It is a commonplace in educational policy and theory to claim that digital technology has 'transformed' the university, the nature of learning and even the essence of what it means to be a scholar or a student. However, these claims have not always been based on strong research evidence. What are students and scholars actually doing in the day-to-day life of the digital university? This book examines in detail how the world of the digital interacts with texts, artefacts, devices and humans, in the contemporary university setting. Weaving together perspectives from a range of thinkers and disciplinary sources, Lesley Gourlay draws on ideas from posthuman and new materialist theory in particular, to open up our understanding about how digital knowledge practices operate. She proposes that digital engagement in the university should not be regarded as 'virtual' or disembodied, but instead may be understood as a complex set of entanglements of the body, texts and material artefacts, making a case that agency and the ways in which knowledge emerges should be regarded as 'more than human'.

This book investigates the syntax and semantics of proportional most and other majority quantifiers across languages. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Ion Giurgea draw on data from around 40 languages to demonstrate the existence of two distinct semantic types of most: a distributive type, which compares cardinalities of sets of atoms, and a cumulative type, which involves measuring plural and mass entities with respect to a whole. On the syntactic side, the most significant difference is between partitive and non-partitive configurations: certain majority quantifiers are specific to partitive constructions, while others are also allowed in non-partitives. The volume also explores complex expressions of the type the largest part and nominal quantifiers of the type the majority. The authors argue in favour of a quantificational analysis of most, in contrast to many recent studies, but adopt a bipartition-cum-superlative analysis for the largest part. The volume is a large-scale crosslinguistic investigation, offering typological insights as well as case studies from a range of languages, including German, Romanian, Hungarian, Hindi, and Syrian Arabic. The findings have implications for the study of number marking, partitivity, kind reference, (in)definiteness marking, and other crucial issues in linguistic theory.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish Pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them. Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirty-three chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including: * Discourse * Variation; Culture and interculture * (Im)politeness; humor * Learning contexts and teaching * Technology This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics.

The Logic of Narratives is a linguistic study of narrative discourse that contextualizes the 'logical' rather than the 'stylistic' aspect of narratives within the range of current issues in the interdisciplinary study of narratives being conducted in linguistics, philosophy, literature, cognitive science, and Artificial Intelligence. The book quantitatively analyzes naturally occurring narratives randomly selected from the British National Corpus (BNC) as well as James Joyce's (1882-1941) The Dead (1914) and Fredrik Backman's (1981-) A Man Called Ove (2012). Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) formalization (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) is employed and enriched with the representations and interpretations of perspective/point of view, genre differences, coherence relations, and episodes, which are called in the book Perspectival DRT (PDRT).

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.

Stefanie Lange erforscht das immersive Erleben von enhanced E-Books. Die Rezeption dieser digitalen Literaturform unterscheidet sich vor allem durch ihre Multimodalitat und Interaktivitat vom Lesen von Printbuchern. Somit verandern sich die Wahrnehmung und das Leseverstehen. Durch eine empirische Studie werden diese Veranderungen und Unterschiede zum Printlesen, mit Fokussierung des immersiven Lesens, sichtbar gemacht. Hierbei geht es auch darum, herauszufinden, welche Potentiale und Chancen enhanced E-Books fur den Literaturunterricht haben koennen.

Die PEWU-Studie liefert eine empirisch untermauerte Einschatzung des Nutzens von portablen elektronischen Woerterbuchern (PEW) als unterrichtlichem Hilfsmittel. Jan Kassel untersuchte uber anderthalb Jahre den Einsatz von PEW im Englischunterricht. Elektronische Woerterbucher wecken die Bereitschaft zur Woerterbucharbeit und foerdern die Lernmotivation. Leistungsschwache Englischlernende nutzen die Besonderheiten von PEW und schlagen selbst polyseme Lemmata erfolgreich nach. Durch die Identifikation von potenziellen Fehlerquellen einerseits und der Analyse des noetigen Wissens fur erfolgreiches Nachschlagen andererseits wird eine Basis fur eine woerterbuchdidaktische Konzeption geschaffen.

There is growing acceptance among pragmaticians that identity is often (de)constructed and negotiated in communication in order to impact the outcome of the interaction. Filling an important gap in current research, this book offers the first systematic, pragmatic theory to account for the generative mechanisms of identity in communication. Using data drawn from real-life communicative contexts in China, Xinren Chen examines why identity strategies are adopted, how and why identities are constructed and what factors determine their appropriateness and effectiveness. In answering these questions, this book argues that identity is an essential communicative resource, present across various domains and able to be exploited to facilitate the realization of communicative needs. Demonstrating that communication in Chinese involves the dynamic choice and shift of identity by discursive means, Exploring Identity Work in Chinese Communication suggests that identity is intersubjective in communication in all languages and that it can be accepted, challenged, or even deconstructed.

In Rationalist Pragmatism: A Framework for Moral Objectivism, Mitchell Silver draws from a wide array of philosophical fields to formulate a comprehensive theory of ethics. He argues that an understanding of justification rooted in pragmatism leads to practical principles that apply to all those we would recognize as persons. The account bears implications for the nature of selfhood, the freedom of the will, the meaning of moral terms, the power of moral principles to motivate, conceptions of truth, the nature of value, and the use and abuse of abstract moral theorizing. Rationalist Pragmatism develops its pragmatically informed morality in light of prominent ethical schools, as well as relevant topics in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, including the correspondence theory of truth, inferentialist semantics, motivational internalism, the source of value, and experimental philosophy. Finally, Silver explores concrete moral and political implications of his theory, demonstrating that metaethics can affect positions regarding the morality of personal relations; the treatment of animals; and political assessments of democracy, socialism, and nationalism. Silver maintains that our interest in truth-our rational nature as practical and theoretical beings-forms us as a community of mutually recognizing truth seekers.

In Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God?, D. E. Buckner argues that all reference is story-relative. We cannot tell which historical individual a person is talking or writing about or addressing in prayer without familiarity with the narrative (oral or written) which introduces that individual to us, so we cannot understand reference to God, nor to his prophets, nor to any other character mentioned in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures, without reference to those very scriptures. In this context we must understand God as the person who "walked in the garden in the cool of the day" (Gen. 3:8), and who is continuously referred to in the books of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, as well as the Quran. Further developing ideas presented by the late Fred Sommers in his seminal The Logic of Natural Language, Buckner argues that singular reference and singular conception is empty outside such a context.

This book explores and analyzes the ways fat acceptance activists have advocated through language and tactical action. Using Anthony Giddens' concept of Structuration in the make-up of ideology, the book identifies how fat acceptance activists use signification, domination, and legitimation to strengthen their cause. Thus, their actions are both rhetorical and tactical. Fat-considered a descriptor and not a negative label among activists-is highly stigmatized for arbitrary reasons in various areas of life ranging from the fashion industry to health care. This books shows how fat acceptance activists work to remedy this situation.

Philology the discipline of making sense of texts is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology" charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding.

Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read.

Covering a wide range of cultures Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European World Philology "lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline."