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.

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

Die ostseefinnischen Sprachen enthalten viele alte, d.h. vor etwa 500 A.D. ubernommene Woerter germanischer Herkunft. Die germanische Lehnwortschicht reicht teilweise bis in die Jahrhunderte vor unserer Zeitrechnung zuruck. Im dreibandigen Werk werden fast 1400 Stichwoerter behandelt. Die Autoren stellen nicht nur sichere Lehnwoerter vor, sondern auch solche Woerter, die in der Forschungsliteratur zu Unrecht fur germanische Lehnwoerter gehalten worden sind oder deren germanische Herkunft zweifelhaft ist.

This book examines the importance of politeness in pragmatic expression and communication, making a significant contribution to the debate over whether the universal politeness theory is applicable globally regardless of cultural differences.

This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers contributing novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness. Three main issues are addressed: gradable expressions and comparison, the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (such as 'clearly'), and ways of evading the sorites paradox.

Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals:

• raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to engage in social action
• fosters the ability to think critically about language data and use
• helps readers develop the ability to "do pragmatics"

The book features careful explanations of topics and concepts that are often difficult for uninitiated readers, a wealth of examples, mostly of natural speech from collected data sources, and attention to the needs of readers who are non-native speakers of English, with non-Western perspectives offered when possible. Suggested Readings, Tasks, Discussion Questions, and Data Analysis sections involve readers in extending and applying what they are reading. The exercises push readers to recall and synthesize the content, elicit relevant personal experiences and other sources of information, and engage in changing their own interactional strategies. The activities go beyond a predictable framework to invite readers to carry out real life observations and experiment to make doing pragmatics a nonjudgmental everyday practice.

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.

The 'profile' of a word is understood here as the totality of the semantic, combinatory, and grammatical features determining its specific communicative potential. The book provides profiles of well over 100 French nouns and verbs, thus supplying new foundations for the distinction of synonyms, the differentiation of subordinate meanings, and the etymology of the words in question. The study draws upon large-scale electronic corpora (modern novels, newspapers). The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate that the typical collocations encountered in everyday usage can be explained with reference to deeper semantic and cognitive structures.

This collection brings about a current interdisciplinary debate on explicit communication. With Robyn Carston's pragmatics at the core of the discussion, special attention is drawn to linguistic under-determinacy, the explicit/implicit divide and also to the construction or recruitment of concepts in on-line utterance comprehension.

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

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.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language, covering not only semantic matters but also topics normally considered to fall under pragmatics. Above all, the book displays and explains the richness and subtlety of meaning, with the aid of numerous examples and exercises throughout the text. Highly readable, written with style and wit, Meaning in Language is not bound to any particular theory, but provides explanations of theoretical approaches and perspectives as the context requires, with a stress throughout on the need for conceptual clarity.
The text and exercises in this third edition have been fully updated to take into account the most recent developments in the field and new chapters have been added, one on the semantics of prepositions and another on the semantics of derivational affixes.

Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.

Against the background of prototype theory the volume examines the meaning varieties of the German verb legen in present-day usage. On the basis of extensive material taken from written German, the individual variants of legen referring to a process going on in concrete space are identified and subjected to detailed analysis with reference to numerous example sentences. The systematic relations between the various usages are presented in the form of a semantic network displaying the interconnections between the meanings of the variants and the core meaning of the verb.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An Introduction to GDT, with an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date and its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics is followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

El objetivo de este libro es el analisis semantico-formal del componente morfologico de la lengua espanola. Para ello se ha recurrido a la semantica europea de Benveniste, Hjelmslev, Coseriu, etc. Siguiendo sus principios metodologicos, se han logrado establecer en este libro las principales oposiciones semanticas del sistema morfologico espanol, el significado invariante de cada una de sus unidades y sus particulares campos de uso.

Diese Professorin Regina Hessky gewidmete thematische Festgabe versammelt 27 Beitrage, die sich mit Problemen der lexikalischen Semantik, der Phraseologie und der Lexikographie des Deutschen aus einzelsprachlicher oder kontrastiver Perspektive auseinander setzen. Die Autoren des Bandes sind Vertreter der ungarischen und der internationalen Germanistik aus Deutschland, Frankreich, Russland, Schweden, Spanien und den USA.

Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language, information theory and cognitive psychology.

The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some seminal work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy.

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.