This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.

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.

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 book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance 'do things' with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with i) vocatives, interjections, and particles; and ii) illocutionary complementizers, items that look like subordinators but behave differently. Alice Corr argues that the behaviour of these conversation-oriented items provides insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. The approach identifies the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer - i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside - and the empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the configurational architecture of grammar also configures the architecture of the mind. The book thus builds on existing work on the syntax of discourse not only by contributing new empirical and theoretical insights, but also by pursuing explanatory adequacy via a so-called 'un-Cartesian' grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. Drawing on a wealth of naturalistic data from social media and online corpora, augmented by elicited introspective judgements, The Grammar of the Utterance offers new insights into the colloquial grammar and morphosyntactic variation of (Ibero-)Romance, and showcases the utility of comparative work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran all the way to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above.

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.

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 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.

Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life. N. J. Enfield draws on semantic and pragmatic case studies from his extensive fieldwork in Laos to investigate a range of semantic fields including emotion terms, culinary terms, landscape terminology, and honorific pronouns, among many others. These studies form the building blocks of a conceptual framework for understanding meaning in language. The book argues that the goals and relevancies of human communication are what bridge the gap between the private representation of language in the mind and its public processes of usage, acquisition, and conventionalization in society. Professor Enfield argues that in order to understand this process, we first need to understand the ways in which linguistic meaning is layered, multiple, anthropocentric, cultural, distributed, and above all, useful. This wide-ranging account brings together several key strands of research across disciplines including semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and sociology of language, and provides a rich account of what linguistic meaning is like and why.

Desde una perspectiva teorico-practica, las contribuciones del profesor Wotjak en el ambito de los estudios de traduccion han supuesto un serio y profundo avance en el conocimiento cientifico de la traductologia. El libro presenta una seleccion de articulos en espanol, escritos por el profesor de Leipzig a lo largo de mas de dos decadas y que han influenciado profundamente la traductologia espanola. Los temas tratados abarcan desde el proceso traductor, las herramientas y tecnicas de la traduccion, hasta reflexiones sobre sus aspectos cognitivos y comunicativos. Con estas aportaciones, Gerd Wotjak ofrece una reflexion profunda sobre la teoria y la epistemologia de la traduccion.

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

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.

Imposters are third person DPs that are used to refer to the speaker/writer or addressee, such as : (i) Your humble servant finds the time before our next encounter very long. (ii) This reporter thinks that the current developments are extraordinary. (iii) Daddy will be back before too long. (iv) The present author finds the logic of the reply faulty. This volume explores verbal and pronominal agreement with imposters from a cross-linguistic perspective. The central questions for any given language are: (a) How do singular and plural imposters agree with the verb? (b) When a pronoun has an imposter antecedent, what are the phi-features of the pronoun? The volume reveals a remarkable degree of variation in the answers to these questions, but also reveals some underlying generalizations. The contributions describe imposters in Bangla, Spanish, Albanian, Indonesian, Italian, French, Romanian, Mandarin and Icelandic.