with recent developments in the field, this third edition features: - Enhanced chapters on vocabulary, dictionaries and investigative lexicology - New sections on contemporary topics such as internet language, social media and youth culture - Guides to new electronic resources and tools of analysis - Exercises throughout each chapter, with an updated answer key - A revised list of suggestions for further reading Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, and featuring exercises and a fully updated glossary of lexicological terms to support your learning, An Introduction to English Lexicology is the only book you need to understand the basics of English lexicology.

This volume draws on insights from a range of theoretical perspectives to explore objects, agreement, and their intersecting angles, based on novel data from multiple language families. The recent expansion of agreement theories has revealed new ways of integrating phenomena that affect objects and their relational and featural properties with conventional object markers, under a single 'agreement' umbrella. The contributions to this book present the major advances in these new angles of research into object agreement, and highlight in particular the shared conditions on objects undergoing agreement that are attested in a large number of genetically unrelated languages and language modalities. Following a detailed introduction, the chapters are organized into four parts that explore respectively the mechanics of object agreement, constraints on symmetry, features of object agreement, and issues relating to the left periphery. The volume's findings and the novel questions that they raise will be of interest to theoretical linguists, typologists, sign language researchers, and anyone working on the theoretical analysis of Amazonian, Bantu, Romance, Semitic, and Slavic languages.

This book should be of interest to speech and language therapists; educational psychologists, teachers.

This book presents a novel overarching account of negation and negative dependencies, based on novel data from language variation, language acquisition, and language change. Negation is a universal property of natural language, but languages can significantly differ in how they express it: there is variation in the form and position of negative elements, the number of manifestations of negative morphemes, and in the restrictions on the use of Negative and Positive Polarity Items. In this volume, Hedde Zeijlstra explores the hypothesis that all known syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and lexical ways of encoding dependencies should be also be attested in the domain of negation, unless they are independently ruled out. He shows that the pluriform landscape of negative dependencies and markers of negation that emerges has broader implications for theories of syntax and semantics and their interface.

In this book, Michael Blome-Tillmann offers a critical overview of the current debate on the semantics of knowledge attributions. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to the literature on 'knowledge' attributions by outlining the historical roots of the debate and providing an in-depth discussion of epistemic contextualism. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of the view, Part 2 offers a detailed investigation of epistemic impurism (or pragmatic encroachment views), while Part 3 is devoted to a careful examination of epistemic relativism and Part 4 to two different types of strict invariantism (psychological and pragmatic). The final part of the book explores Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism - a version of contextualism that is argued to provide a more powerful and elegant account of the semantics of 'knowledge' attributions than many of its competitors. A clear and precise account is provided of the main principles underlying each view and of how they aim to explain the pertinent data and resolve philosophical puzzles and challenges. The book also provides charts outlining the relations between the positions discussed and offers suggestions for further reading.

This book investigates the semantics and pragmatics of a representative sample of parenthetical constructions. Todor Koev argues that these constructions fall into two major classes: pure and impure. Pure parentheticals comment on some part of the descriptive content of the root sentence but are otherwise relatively independent of it. Impure parentheticals modify components of the illocutionary force and affect the felicity or the truth of the root sentence. The book studies parentheticals from three theoretical viewpoints: illocutionary effects, scopal properties, and discourse status. It establishes and explicates the notion of parenthetical meaning in a formally precise and predictive dynamic-semantic model. As a result, parentheticality is brought to bear on linguistic phenomena such as entailment and presupposition, binding and anaphora, evidentiality and modality, illocutionary force, and polarity.

Wenn man uber das menschliche Leben spricht oder schreibt, benutzt man oft metaphorische Ausdrucke wie am Kreuzweg stehen oder sein Leben aufs Spiel setzen. Im ersten Teil der Arbeit geht der Autor der Frage nach, wie metaphorische Idiome im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik, unter kritischer Betrachtung der kognitiven Metapherntheorie von Lakoff und Johnson, untersucht werden koennen. Im empirischen Teil wird eine Sammlung von deutschen metaphorischen Lebens-Idiomen aus Woerterbuchern und aus dem Deutschen Referenzkorpus (IDS-Korpus) zusammengestellt und ihre Motiviertheit in Korpusbelegen untersucht. Die Idiome werden demnach nicht nur durch konzeptuelle Metaphern, sondern auch durch Symbole sowie etymologisches, kulturelles und enzyklopadisches Wissen motiviert.

This is your guide to historical pragmatics in English studies. Providing an ideal introduction to historical pragmatics, this guide gives students a solid grounding in historical pragmatics and teaches the methodology needed to analyse language in social, cultural and historical contexts. Using a number of case studies including politeness, news discourse, and scientific discourse, this book provides new insights into the analysis of discourse markers, interjections, terms of address and speech acts. Through focusing on the methodological problems in using historical data, students learn the key concepts in historical pragmatics, as well as covering recent work at the interface of between language and literature.

This volume explores the nature of ellipsis, the core phenomenon that results in various types of omission in sentences. The chapters adopt the popular 'silent structure' accounts of ellipsis, and investigate the question of when linguistic material becomes silenced during the derivation and realization of syntactic structure. The book begins with a detailed introduction from the editors that outlines the current generative syntactic approaches to the derivational timing of ellipsis. In the chapters that follow, internationally-recognized experts in the field address key topics including structure building, the architecture of grammar, the interaction of distinct modules with syntax, the order of operations in the post-syntactic component, and constraints on binding relations. The authors also present novel arguments for and against the derivational approaches to ellipsis, the licensing of ellipsis, and phonological constraints on elliptical sentences. The findings, based on data from English and other languages such as Armenian, Italo-Romance, Ossetic, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish, facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction between syntax and the neighbouring modules in the formation of elliptical utterances.

Felicitous uses of contextually sensitive expressions generally have unique semantic values in context. For example, a felicitous use of the singular pronoun 'she' generally has a single female as its unique semantic value in context. In the present work, Jeffrey C. King argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses where they lack unique semantic values in context. He calls such uses instances of felicitous underspecification. In such cases, he says that the underspecified expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. King provides a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground when sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions are uttered and accepted in a conversation. He also gives an account of the mechanism that associates the range of candidate semantic values in context with an underspecified expression. Sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions can be embedded in various constructions. King considers the result of embedding such sentences under negation and verbs of propositional attitude. He also considers the question of why some uses of underspecified expressions are felicitous and others aren't. This investigation yields the notion of a context being appropriate for a sentence (LF), where a context is appropriate for a sentence containing an underspecified expression if the sentence is felicitous in that context. Finally, he considers some difficulties that arise in virtue of the fact that pronouns and demonstratives have some sorts of implications of uniqueness that clash with their being underspecified.

This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.