This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

This study provides a systematic overview of articles and article systems in the world's languages using a sample of 104 languages. Articles can be classified into 10 types according to their referential functions: definite, anaphoric, weak definite, recognitional, indefinite, presentational, exclusive-specific, nonspecific, inclusive-specific, and referential articles. All 10 types are described in detail with examples from various languages of the world. The book also addresses crosslinguistic trends concerning the distribution and the development of different article types, and it proposes a typology of article systems. The aim of this study is to provide a general crosslinguistic overview concerning the attested properties and distributions of articles. It is geared towards readers with interests in language typology and the nominal domain, and it can serve as a point of reference for language-specific studies of articles or determiners.

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.

Much of the literature on modality focuses, at least implicitly, on the occurrence of single modal auxiliaries. However, cross-linguistically, modal auxiliaries can co-occur with one another, but under interesting restrictions. This monograph examines layered modal constructions and the semantic restrictions under which they combine. The main puzzle addressed in the book is the question of ordering restrictions among modal auxiliaries and whether these have any semantic consequences, and finally, what the conceptual rationale is behind these restrictions. Based on the data from Croatian, the central proposal is that modal restrictions depend heavily on both modal force and flavour, and combine according to a hierarchy that can possibly be extended cross-linguistically since it rests on the basis of the conceptual and logical reality of human language. The book also offers an in-depth overview of the literature on layered modal constructions as well as a valuable and extensive set of analyzed data which will be of great interest for researchers interested in verbal systems, modality, and Slavic languages.

This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to 'map' the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.

This book traces the evolutionary trajectory of language and teaching from the earliest periods of human evolution to the present day. The author argues that teaching is unique to humans and our ancestors, and that the evolution of teaching, language, and culture are the inextricably linked results of gene-culture coevolutionary processes. Drawing on related fields including archaeology, palaeontology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology and linguistics, he makes the case that the need for joint attention and shared goals in complex adaptive strategies is the underlying driver for the evolution of language-like communication. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of these disciplines, as well as lay readers with an interest in human origins.

The collection of papers addresses the perennial problem of the relation between language and meaning. It proposes various theoretical approaches to the issue ranging from a synergetic theory of meaning merging the cognitive and the socio-historical perspectives, through holistic, evolutionary models and a revision of some of the assumptions of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to the discussion of the role of pragmatic competence in meaning construction. A number of papers make recourse to corpus based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The topics of specific linguistic investigations cover such diverse issues as idiom processing, emotion words in Chinese, valuation of abstract nouns, the preposition at and scalar adjectives. Several papers explore the application of the reflections on the nature of meaning to lexicography and translation. One, self-reflective article investigates the consequences of the unformulated assumptions about meaning for the coherence of proposed linguistic theories. The volume firmly places the study of meaning in the centre of the linguistic research by showing its significance for linguistic theory and its applications.

The book contains essays in honor of Victor Raskin. The contributions are all directly related to some of the major areas of work in which Raskin's scholarship has spanned for decades. The obvious connecting idea is the encyclopedic script-based foundation of lexical meaning, which informs his pioneering work in semantics in the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of the book collects articles directly concerned with script-based semantics, which examine both the theoretical and methodological premises of the idea and its applications. Script-based semantics is the foundation of both Raskin's ground-breaking work in humor research (addressed by the articles in part 2) and in Ontological semantics (addressed in part 3), the most recent development of script-based semantics. The fourth part is dedicated to a less-known, but equally important, strand of Raskin's research, the applications of linguistics to other fields, including writing, lexicography, and professional applications (e,g., tourism). Overall, the book provides and up-to-date, in-depth discussion of an influential strand of the discussion on semantics and its most recent developments and influence on other seemingly unrelated fields, such as Cognitive Linguistics.

Together with the volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues," this book provides a journey through the more recent developments of pragmatics, considering both its philosophical and linguistic nature. This first volume is devoted to the theoretical models developed from a philosophical perspective, including both the newest advances of the classical theories and approaches, and pioneering and interdisciplinary ideas proposed to face the challenges of the fields and areas of practice and analysis. The topics investigated, which include implicatures, reference, presupposition, speech acts, metaphor, relevance, and common ground, represent the core of the state of the art in philosophical pragmatics. Research on these matters have been continuously changing the way that we can look at them. This book serves as a collection of works from the most eminent authors who represent the theoretical developments of the approaches that defined this field, together with the new philosophical insights coming from more applied disciplines such as argumentation, discourse analysis, or linguistics. The combination of these two perspectives provides a unique outline of the current research in pragmatics.

This book is about the representations - both visual and linguistic - which people give of their own places of origin. It examines the drawings of interviewees who were asked to draw their own place of origin on a white A3 sheet, using pencil or colour, according to their choice. If they were born in a place they did not remember because they moved in when they were very small, they could draw the place they did remember as the scenario of their early childhood. The drawings are examined from three different perspectives: semiotics, cognitive psychology and geography. The semiotic instruments are used to describe how each person reconstructs a complex image of his/her childhood place, and how they translate their own memories from one language to another, e.g. from drawing to verbal story, trying to approach what they want to express in the best possible way. The cognitive-psychological point of view helps clarify the emotional world of the interviewees and their motivations during the process of reconstruction and expression of their childhood experiences. The geographical conceptualizations concern a cultural level and provide insight into the cartographic models that inspire the maps people drew. One of the main findings was the influence from cultural codes as demonstrated in the fact that most of the US students interviewed drew their maps showing considerable cartographic expertise in comparison to their European counterparts.

Natural language differs from artificial ones in having the "displacement property," allowing expressions to "move" from one position to another in the sentence. The mapping from syntax to phonology, therefore, must include rules specifying how objects created by movement are pronounced, or in technical jargon, how chains are linearized. One of these rules is Copy Deletion. The present study investigates the structural description of Copy Deletion. Specifically, it proposes a phrase geometric constraint on its application. The proposal is corroborated by empirical arguments based on distributional and interpretational facts concerning predicate clefts, NP-Splits, and head ordering patterns. The data are drawn from languages of different types and families including Chinese, English, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. The book, thus, contributes to our understanding of a crucial property of natural language and should be of relevance to readers who are interested in the cross-linguistic approach to Universal Grammar research.

This book systematically examines the linguistic features and socio-cultural issues of 'Hong Kong English'. The author focuses on authentic data taken from the International Corpus of English (the Hong Kong component) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English to track the ways in which the English language in Hong Kong has been adapted by its users. She also analyses the emergence of new forms and structures in its grammar and discourse. While the phonetic and phonological aspects of this variety of English have been well documented, its grammatical peculiarities and social language use have been hitherto neglected. This book offers original insights into the grammatical and pragmatic/discoursal features of Hong Kong English and will therefore be of interest to those working in fields such as World Englishes and corpus linguistics.

This book sets out to describe the multi-dimensional nature and function of rhetorical questions in the Old Testament. Biblical scholars have previously analyzed the use of rhetorical questions in both Testaments, but consistently describe their function in persuasive terms. While this understanding is appropriate in a number of instances, many rhetorical questions do not operate this way, and Jim W. Adams focuses in particular on rhetoric expressing the self-involvement of both the speaker and hearer. Among linguistic philosophers, speech act theory has illuminated the fact that uttering a sentence does not merely convey information; it may also involve the performing of an action. The concept of communicative action provides additional tools to the exegetical process as it points the interpreter beyond the assumption that the use of language is merely for descriptive purposes. Language can also have performative and self-involving dimensions. In relation to speech act theory, linguistic specialists continue to research the nature of rhetorical questions.

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice's circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions (and related chapters), where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that (potential) presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle's Organon): the most basic aspects of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly frequent way to express quantification in Spanish, viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un aluvionN1 de llamadasN2 'a flood of calls') which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1. This volume offers a corpus-based, cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ) in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish, in synchrony and in diachrony, with major implications for reference grammars and theory building.

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and goes on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted "Inner Speech" Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

This book contributes to the recent theoretical developments in the area of mutual interactions of valency and aspect, as expressed in different types of verb-related nominal structures (nominalizations and synthetic compounds). A wide range of data from Slavic, Hellenic, Germanic, Romance and Semitic languages provides an empirical testing ground for competing theoretical explanations couched in the lexicalist and construction-based frameworks.

This volume brings together a wide array of papers which explore, among other things, to what extent languages and cultures are variable with respect to the interactions around the event of death. Motivated by J. L. Mey's idea of the pragmeme, a situated speech act, the volume has both theoretical and practical implications for scholars working in different fields of enquiry. As the papers in this volume reveal, despite the terminological differences between various disciplines, the interactions around the event of death serve to provide solace, not only to the dying, but also to the family and friends of the deceased, thus helping them to "accommodate" to the new state of affairs.

This volume presents new and cutting-edge research on the question of how we parse, interpret and understand language in more complex discourse settings. The challenge is to find empirical evidence on how information structure and semantic processing are related. Comprehensible answers are provided by showing how syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics interact and how they influence semantic processing and interpretation. The analysis of core information structural concepts that contribute to processing such as focus and contrast, the specific discourse status of referents that add to the common ground, context dependency and markedness as well as prosodic prominence and givenness marking has added new and convincing evidence to the research of information structure and semantic processing.

How do library professionals talk about and refer to library users, and how is this significant? In recent decades, the library profession has conceived of users in at least five different ways, viewing them alternatively as citizens, clients, customers, guests, or partners. This book argues that these user metaphors crucially inform librarians' interactions with the public, and, by extension, determine the quality and content of the services received. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide library professionals with insights and tools for avoiding common pitfalls associated with false or professionally inadequate conceptions of library users.

This book focuses on information literacy for the younger generation of learners and library readers. It is divided into four sections: 1. Information Literacy for Life; 2. Searching Strategies, Disciplines and Special Topics; 3. Information Literacy Tools for Evaluating and Utilizing Resources; 4. Assessment of Learning Outcomes. Written by librarians with wide experience in research and services, and a strong academic background in disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences, information technology, and library science, this valuable reference resource combines both theory and practice. In today's ever-changing era of information, it offers students of library and information studies insights into information literacy as well as learning tips they can use for life.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on the semantic properties of derived words and the processes by which these words are derived. To this day, many of these processes remain under-researched and the nature of meaning in derivational morphology remains ill-understood. All eight articles have an empirical focus and rely on carefully collected sets of data. At the same time, the contributions represent a broad variety of approaches. Several contributions deal with specific problems of the pairing of form and meaning, such as the rivalry between nominalizing suffixes or the semantic categories encoded by conversion pairs. Other articles tackle the more general question of how meaning is organized, e.g. whether there is evidence for the paradigmatic organization of derived words or the reality of the inflection-derivation dichotomy. The contributions feature innovative methodologies, such as representing lexical meaning as word distribution or predicting semantic properties by means of analogical algorithms. This volume offers new and highly interesting insights into how complex words mean, and offers directions for future research in an oft-neglected field.

This book offers a unique window to the study of im/politeness by looking at a translation perspective, which offers a different set of data and allows further understanding of the phenomenon. In the arena of real-life translation practice, the workings of im/politeness are renegotiated in a different cultural context and thus pragmatically oriented cross-cultural differences become more concrete and tangible. The book focuses on the language pair English and Greek, a strategic choice with Greek as a less widely spoken language and English as a global language. The two languages also differ in their politeness orientation in certain genres, which allows for a fruitful comparison. The volume focuses on press translation first, then translation of academic texts and translation for the stage, and finally audiovisual translation (mainly subtitles). These genres highlight a public, an interactional, and a multimodal dimension in the workings of im/politeness.