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.

This book brings together chapters on the semantics and pragmatics of measurement, scales, and numerical expressions. The chapters highlight recent developments in measurement theory, the meaning of numerical expressions and the relation between measurement scales and entailment scales. The authors provide explorations in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, as well as at the interfaces of this field with others including philosophy of language and sociolinguistics. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in these areas, as well as psychology, psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence.

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.

This book contributes to the scholarly debate on the forms and patterns of interaction and discourse in modern digital communication by probing some of the social functions that online communication has for its users. An array of experts and scholars in the field address a range of forms of social interaction and discourses expressed by users on social networks and in public media. Social functions are reflected through linguistic and discursive practices that are either those of 'convergence' or 'controversy' in terms of how the discourse participants handle interpersonal relations or how they construct meanings in discourses. In this sense, the book elaborates on some very central concerns in the area of digital discourse analysis that have been reported within the last decade from various methodological perspectives ranging from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to corpus linguistics. This edited collection will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the fields of digital discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social media and communication, and media and cultural studies.

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 book explores what new light philosophical approaches shed on a deeper understanding of (im)politeness. There have been numerous studies on linguistic (im)politeness, however, little attention has been paid to its philosophical underpinnings. This book opens new avenues for both (im)politeness and philosophy. It contributes to a fruitful dialogue among philosophy, pragmatics, and sociology. This volume appeals to students and researchers in these fields.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book uses a unique and extensive data survey of manufacturing firms in Zimbabwe to analyse firm-level responses to economic liberalization. The focus on labour and financial markets, investment behaviour, the determinants of entrepreneurship, productivity growth and efficiency, export performance, firm growth, and resource shifts between different manufacturing activities. Understanding these determinants is crucial evaluating the success or failure of structural adjustment.

The study focuses on the correlations existing between the conceptual properties of the modalities of visual and auditory perception and the semantic-syntactic behavior of the verbs of perception ver/voir, oA-r/entendre, mirar/regarder, and escuchar/A(c)couter. In part one of the book, the author argues that visual perception and auditory perception differ in terms of extra-linguistic criteria. Part two draws upon empirical material to advance syntactic evidence for a connection between the cognitive features of visual and auditory perception and the syntactic behavior of verbs expressing such perception.

Musikkritik wird unter zwei Aspekten untersucht: als umstrittene Textsorte in Alltagsmedien sowie als Textsorte, die es nach verbreiteter Auffassung mit der Verbalisierung von nicht (oder schwer) "Sagbarem", Musikalischem, zu tun hat. Von der Rezipientenseite ausgehend erweist sich die Musikkritik als deklarierende Textsorte mit - hier am Beispiel eines Corpus von Konzertkritiken ermittelten - systematisch herzuleitenden Spezifika in Aufbau, Inhalt und Sprache. Die Grenzen des Verstehens wie auch des Verbalisierens sind weniger eng als oft angenommen, da Rezipienten - nicht nur in der Musikkritik - durch Herstellung bestimmter innertextlicher sowie textsortenspezifischer intertextueller Bezuge Textausdrucke semantisieren, d.h. mit Bedeutung versehen koennen.

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.

The boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been important since the early twentieth century, but in the last twenty-five years it has become the central issue in the philosophy of language. This anthology collects classic philosophical papers on the topic, along with recent key contributions. It stresses not only the nature of the boundary, but also its importance for philosophy generally.

Das Buch ist in russischer Sprache verfasst. Das Woerterbuch ist das erste seiner Art, das die Wortart der Partikeln der russischen Gegenwartssprache in ihrer Gesamtheit erfasst und in ihrem Funktionieren detailliert und anschaulich beschreibt. Damit werden hier Woerter wissenschaftlich erklart, die in den Woerterbuchern der Vergangenheit stark vernachlassigt wurden, obwohl sie fur die naturliche Kommunikation eine ganz entscheidende Rolle spielen. Aus diesem Grund ist das Woerterbuch besonders auch fur Studierende, Lehrende und Forschende, UEbersetzer und Dolmetscher des Russischen von hoechstem Interesse.

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.