Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on the Semantics of Under-represented Languages in the Americas. Conference held at Cornell University in 2012.

This book is an investigation of Arabic derivational morphology that focuses on the relationship between verb meaning and linguistic form. Beginning with the ground form, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the most common verb patterns of Arabic from a lexical semantic perspective. Peter Glanville explains why verbs with seemingly unrelated meanings share the same phonological shape, and analyses sets of words that contain the same consonantal root to arrive at a common abstraction. He uses both contemporary and historical data to explore the semantics of reflexivity, symmetry, causation, and repetition, and argues that the verb patterns of Arabic that express these phenomena have come about as the result of grammaticalization and analogical processes that are common cross-linguistically. The book adopts an approach to morphology in which rule-based derivation has created word patterns and consonantal roots, with the result that in some derivations roots may be extracted from a source word and plugged in to a pattern. It illustrates the semantic relationship between a source word and its derivative, while also offering evidence to support the view of the consonantal root as a morphological object. The volume will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Arabic language and linguistics who are interested in understanding the verb patterns of Arabic, the derivational relationships between words, and the construction of meaning in the mind. It will also appeal to researchers and students in morphology, semantics, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics.

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.

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory. The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants. The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

The present book is a study in the field of linguistic pragmatics, by using conversation analysis and microsociolinguistics as an extension of speech act theory, as well as in the field of applied linguistics by offering an analysis of a genuine Romanian conversational corpus. The study is first of all important for its theme - that of conversational narratives, since it is the first comprehensive research of this issue in Romanian research. Chapter 1 deals with the theoretical framework of the research which is based on the integration of two theoretical perspectives, conversation analysis and narrative analysis. Narrative analysis offers the instruments necessary for the micro analysis of narratives as fragments per se, whereas conversation analysis offers the basis for the integration of narratives in the context of conversational interaction. Chapter 2 views conversational narratives as texts having certain linguistic features and content traits. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the narrative as process. Chapter 3 investigates the content of the story proper, analysing its communicative functions, in other words it analyzes the functions of narratives as message. Chapter 4 examines the interaction between narrative and conversation from the perspective of the interactional role of cooperation between the two discourse genres, the perspective adopted being again that of conversation analysis. Chapter 3, The functions of conversational narratives, is the most extended of all chapters and considers conversational narrative as a complex multifunctional message. It is the author's merit to have completed and systemized the discussion on the functions of conversational narrative starting from complete theories on the functions of language. In the present case, the author opts for Halliday, discriminating mainly between the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. These three functions are detailed by using the theory of the communicative code on the functions of language proposed by Jakobson. The two theories (Halliday's and Jakobson's) are convergent, both viewing language from the perspective of communication. The advantage of this combination is obvious in the discussion on the interpersonal function, which can be detailed in an emotive (expressive, according to Buehler) function (which constructs the speaker), a persuasive function, which focuses on the interlocutor, a phatic function, which maintains the channel of communication and expresses the concern for the mutual saving of the interlocutors' faces. The right assumption adopted by the author is that in each and every case there is a dominant function, which relates to the purpose of communication, that is to the very illocutionary or perlocutionary dimension of the story, whereas the other functions are present but subordinate (it is the case of the referential and textual functions) or simply absent (the poetic function). The chapter offers a coherent and integrative perspective on the complexity of the functions of conversation analysis, on the complexity of the literature in the field. The analysis is entirely original, the only stories discussed being the ones taken from the corpus collected by the author. From a methodological point of view, the chapter makes extensive use of the Speech Act Theory and the Politeness Theory, with many sociolinguistic elements. The linguistic sections provide the interested readers with lists of formulas, cliches, etc., the present study enriching the picture of Romanian oral discourse. This book is very nicely and correctly written; it is a pleasant read. Professor Dr. Alexandra Cornilescu University of Bucharest

This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language, scalar expressions such as comparatives, intensifiers, and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However, cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example, in English more than anything can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance, and in Japanese the minimizer chotto 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book, Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different, the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface, and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics more generally.

The volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language and social interaction in an under-researched and less commonly taught Asian language.

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.

This volume is dedicated to Robin Cooper on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The honoree's contributions to formal linguistics and language technology range from quantifier storage techniques and generalised quantifiers to the development of foundations and applications of a type-theoretical framework for formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language, with a focus on linguistic interaction in conversation. In this book the reader will find brilliant contributions of prominent linguists, computer scientists and philosophers which ranges over a broad repertoire of topics related to the outstanding work of Robin Cooper.