The book discusses the central concepts of National Socialist art policy: 'degenerate art' and 'German art'. With the aid of linguistic discourse analysis the history of these concepts is traced from their emergence in the 18th century and their development investigated up to the deontic potential they were invested with in National Socialist criticism of literature and art. The author demonstrates how these two concepts were drawn upon in word and text as a foundation for bans on artists and the burning of paintings in the Third Reich.

This book argues that definite descriptions ('the table', 'the King of France') refer to individuals, as Gottlob Frege claimed. This apparently simple conclusion flies in the face of philosophical orthodoxy, which incorporates Bertrand Russell's theory that definite descriptions are devices of quantification. Paul Elbourne presents the first fully-argued defence of the Fregean view. He builds an explicit fragment of English using a version of situation semantics. He uses intrinsic aspects of his system to account for the presupposition projection behaviour of definite descriptions, a range of modal properties, and the problem of incompleteness. At the same time, he draws on an unusually wide range of linguistic and philosophical literature, from early work by Frege, Peano, and Russell to the latest findings in linguistics, philosophy of language, and psycholinguistics. His penultimate chapter addresses the semantics of pronouns and offers a new and more radical version of his earlier thesis that they too are Fregean definite descriptions.

This book introduces the essential principles and techniques of formal semantics. In formal semantics, structure is treated as the essential ingredient in the creation of sentence meaning from individual word meaning. This approach synthesizes the traditions of logical language analysis with the scientific findings of contemporary empirical linguistics and introduces new ways to understand language meaning. Designed as a quick yet thorough introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of research in modern linguistics today this volume reveals the beauty and elegance of the mathematical study of meaning. It contains examples and exercises. It offers an accessible style that is aimed at students developing knowledge of formal semantics. It can be applied to logic, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Mark Richard presents an original picture of meaning according to which a word's meaning is analogous to the biological lineages we call species. His primary thesis is that a word's meaning - in the sense of what one needs to track in order to be a competent speaker - is the collection of assumptions its users make in using it and expect their hearers to recognize as being made. Meaning is something that is spread across a population, inherited by each new generation of speakers from the last, and typically evolving in so far as what constitutes a meaning changes in virtue of the interactions of speakers with their (linguistic and social) environment. Meanings as Species develops and defends the analogy between the biological and the linguistic, and includes a discussion of the senses in which the processes of meaning change are and are not like evolution via natural selection. Richard argues that thinking of meanings as species supports Quine's insights about analyticity without rendering talk about meaning theoretically useless. He also discusses the relations between meaning as what the competent speaker knows about her language, meaning as the determinant of reference and truth conditions, and meaning qua what determines what sentence uses say. This book contains insightful discussions of a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, including: relations between meaning and philosophical analysis, the project of 'conceptual engineering', the senses in which meaning is and is not compositional, the degree to which to which referential meaning is indeterminate, and what such indeterminacy might tells us about propositional attitudes like belief and assertion.

Zu den Aufgaben einer Akademie der Wissenschaften gehoren nieht nur die sogenannten Langzeitvorhaben wie die Herausgabe des Grimmschen Worterbu ches oder des von der Nordrhein-Westfalischen Akademie betreuten Reallexikons und Jahrbuches fiir Antike und Christentum oder - in den monatlichen Sitzungen der beiden Klassen fiir Geisteswissenschaften und fiir Natur-, Ingenieur- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften - die Diskussion wissenschaftlicher Themen und Entwieklungen, sondem es ist auch eine gem iibemommene Verpflichtung der Akademie, intemationale Symposien zu bestimmten Fragen der Wissenschaft anzuregen und zu unterstiitzen. In einer Zeit, in der man von der schriftlichen Tradition zu den sogenannten Neuen Medien iiberzugehen scheint, ist es sicherlich berechtigt, den Blick zuriickzulenken auf eine Epoche, in der es noch keine oder nur eine unzureichende schriftliche Tradierung gab, oder auf Ethnien, in denen heute noch die iilteste Kommunikations methodik der oralen Dbertragung dichterischer Erzeugnisse lebendig ist. Wiihrend man in friiheren Jahrhunderten derartige miindliche Quellen weitgehend vemach liissigte, ist es in Europa seit d m 19. Jahrhundert zu einer intensiven Beschiiftigung mit diesem wiehtigen, bis heute in vielen Teilen der Welt brachliegenden Quellenmaterial gekommen. Gerade ein Medizinhistoriker wie ich, der sich derartiger miindlicher Uberlieferungen bei seinen Untersuchungen iiber die Ethno medizin verschiedenster Volkerschaften zu bedienen hat, darf sich besonders freuen, daB von sachkundigen Kennem Formen und Funktion dieser miindlichen Traditionen in aller Welt behandelt werden und damit neue AnstoBe zu einer intensiveren Beschiiftigung mit dieser Forschungsrichtung gegeben werden."

This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form. Natural language abounds in these apparently incomplete expressions, such as I laughed but Ed didn't, in which the final portion of the sentence, the verb 'laugh', remains unpronounced but is still understood. The range of phenomena involved raise general and fundamental questions about the workings of grammar, but also constitute a treasure trove of fine-grained points of inter- and intralinguistic variation. The volume is divided into four parts. In the first, authors examine the role that ellipsis plays and how it is analysed in different theoretical frameworks and linguistic subdisciplines, such as HPSG, construction grammar, inquisitive semantics, and computational linguistics. Chapters in the second part highlight the usefulness of ellipsis as a diagnostic tool for other linguistic phenomena including movement and islands and codeswitching, while part III focuses instead on the types of elliptical constructions found in natural language, such as sluicing, gapping, and null complement anaphora. Finally, the last part of the book contains case studies that investigate elliptical phenomena in a wide variety of languages, including Dutch, Japanese, Persian, and Finnish Sign Language.

This volume explores the nature of ellipsis, the core phenomenon that results in various types of omission in sentences. The chapters adopt the popular 'silent structure' accounts of ellipsis, and investigate the question of when linguistic material becomes silenced during the derivation and realization of syntactic structure. The book begins with a detailed introduction from the editors that outlines the current generative syntactic approaches to the derivational timing of ellipsis. In the chapters that follow, internationally-recognized experts in the field address key topics including structure building, the architecture of grammar, the interaction of distinct modules with syntax, the order of operations in the post-syntactic component, and constraints on binding relations. The authors also present novel arguments for and against the derivational approaches to ellipsis, the licensing of ellipsis, and phonological constraints on elliptical sentences. The findings, based on data from English and other languages such as Armenian, Italo-Romance, Ossetic, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish, facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction between syntax and the neighbouring modules in the formation of elliptical utterances.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book presents a new logical framework to capture the meaning of sentences in conversation. The traditional approach equates meaning with truth-conditions: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know under which circumstances it is true. The reason for this is that linguistic and philosophical investigations are usually carried out in a logical framework that was originally designed to characterize valid argumentation. However, argumentation is neither the sole, nor the primary function of language. One task that language more widely and ordinarily fulfils is to enable the exchange of information between conversational participants. In the framework outlined in this volume, inquisitive semantics, information exchange is seen as a process of raising and resolving issues. Inquisitive semantics provides a new formal notion of meaning, which makes it possible to model various concepts that are crucial for the analysis of linguistic information exchange in a more refined and more principled way than has been possible in previous frameworks. Importantly, it also allows an integrated treatment of statements and questions. The first part of the book presents the framework in detail, while the second demonstrates its benefits in the semantic analysis of questions, coordination, modals, conditionals, and intonation. The book will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and logic.

Die zentrale These dieses Buches lautet: Die Semantik des deiktischen Phanomens - des Zeigens und Verweisens mittels Sprache - darf von dem wahrnehmenden und aktiv verhaltensorientierten Organismus nicht getrennt behandelt werden. Sie kann erst durch eine Betrachtung des sprachlichen Geschehens in einem globalen Zusammenhang mit der visuellen und sprachlichen Struktur und Dynamik des intentionalen Verhaltenssystems Organismus geklart werde. Die Bedeutung der Deixis entsteht im Akt des Hinsehens beim vorkommunikativen, intra-organismischen Orientierungsprozess, die Leistung der Deixis besteht im Akt des Zeigens beim inter-organismischen Orientierungsprozess in einer "elementaren Kommunikationssituation.""

This is a study of pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English. Pragmatic markers are multifunctional and this can make it difficult to describe their meaning and potential. In particular, we know little about pragmatic markers and prosody, their sociolinguistic use or their distribution across text types. This book looks at pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, with a focus on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text. Karen Aijmer explores the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse aspects of the markers. By taking a broader perspective on the markers, classifying them, describing their class-specific properties and analysing individual markers, she assesses whether any generalisations can be made about the prosody of the markers. It includes a definition of pragmatic markers in the context of the book. It features chapter-long case studies of the pragmatic markers well, in fact and actually. Each chapter has a clear introduction and conclusion.

This book focuses on how readers can be 'manipulated' during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control. Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers' responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.

This book is a study of around seven hours of naturally occurring video data, recorded by the author in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. Drawing on the methodology of Conversation Analysis, Gazin analyses instructional sequences of interaction during driving lessons. The temporal constraints of mobility make the driving lessons a rich setting for the investigation of sequence organisation and action constitution. The author identifies different types of actions that compose the unfolding driving and instructing activity, and their turn-constructional features (e.g. different verb forms for specific instructions). The analyses thereby offer insights that inform fundamental concepts like multiactivity and multimodality. The investigations in this book contribute to an increased understanding of the mechanisms of human interaction in general and in mobile settings more specifically.

Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. This book offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes, language variation, among others. On the other, the volume offers an overview of references describing the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL). The author provides a broad critical review of previous works to date, which has enabled her to detect areas of research still unexplored.