Lexicology is about words, their meanings and the relationships between them, their origins and their structure. It combines the study of derivational morphology with lexical semantics. This textbook explores the history, meanings and structure of words, the way they are collected in dictionaries and the way they are stored in our minds. It goes beyond examining the morphological structure of words to examine the way words are spelt and the way they sound. At every stage, the book focuses not only on description, but also on the puzzles that words present. Supported by numerous examples, exercises, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this is an accessible and lively guide to the linguistic study of English through the consideration of words.

This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language, scalar expressions such as comparatives, intensifiers, and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However, cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example, in English more than anything can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance, and in Japanese the minimizer chotto 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book, Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different, the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface, and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics more generally.

Frame semantics is an important recent development in linguistic theory that links linguistics, cognitive psychology, general cognitive science, and AI research. This handbook-style introductory work, which is the first to com-prehensively consider the topic from a linguistic perspective, discusses the most important frame models and their theoretical roots, applications, and implications. The handbook format allows each chapter to be read and used individually.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals such as more likely than, quite possible, and very good. He provides an introduction to qualitative and degree semantics for graded meaning, using the Representational Theory of Measurement to expose the complementarity between these apparently opposed perspectives on gradation. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals. It also demonstrates that modality is deeply intertwined with probability and expected value, connecting modal semantics with the cognitive science of uncertainty and choice.

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations.

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This is the fully revised and expanded second edition of English - One Tongue, Many Voices, a book by three internationally distinguished English language scholars who tell the fascinating, improbable saga of English in time and space. Chapters trace the history of the language from its obscure beginnings over 1500 years ago as a collection of dialects spoken by marauding, illiterate tribes. They show how the geographical spread of the language in its increasing diversity has made English into an international language of unprecedented range and variety. The authors examine the present state of English as a global language and the problems, pressures and uncertainties of its future, online and offline. They argue that, in spite of the amazing variety and plurality of English, it remains a single language.

This book presents an analysis of how speakers of typologically diverse languages report present-time situations. It begins from the assumption that there is a restriction on the use of the present tense to report present-time dynamic/perfective situations, while with stative/imperfective situations there are no such alignment problems. Astrid De Wit brings together cross-linguistic observations from English, French, the English-based creole language Sranan, and various Slavic languages, and relates them to the same phenomenon, the 'present perfective paradox'. The proposed analysis is founded on the assumption that there is an epistemic alignment constraint preventing the identification and reporting of events in their entirety at the time of speaking. This book discusses the various strategies that the aforementioned languages have developed to resolve this conceptual difficulty, and demonstrates that many of the features of their tense-aspect systems can be regarded as the result of this conflict resolution. It also offers cognitively plausible explanations for the conceptual structures underlying the interactions attested between tense and aspect.

Die Studie beschaftigt sich mit einem Spezialgebiet der Substantivvalenzforschung. Nach der Diskussion einiger Grundfragen der Substantivvalenz ermittelt die Autorin die reziproken Strukturen auf empirischer Grundlage. Es folgt eine ausfuhrliche Beschreibung der morphosyntaktischen und semantischen Merkmale der Elemente von reziproken Strukturen. Der Formtyp Reziproke und der Funktionstyp Wechselseitigkeit werden als zwei Seiten eines funktionalen Modells gedeutet. Abschliessend wird uberpruft, ob die bestimmten Merkmale ausreichen, die reziproken Strukturen von den anderen Syntagmen valenter Substantive abzugrenzen. Die Ergebnisse der durchgefuhrten Untersuchungen sind im Anhang detailliert dargestellt, so u.a. zahlreiche valente Substantive im Hinblick auf Reziprozitat.

Wortspiele entstehen unter anderem infolge kreativen Umgangs mit Wortbildungsregeln. In der Monographie schlagt die Autorin eine Definition und Klassifikation von Wortbildungsspielen vor dem Hintergrund von Wittgensteins Sprachspieltheorie vor. Sie untersucht, wie das Spiel mit den Wortbildungsregeln die semantische Struktur von Woertern verandert. Die Untersuchungsmethode stutzt sich auf die Erkenntnis, dass komplexe Lexeme als pradikative Strukturen aufgefasst werden koennen. Den Analysen liegt die Dependenzgrammatik zugrunde. Die Ergebnisse weisen nach, dass durch das Wortbildungsspiel in den Pradikationsstrukturen bewirkte Veranderungen bestimmte Regelhaftigkeiten erkennen lassen.

Ausgehend von einer Sprecherbefragung mit deutschem Sprachmaterial untersucht die Autorin die Verwendung von indirekten pronominalen Anaphern im Deutschen. Die Ergebnisse der empirischen Arbeit bestatigen die zentrale Hypothese der Abhandlung: Den Muttersprachlern erscheint die Verwendung von indirekten pronominalen Anaphern im Deutschen als akzeptabel, wenn der implizite Referent nuklearer Bestandteil der gegebenen Diskursreprasentation ist. Die Autorin kann somit auf der Grundlage von Grammatikalitatsurteilen zeigen, dass indirekte pronominale Anaphern akzeptierte Koharenzmittel sind.

Die Autorin untersucht den seit Jakob Grimm in der Forschung diskutierten Gegenstand der Paarformel anhand der spatmittelalterlich-fruhneuzeitlichen Textsorte der Stadtrechtsbucher. Sie behandelt 20 Texte, die sich auf den gesamten deutschen Sprachraum verteilen und den Zeitraum vom 13.-15. Jahrhundert abdecken. Die Analyse ist nach sehr weit gefassten modernen Rechtsbegriffen wie "naturliche Person" oder "Koerperverletzung" strukturiert, die jenseits ihrer historischen Andersartigkeit als Grundtatsachen des menschlichen Lebens gelten koennen. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass Paarformeln als Mittel zur Erfassung rechtsrelevanter Begrifflichkeiten dienen, berucksichtigt die Autorin neben Verwendung und Bedeutung auch die Funktion von Paarformeln im jeweiligen Kontext.

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 explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden adopt the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of two elements: an event template describing the verb's broad temporal and causal contours, which occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes; and an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish between verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less work has addressed the truth-conditional contributions of roots, despite the importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions made by event structural approaches. This book aims to address this gap by exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which specifies that roots can describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time. Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book argues that event structures still have predictive value: it presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, in which systematic semantic and grammatical properties are determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

Das Buch bietet eine systematische Untersuchung von Mechanismen der Lizenzierung der Modalpartikeln ja, doch und denn im Deutschen und [ved'], [ze] und [vot] im Russischen in Nebensatzen. Folgende Fragen werden diskutiert: Wie hangt die Lizenzierung der Modalpartikeln im Nebensatz mit semantischen, grammatischen, kommunikativen und pragmatischen Besonderheiten des Matrixsatzes zusammen? Wie sollte die Definition des Phanomens "illokutiv selbststandiger Satz" formuliert werden? Was ist der Grund fur die Verwendung der Modalpartikeln in Nebensatzen? Koennen die Modalpartikeln auch in Nebensatzen in der Funktion von Konnektoren verwendet werden? Was beeinflusst die Lesarten der Modalpartikeln? Wodurch unterscheiden sich die Modalpartikeln in der Konnektorenlesart von Subjunktoren mit entsprechender Semantik?

Catorce investigadores de diferentes paises y nacionalidades, especialistas en diferentes campos de estudio sobre la lengua espanola - Didactica del ELE y del EFE, lengua de especialidad, lexicologia, linguistica aplicada, terminologia, traduccion -, resaltan, al enfocar el lexico dentro de un contexto profesional y cultural especificos, la permeabilidad y renovacion de la lengua espanola. Sus investigaciones ineditas que se enmarcan dentro de diversas perspectivas y areas de investigacion como la cibernetica, la cognitiva, la didactica, la estructuralista y la linguistica aplicada, abordan temas como los prestamos, las colocaciones sintacticas, la traduccion, el lexico profesional y de especialidad, el discurso retorico de la prensa, el lenguaje del turismo, los enfoques didacticos sobre el lexico. El resultado de sus analisis de corpus muestra diferentes interpretaciones del lexico espanol dentro de los ambitos arriba mencionados.

El trabajo explora - con base en los estudios de corte cognitivo de los eslavistas norteamericanos Laura Janda y Steven Clancy - la evolucion de las semanticas asociadas al caso dativo a lo largo de los 700 anos de historia de la lengua checa escrita. Del analisis sistematico de 8.355 dativos extraidos de cinco textos, que representan cuatro cortes sincronicos de la historia de esta lengua, obtenemos la distribucion diacronica de la red semantica del dativo checo en torno a tres subsemanticas principales: dativo receptor, dativo experimentador y dativo competidor. Un ultimo objetivo de este estudio es el diseno de una red conceptual que muestre de forma grafica toda la riqueza y complejidad de estas relaciones semanticas.

This book provides a pragmatic analysis of presidential language. Pragmatics is concerned with "meaning in context," or the relationship between what we say and what we mean. John Wilson explores the various ways in which U.S. Presidents have used language within specific social contexts to achieve specific objectives. This includes obfuscation, misdirection, the use of metaphor or ambiguity, or in some cases simply lying. He focuses on six presidents: John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald W. Reagan, William F. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack H. Obama. These presidents cover most of the last half of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty first century, and each has been associated with a specific linguistic quality. John F. Kennedy was famed for his quality of oratory, Nixon for his manipulative use of language, Reagan for his gift of telling stories, Clinton for his ability to engage the public and to linguistically turn arguments and descriptions in particular directions. Bush, on the other hand, was famed for his inability to use language appropriately, and Obama returns us to the rhetorical flourishes of early Kennedy. In the case of each president, a range of specific examples are explored in order to highlight the ways in which a pragmatic analysis may provide an insight into presidential language. In many cases, what the president says is not necessarily what the president means.

Few conversational topics can be as significant as our troubles in life, whether everyday and commonplace, or more exceptional and disturbing. In groundbreaking research conducted with John Lee at the University of Manchester UK, Gail Jefferson turned the microscope on how people talk about their troubles, not in any professional or therapeutic setting, but in their ordinary conversations with family and friends. Through recordings of interactions in which people talk about problems they're having with their children, concerns about their health, financial problems, marital and relationship difficulties (their own or other people's), examination failures, dramatic events such as burglaries or a house fire and other such troubles, Jefferson explores the interactional dynamics and complexities of introducing such topics, of how speakers sustain and elaborate their descriptions and accounts of their troubles, how participants align and affiliate with one another, and finally manage to move away from such topics. The studies Jefferson published out of that remarkable period of research have been collected together in this volume. They are as insightful and informative about how we talk about our troubles, as they are innovative in the development and application of Conversation Analysis. Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) was one of the co-founders of Conversation Analysis (CA); through her early collaboration with Harvey Sacks and in her subsequent research, she laid the foundations for what has become an immensely important interdisciplinary paradigm. She co-authored, with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, two of the most highly cited articles ever published in Language, on turn-taking and repair. These papers were foundational, as was the transcription system that she developed and that is used by conversation analysts world-wide. Her research papers were a distinctive and original voice in the emerging micro-analysis of interaction in everyday life.

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.

This book explores the various choices speakers or communicators make when expressing power relations in modern societies. The volume brings together several disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, communication studies and social psychology, to give insight into how interactants co-construct different aspects of power in their everyday life.

This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or 'impolite' to linguistic phenomena. Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.