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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This book provides an introduction to the theory and methods of historical semantics. It gives a survey of the most important types of semantic innovation (metaphor, metonymy etc.), it describes typical paths and results of semantic change (polysemy, competition of lexical units, shifts of prototypical meaning), and it presents historical case studies on various fields of German vocabulary (from speech act verbs to forms of address). The book is designed for readers with no background knowledge of semantics and can be used for seminar discussion or self-study. It contains extensive exercises and suggestions for further reading.

This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.

Combining a fresh, previously unexplored view of the subject with a detailed overview of the past and ongoing philosophical discussion on the matter, this book investigates the phenomenon of semantic under-determinacy by seeking an answer to the questions of how it can be explained, and how communication is possible despite it.

In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.

The continental Germanic languages are well known to possess a wealth of modal particles (such as eigentlich, auch, and denn in German), whereas this is not the case in the Romance languages. The argument advanced here is that in Romance languages their functions are expressed by other means. To supply a tertium comparationis the study elaborates a communicative definition of modality, enabling us to identify forms of modal shading independently of translation comparisons. The investigation also demonstrates that in diachronic terms forms of modal shading (whether particles or not) are recruited from a specific type of language change.

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.

This book considers the syntax and semantics of non-verbal predicates (i.e., nominal, adjectival and prepositional predicates) in copular sentences. Isabelle Roy explores how a single structure for predication can account for the different interpretations of non-verbal predicates. The book departs from earlier studies by arguing in favor of a ternary distinction between defining / characterizing / situation-descriptive predicates rather than the more common stage-level/individual distinction. The distinction is based on two semantic criteria, namely maximality (i.e., whether the predicate describes an eventuality that has spatio-temporal properties or not) and density (i.e. whether the spatio-temporal properties are perceived as atomic or not). The author argues in favor of a strong correlation between the semantics properties of predicates and their internal syntactic structure. Her analysis accounts for seemingly unrelated cross-linguistic data: the indefinite article in French, the distribution of the two copulas 'ser'/'estar' in Spanish, and case marking on Russian predicates.

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 book shows that over forty years of psychological laboratory-based research support the claims of the Lexical Priming Theory. It examines how Lexical Priming applies to the use of spoken English as the book provides evidence that Lexical Priming is found in everyday spoken conversations.

This book synthesizes previous work on thanking, politeness and Japanese pragmatics and crystallises the theoretical underpinnings of thanking, how it is realized linguistically and the social meaning and significance of this aspect of Japanese communication.

In clear and lively prose that avoids jargon, the author carefully and systematically examines the many kinds of subtly nuanced words or word-pairs of everyday discourse such as 'and'-'but', 'before'-'ere', 'Chinese'-'Chink', and 'sweat'-'perspiration', that have proven resistant to truth-conditional explanations of meaning.

The subject of this extensive corpus-based study is the distribution and the functional role played by a total of 22 indefinite nouns in 9 key texts for Italian linguistic and literary history dating from the late 13th to the early 16th century (including ANovellinoA, ADecameronA, and Bembo's AProseA). The central issue is the semantic and functional differentiation of these indefinite forms as encountered in the texts. This is pinpointed by way of comparison with their Latin etyma and modern Italian equivalents. A further essential aspect is the problem of the grammaticalization of indefinite noun determinants in Italian and the Romance languages in general.