This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.

This book provides an in-depth study of controlled languages used in technical documents from both a theoretical and practical perspective. It first explores the history of controlled languages employed by the manufacturing industry to shape and constrain the information in technical documents. The author then offers a comparative analysis of existing controlled languages and distills the best-practice features of those language systems. He concludes by offering innovative models that can be used to develop and trial a new controlled language. This book will be of interest to linguists working in technical and professional communication, as well as writers and practitioners involved in the production of technical documents for companies in multiple industries and geographical locations.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

This volume provides an up-to-date and evaluative review of theoretical and empirical stances on emotion and its close interaction with language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Importantly, it presents a novel methodological approach that takes into account contextual information and hence goes beyond the reductionist approach to affective language that has dominated contemporary research. Owing to this pragmatic approach, the book presents brand new findings in the field of bilingualism and affect and offers the first neurocognitive interpretation of findings reported in clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism. This not only represents an invaluable contribution to the literature, but may also constitute a breakthrough in the investigation of the worldwide phenomenon of bilingualism. Beginning with a thorough review of the history and current state of affective research and its relation to language, spanning philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic perspectives, the volume then proceeds to explore affect manifestation using neuropragmatic methods in monolingual and bilingual individuals. In doing so, it brings together findings from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism with cognitive, psychophysiological and neuroimaging paradigms. By combining conceptual understanding and methodological expertise from many disciplines, this volume provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain. Thus, Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective fosters a pragmatic approach to research on affective language processing in monolingual and bilingual population, one that builds bridges across disciplines and sparks important new questions in the cognitive neuroscience of bi- and multilingualism.

This book focuses on the discursive processes that allow activists to make sense of themselves and of the modes of politics they engage in. It shows how political and metadiscursive awareness develop in tandem with a reconfiguration of one's sense of self. The author offers an integrated pragmatic and poststructuralist perspective on self and subjectivity. He draws on Essex style discourse theory, early pragmatist philosophy, and linguistic pragmatics, arguing for a notion of discourse as a multi-dimensional practice of articulation. Demonstrating the analytical power of this perspective, he puts his approach to work in an analysis of activist discourse on integration and minority issues in Flanders, Belgium. Subjects articulate a whole range of norms, values, identities and narratives to each other when they engage in political discourse. This book offers a way to analyse the logics that structure political awareness and the associated boundaries for discursive self-interpretation.

The present volume of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics series, presents cutting-edge corpus pragmatics research on language use in new social and educational environments. The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics offers a platform to scholars who carry out rigorous and interdisciplinary research on language in real use. Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific research, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a precise methodology based on mathematics and statistics while Pragmatics strives to interpret intended meaning in real language. This series will give readers insight into how pragmatics can be used to explain real corpus data, and how corpora can illustrate pragmatic intuitions.

This book is an invitation to researchers who are committed to social change to look for ideas about transformation in an unexpected place - that is, in the data generated from empirical research. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and postmodern theory, it proposes a method of locating, through close grammatical analysis of everyday descriptions of the social world, the desire for alternative transformative structures. Drawing upon insightful analysis of conversational data collected over a period of 12 years from both 'marginalised' and 'mainstream' participants, it reveals innovative ways of imagining social structure. Clark proposes a view of the social world as in an embodied relationship with embodied selves.

This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements?

The chapters in this volume address a variety of issues surrounding quotation, such as whether it is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon, what varieties of quotation exist, and what speech acts are involved in quoting. Quotation poses problems for many prevailing theories of language. One fundamental principle is that for a language to be learnable, speakers must be able to derive the truth-conditions of sentences from the meanings of their parts. Another popular view is that indexical expressions like "I" display a certain fixity -- that they always refer to the speaker using them. Both of these tenets appear to be violated by quotation. This volume is suitable for scholars in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, and for graduate students in philosophy and linguistics. The book will also be useful for researchers in other fields that study quotation, including psychology and computer science.

This book critically refines and adds depth to current understandings and practices in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and EMI (English-Medium Instruction), using empirical research examining the experiences of English language learning and use of undergraduate and postgraduate international students in the UK. The author illuminates the language learning that takes place in and around English-medium higher education settings, both formally and informally, with a specific focus on courses with a creative or professional practice orientation. Drawing on theoretical insights from socio-cultural Second Language Acquisition, this volume capitalises on the synergies between applied linguistics and higher education research to paint a richer picture of the interactions facilitating student growth as confident and competent communicators in globalised academic and professional settings. Considering the broader implications of language development initiatives, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, English as a Second Language and second language acquisition.

This book examines the concept of " Neurosemantics", a term currently used in two different senses: the informational meaning of the physical processes in the neural circuits, and semantics in its classical sense, as the meaning of language, explained in terms of neural processes. The book explores this second sense of neurosemantics, yet in doing so, it addresses much of the first meaning as well. Divided into two parts, the book starts with a description and analysis of the mathematics of the brain, including computational units, representational mechanisms and algorithmic principles. This first part pays special attention to the neural architecture which has been used in developing models of neurosemantics. The second part of the book presents a collection of models, and describes each model reproducing specific aspects of the semantics of language. Some of these models target one of the core problems of semantics, the reference of nouns, and in particular of nouns with a strong perceptual characterization. Others address the semantics of predicates, with a detailed analysis of colour attributes. While this book represents a radical shift from traditional semantics, it still pursues a line of continuity that is based on the idea that meaning can be captured, and explained, by a sort of computation.

This book examines the transmission processes of the Aristotelian Mechanics. It does so to enable readers to appreciate the value of the treatise based on solid knowledge of the principles of the text. In addition, the book's critical examination helps clear up many of the current misunderstandings about the transmission of the text and the diagrams. The first part of the book sets out the Greek manuscript tradition of the Mechanics, resulting in a newly established stemma codicum that illustrates the affiliations of the manuscripts. This research has led to new insights into the transmission of the treatise, most importantly, it also demonstrates an urgent need for a new text. A first critical edition of the diagrams contained in the Greek manuscripts of the treatise is also presented. These diagrams are not only significant for a reconstruction of the text but can also be considered as a commentary on the text. Diagrams are thus revealed to be a powerful tool in studying processes of the transfer and transformation of knowledge. This becomes especially relevant when the manuscript diagrams are compared with those in the printed editions and in commentaries from the early modern period. The final part of the book shows that these early modern diagrams and images reflect the altered scope of the mechanical discipline in the sixteenth century.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter's voice and the original speaker's voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.

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 outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Joerg Schmid explains how this multiple feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage. The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact.

This book is an introduction to the relationship between the morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated illocutionary forces or force potentials. The volume begins with several chapters dedicated to important theoretical and methodological issues, such as sentence and utterance meaning, illocutionary force, clause types, and cross-linguistic comparison. The bulk of the book is then composed of chapter-length case studies that systematically investigate typologically prominent clause types and their forces, such as declaratives and assertions, interrogatives and questions, and imperatives and commands. These case studies begin with an overview of the necessary theoretical foundations, followed by a discussion of the grammatical structures of English, and an assessment of the relevant cross-linguistic facts. Each chapter ends with a succinct summary of the most important findings, practice exercises, and recommendations for further reading and research. Overall, the book works towards developing a gradient model of clause types that goes substantially beyond the traditional distinction between major and minor clause types. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

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.

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.