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 is the first textbook on Functional Discourse Grammar, a recently developed theory of language structure which analyses utterances at four independent levels of grammatical representation: pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological. The book offers a very systematic and highly accessible introduction to the theory: following the top-down organization of the model, it takes the reader step-by-step though the various levels of analysis (from pragmatics down to phonology), while at the same time providing a detailed account of the interaction between these different levels. The many exercises, categorized according to degree of difficulty, ensure that students are challenged to use the theory in a creative manner, and invite them to test and evaluate the theory by applying it to the new data in various linguistic contexts. Evelien Keizer uses examples from a variety of sources to demonstrate how the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar can be used to analyse and explain the most important functional and formal features of present-day English. The book also contains examples from a wide variety of other typologically diverse languages, making it attractive not only to students of English linguistics but to anyone interested in linguistic theory more generally.

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.

For over 200 years scholars have been talking about the possibility of changing the spelling of English so that it would be easier to learn and easier to remember. Using Ogden's Basic English 5000 words as a basis, this dictionary attempts to provide a phonetic alphabet based primarily on that of James Pitman's and a few simple rules to arrive at an idealized re-spelling of the most common English words. Definitions are not given since the focus is on the spelling and not the meanings of the words which can be found in any common English dictionary. Although this dictionary is limited to Ogden's Basic English vocabulary, the re-spelling of Kleer English, as I call it, can easily be extended to the entire English Language vocabulary.

Pragmatics & Language Learning Volume 13 examines the organization of second language and multilingual speakers' talk and pragmatic knowledge across a range of naturalistic and experimental activities. Based on data collected among ESL and EFL learners from a variety of backgrounds, the contributions explore the nexus of pragmatic knowledge, interaction, and L2 learning outside and inside of educational settings.

In this book Mr. Putman presents for the first time his theory of semantics or, in the vernacular, "How language works." Other theories abound. Frege, Russell, Strawson, Donnellan are some of the famous philosophers of the past who's semantic theories are in print. Until now, few of us cared which theory of semantics is correct. We know language works and we use it. But the theory presented in this book is different. It has a practical bent. Once you understand Putman's "Distinctive Semantics" from Chapter 1 of this book, you can make use of it whenever you read or write. Just how to make use of it comprises the other four chapters of his book.

2013 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." With "Word and Object" Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy's turn away from metaphysics and what has been called the "phony precision" of conceptual analysis. In the course of his discussion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference, Quine considers the indeterminacy of translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language's referential apparatus, clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects. A profoundly influential work.

Introducing Arabic Rhetoric is a collection of lecture notes delivered for undergraduate and post-graduate courses taught at Schools within the university of London as well as independent educational colleges. It is merely an introductory book that supplements the classroom material and subject lecture and aims to introduce students to the unique discipline of rhetorical studies as understood and formulated by Medieval Muslim rhetoricians drawing on materials from classical Qur'anic commentary and Arabic linguistics. The book comprises of ten broad chapters outlining preliminary areas and a general exploration of traditional sub-fields within Arabic rhetoric applied to the Qur'an. The book contains primary Arabic source material with all key technical terms translated with extensive notes and a helpful glossary at the end. There is also an appendix at the end that includes an Arabic edition of the primer on rhetoric composed by 18th century jurist, Mystic and philologist Ahmad al-Dardir focusing specifically on 'Ilm al-Bayan ('Figures of Speech') for a small representative text for further study and exploration.

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Salvatore Attardo takes a broad approach to the topic, exploring not only theoretical linguistic analyses, but also pragmatic and semantic aspects, conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactionist and variationist sociolinguistics. The volume begins with chapters that introduce the terminology and conceptual and methodological apparatus, as well as outlining the major theories in the field and examining incongruity and resolution and the semiotics of humor. The second part of the book explores humor competence, with chapters that cover semantic and pragmatic topics, the General Theory of Verbal Humor, and puns and their interpretation. The third part provides an in-depth discussion of the applied linguistics of humor, and examines social context, discourse and conversation analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects. In the final part of the book, the discussion is extended beyond the central field of linguistics, with chapters discussing humor in literature, in translation, and in the classroom. The volume brings together the multiple strands of current knowledge about humor and linguistics, both theoretical and applied; it assumes no prior background in humor studies, and will be a valuable resource for students from advanced undergraduate level upwards, particularly those coming to linguistics from related disciplines.

The thesis explores the syntactic and semantic dimensions of four linguistic elements that appear in Modern Greek arguably as quantifiers and modifiers, i.e., in the form of Quantificational Modifiers (QMods) olos 'all, whole, overall' and its extension olikos 'total', merikos 'some, a few, partial', ligos 'some, few, little, insignificant' and polis 'many, great, considerable'. Such QMods are analyzed as 'measure' quantifiers of scalar semantics that appear in a syntactic position common to adjectival modifiers. The thesis explores specific sets of reading and their interpretations. Such a phenomenon is common to Modern Greek, English, French and Arabic QMods and gives evidence to the universality of Quantificational Modification.Chapter 1 discusses Quantification as semantic interpretation along with the main questions this research intends to answer, while Chapter 2 reviews recent literature on Quantification within and across languages. Chapter 3 focuses on Modern Greek expressions of Quantification and extends chapter 2 into a further discussion about the various syntactic manifestations. Chapters 4 and 5 are extensions to chapters 2 and 3 as they discuss the semantics of specific QMods as 'total' and 'partial' quantifiers, which operate on homomorphic sets of degrees and amounts.Chapter 6 discusses the broader issues in the thesis from a theoretical and typological perspective that establishes Quantificational Modification as a universal and purely semantic subclass of Quantification. Our findings are summarized in chapter 7, followed by suggestions for expanding our investigation into other related areas.

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.

Language is more than words: it includes the prosodic features and patterns that we use, subconsciously, to frame meanings and achieve our goals in our interaction with others. Here, Nigel G. Ward explains how we do this, going beyond intonation to show how pitch, timing, intensity and voicing properties combine to form meaningful temporal configurations: prosodic constructions. Bringing together new findings and hitherto-scattered observations from phonetic and pragmatic studies, this book describes over twenty common prosodic patterns in English conversation. Using examples from real conversations, it illustrates how prosodic constructions serve essential functions such as inviting, showing approval, taking turns, organizing ideas, reaching agreement, and evoking action. Prosody helps us establish rapport and nurture relationships, but subtle differences in prosody across languages and subcultures can be damagingly misunderstood. The findings presented here will enable both native speakers of English and learners to listen more sensitively and communicate more effectively.

Little exposure and few opportunities for practice are two main drawbacks for learners in instructional contexts. These problems are intensified when dealing with face-threatening acts such as refusals, as learners are not fully capable of expressing their meanings and miscommunication is a likely by-product. The present volume aims at exploring factors and production of refusals in different instructional settings by means of ten original papers which address key questions dealing with the speech act of refusals. The relevance of the volume lies in the individual contributions which embrace innovative perspectives on refusals in order to provide an excellent contribution to this field of enquiry. The book is an obligatory reading for researchers and students interested in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, who will benefit from the range of educational contexts in which refusals are investigated.

This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece. While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism. In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work. This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday settings, how they select languages and manage identities in multilingual contexts and how the linguistic-interactional divide can be bridged with studies combining Conversation Analysis and Functional Linguistics. This variety of issues and approaches clearly shows the fruitfulness of a socio-interactional perspective on second language learning.

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that takes place in the checking of the verb's telic features.Contrary to the assumption that only the direct internal argument of the verb can delimit an event, I argue that objects generated in the lower verb phrase, by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb can delimit an event. An object delimits an event by checking the verb's telic features in spec-AspP, either by covert or overt movement. If a predicate contains one internal argument (e.g., the boy filled the bucket) the checking of the verb's telic features takes place via covert movement. That is, only the NPs specific quantification features move covertly to check the verb's telic features in spec-AspP. However, if the predicate contains two internal arguments (e.g., fill the bucket with water), the surfaced subject (e.g., the water filled the bucket) by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb, checks the verb's telic features as the category and its features move overtly to subject position.The study shows that young children understand telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via overt movement, but have difficulties understanding telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via covert movement. I propose that predicates whose telicity involves overt movement should be acquired earlier than predicates whose telicity involves covert movement because overt movement is an operation that happens between D-structure and S-structure before the sentence is pronounced. Predicates whose telicity involves covert movement might be acquired at a later age of development because covert movement happens between S-structure and LF after the sentence is pronounced.

The Semantics of Grammatical Dependencies argues that constraints of interaction from semantic evaluations enforce grammatical dependency patterns that recur across natural languages and within constructions at intra and inter sentential levels as well as discourse levels. The book develops along three lines. Firstly, a handle is gained on why languages are structured around localities, with localities functioning as actions of 'reset' to permit the reuse of grammatical resources that maintain a fixed semantic contribution. Secondly, sensitivity is brought to the linear and hierarchical placement of scope information to capture ordering effects like accessibility, crossover and intervention. Thirdly, an interestingly different perspective is reached on what it means to be grammatical: rather than being a destructive feature that bans or filters out bad structure, grammaticality takes on a role of constructive guidance that keeps languages to what are generally unambiguous canonical forms that moreover guarantee required dependencies. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, post-graduate and research students and all researchers in the formal analysis of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of natural language.

The book deals with the presence of language aggression in postclassical Roman law, in common opinion one of the characteristic features of the decadence at the dawn of the Byzantine culture. In his analysis of normative sources, the author makes use of an original research method whereby he concentrates on seeking out particular ideologically charged terms in the relevant articles of law, in order to analyze, throughout each selected corpus of legal documents, the context in which they appear and, on that basis, to determine their specific semantic fields. Notably, in his thorough analysis of the statements which are definitely negative in relation to those who are regarded as enemies of the state, he proceeds to examine such expressions semiologically, as based on the traditional forms of invective present in Greek and Roman literature. The book consists of three parts: the first considers the methodological assumptions of the work, the second is devoted to an analysis of the negatively marked vocabulary as found in the relevant constitutions, and the third identifies the groups of enemies of the Roman order and presents conclusions resulting from the author's analysis of the quantities of terms and expressions of invective in the relevant sources. The author attempts to determine semantic fields of the invective-forming expressions on the basis of a wide range of reference material, at times reaching as far as several centuries back (from the perspective of the Late Antique period). The book is intended for scholars and students of postclassical law, historians, and philologists.

When Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose was pronounced "ke-kou ke-la." It sounded right, but it literally translated as "bite the wax tadpole."
Language, like travel, is always stranger than we expect and often more beautiful than we imagine. In "Biting the Wax Tadpole" Elizabeth Little takes a decidedly unstuffy and accessible tour of grammar via the languages of the world--from Lithuanian noun declensions and imperfective Russian verbs to Ancient Greek and Navajo. And in one of the most courageous acts in the history of popular grammar books, she attempts to provide an explanation of verbal aspect that people might actually understand. Other difficult and pressing questions addressed in "Biting the Wax Tadpole" include:
*Just what, exactly, the Swedish names of IKEA products mean
*Why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural
*How Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) was able to take an otherwise unexceptional pair of breakfast foods and turn them into literary fodder for generations
*Why "Joanie Loves Chachi" was Korea's highest rated television show ever
*Why Basque grammar seems downright kooky to just about anyone who isn't a native speaker