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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
This volume descibes, in up-to-date terminology and authoritative
interpretation, the field of neurolinguistics, the science
concerned with the neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension,
production and abstract knowledge of spoken, signed or written
language. An edited anthology of 165 articles from the
award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd edition,
Encyclopedia of Neuroscience 4th Edition and Encyclopedia of the
Neorological Sciences and Neurological Disorders, it provides the
most comprehensive one-volume reference solution for scientists
working with language and the brain ever published.
From K-pop to kimchi, Korean culture is becoming increasingly
popular on the world stage. This cultural internationalisation is
also mirrored linguistically, in the emergence and development of
Korean English. Often referred to as 'Konglish', this book
describes how the two terms in fact refer to different things and
explains how Koreans have made the English language their own.
Arguing that languages are no longer codified and legitimised by
dictionaries and textbooks but by everyday usage and media, Alex
Baratta explores how to reconceptualise the idea of 'codification.'
Providing illustrative examples of how Koreans have taken commonly
used English expressions and adjusted them, such as doing 'Dutch
pay', wearing a 'Burberry' and using 'hand phones', this book
explores the implications and opportunities social codification
presents to EFL students and teachers. In so doing, The Societal
Codification of Korean English offers wider perspectives on English
change across the world, seeking to dispel the myth that English
only belongs to 'native speakers'.
Typically, books on evaluation in the second and foreign language
field deal with large programs and often result from large?scale
studies done by the authors. The challenge for ordinary second and
foreign language classroom teachers is that they must extrapolate
techniques or strategies for evaluation from a very large scale to
a much smaller scale, that of the course. At the same time,
classroom teachers are responsible for outcomes of their courses
and need to do evaluation on a scale and for needs of their
choosing. Evaluating Second Language Courses is designed for
classroom teachers who are dealing with a single course, and who
wish to understand and improve some aspect of their course.
The main purpose of the book is to explore whether native
speakerism has an influence on Polish language schools, using the
explanatory mixed-methods design. The findings show that the
ideology is present in Poland, but it is manifested in complex and
subtle ways. Most prominent findings indicate a wage gap between
teachers considered native speakers and their Polish counterparts,
and the discrepancy between the levels of education required of the
two groups, with native speakers often being employed without
necessary qualifications. Finally, the findings suggest that Polish
teacher education programmes should expose budding teachers to
relevant literature regarding native speakerism and other issues
related to native and non-native speaker status so that they can
critically examine them.
This book provides an overview of current theories of and methods
for analysing spoken discourse. It includes discussions of both the
more traditional approaches of pragmatics, conversation analysis,
interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and
critical discourse analysis, and more recently developed approaches
such as multimodal discourse analysis and critical
sociolinguistics. Rather than treating these perspectives as
mutually exclusive, the book introduces a framework based on
principles from mediated discourse analysis in which different
approaches to spoken discourse are seen as complementing and
informing one another. In this framework, spoken discourse is seen
as mediated through a complex collection of technological, semiotic
and cultural tools which enable and constrain people's ability to
engage in different kinds of social actions, enact different kinds
of social identities and form different kinds of social
relationships. A major focus of the volume is on the way
technological tools like telephones, broadcast media, digital
technologies are changing the way people communicate with spoken
language. The book is suitable for use as a textbook in advanced
courses in discourse analysis and language in social interaction,
and will also be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields
including linguistics, sociology, media studies and anthropology.
When Donald J. Trump announced his campaign for president in 2015,
journalists, historians, and politicians alike attempted to compare
his candidacy to that of Governor George C. Wallace. Like Trump,
Wallace, who launched four presidential campaigns between 1964 and
1976, utilized rhetoric based in resentment, nationalism, and anger
to sway and eventually captivate voters among America's white
majority. Though separated by almost half a century, the campaigns
of both Wallace and Trump broke new grounds for political
partisanship and divisiveness. In Fear, Hate, and Victimhood: How
George Wallace Wrote the Donald Trump Playbook, author Andrew E.
Stoner conducts a deep analysis of the two candidates, their
campaigns, and their speeches and activities, as well as their
coverage by the media, through the lens of demagogic rhetoric.
Though past work on Wallace argues conventional politics overcame
the candidate, Stoner makes the case that Wallace may in fact be a
prelude to the more successful Trump campaign. Stoner considers how
ideas about "in-group" and "out-group" mentalities operate in
politics, how anti-establishment views permeate much of the
rhetoric in question, and how expressions of victimhood often
paradoxically characterize the language of a leader praised for
"telling it like it is." He also examines the role of political
spectacle in each candidate's campaigns, exploring how media
struggles to respond to-let alone document-demagogic rhetoric.
Ultimately, the author suggests that the Trump presidency can be
understood as an actualized version of the Wallace presidency that
never was. Though vast differences exist, the demagogic positioning
of both men provides a framework to dissect these times-and perhaps
a valuable warning about what is possible in our highly digitized
information society.
This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the
Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part
of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various
contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of
the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic
perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical,
semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of
predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical
categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses
find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora
or written sources, including those representing the less studied
varieties of the area.
This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the
semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the
verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as
prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set
predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from
the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven
and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the
syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the
predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers
new insights into language representation in English and Polish,
and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive
mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the
situation of rewarding.
In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in
unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be
placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the
first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and
functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in
conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative
with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the
present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials
in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar
to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates
whether different medial positions are associated with distinct
discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or
different focus meanings.
This volume highlights the dynamic nature of the field of English
Linguistics and features selected contributions from the 8th
Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of
Contemporary English. The contributions comprise studies (i) that
focus on the structure of linguistic systems (or subsystems) or the
internal structure of specific construction types, (ii) that take
an interest in variation at all linguistic levels, or (iii) that
explore what linguistic findings can tell us about human cognition
in general, and language processing in particular. All chapters
represent state-of-the-art research that relies on rigorous
quantitative and qualitative analysis and that will inform current
and future linguistic practice and theory building.
The concept of 'populism' is currently used by scholars, the media
and political actors to refer to multiple and disparate
manifestations and phenomena from across both the left and the
right ends of the political spectrum. As a result, it defies neat
definition, as scholarship on the topic has shown over the last 50
years. In this book, Sebastian Moreno Barreneche approaches
populism from a semiotic perspective and argues that it constitutes
a specific social discourse grounded on a distinctive narrative
structure that is brought to life by political actors that are
labelled 'populist'. Conceiving of populism as a mode of semiotic
production that is based on a conception of the social space as
divided into two groups, 'the People' and 'the Other', this book
uses semiotic theory to make sense of this political phenomenon.
Exploring how the categories of 'the People' and 'the Other' are
discursively constructed by populist political actors through the
use of semiotic resources, the ways in which meaning emerges
through the oppositions between imagined collective actors is
explained. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America and South
America, The Social Semiotics of Populism presents a systematic
semiotic approach to this multifaceted political concept and
bridges semiotic theory and populism studies in an original manner.
This two-volume collection showcases a wide range of modern
approaches to the philosophical study of language. Contributions
illustrate how these strands of research are interconnected and
show the importance of such a broad outlook. The aim is to throw
light upon some of the key questions in language and communication
and also to inspire, inform, and integrate a community of
researchers in philosophical linguistics. Volume one concentrates
on fundamental theoretical topics. This means considering vital
questions about what languages are and how they relate to reality,
and describing some of the key areas of thought in linguistics and
the philosophy of language. Contributors also discuss how
philosophy influences related fields such as translation,
pragmatics, and argumentation.
This two-volume collection showcases a wide range of modern
approaches to the philosophical study of language. Contributions
illustrate how these strands of research are interconnected and
show the importance of such a broad outlook. The aim is to throw
light upon some of the key questions in language and communication
and also to inspire, inform, and integrate a community of
researchers in philosophical linguistics. Volume two presents
analyses of several fundamental concepts and studies in which they
are applied empirically. These include the linguistic topics of
assertion, vagueness, and disagreement, and the philosophical
themes of belief, normativity, and thought. These chapters provide
unique insight into the role of philosophy in the contemporary
study of communication.
Sequential images are as natural at conveying narratives as verbal
language, and have appeared throughout human history, from cave
paintings and tapestries right through to modern comics.
Contemporary research on this visual language of sequential images
has been scattered across several fields: linguistics, psychology,
anthropology, art education, comics studies, and others. Only
recently has this disparate research begun to be incorporated into
a coherent understanding. In The Visual Narrative Reader, Neil Cohn
collects chapters that cross these disciplinary divides from many
of the foremost international researchers who explore fundamental
questions about visual narratives. How does the style of images
impact their understanding? How are metaphors and complex meanings
conveyed by images? How is meaning understood across sequential
images? How do children produce and comprehend sequential images?
Are visual narratives beneficial for education and literacy? Do
visual narrative systems differ across cultures and historical time
periods? This book provides a foundation of research for readers to
engage in these fundamental questions and explore the most vital
thinking about visual narrative. It collects important papers and
introduces review chapters summarizing the literature on specific
approaches to understanding visual narratives. The result is a
comprehensive "reader" that can be used as a coursebook, a
researcher resource and a broad overview of fascinating topics
suitable for anyone interested in the growing field of the visual
language of comics and visual narratives.
This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures,
configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is
missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the
embedding clause (e.g. John wanted to leave). It draws on data from
English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to investigate the
relationship that control bears both to restructuring - the
phenomenon whereby some apparently biclausal structures behave as
though they constitute just one clause - and to the meanings of the
embedding predicates that participate in these structures. Thomas
Grano argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive
and that, by virtue of its co-occurrence with some control
predicates but not others, it serves as evidence for a basic
division within the class of complement control structures. This
division is connected to how the semantics of the control predicate
interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of
the syntax-semantics interface. His findings have general
implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship
between form and meaning in natural language.
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