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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
Dolf Rami contributes to contemporary debates about the meaning and
reference of proper names by providing an overview of the main
challenges and developing a new contextualist account of names.
Questions about the use and semantic features of proper names are
at the centre of philosophy of language. How does a single proper
name refer to the same thing in different contexts of use? What
makes a thing a bearer of a proper name? What is their meaning?
Guided by these questions, Rami discusses Saul Kripke's main
contributions to the debate and introduces two new ways to capture
the rigidity of names, proposing a pluralist version of the causal
chain picture. Covering popular contextualist accounts of names,
both indexical and variabilist, he presents a use-sensitive
alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns
and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide
variety of uses, including names in fiction, this is a
comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names
as use-sensitive expressions.
This book presents the essential approaches that you need to know
when you start doing discourse analysis for the first time. Over 11
chapters, Discourse Analysis: An Introduction outlines the core
methodological and theoretical premises, tracing their development
and discussing the most recent trends. Providing you with an
essential discourse analytic toolkit, each chapter explores a
different approach from a wide variety of global perspectives,
looking at discourse and society, discourse and pragmatics,
discourse and genre, discourse and conversation, discourse grammar,
corpus approaches, multimodal discourse and critical discourse
analysis. Now fully revised to take account of recent developments,
this third edition includes: - A new chapter on discourse and
digital media - New topics, including English as a lingua franca,
linguistic landscapes and translanguaging - Updated examples drawn
from a variety of global perspectives and contexts, ranging from
North America to East Asia - Updated discussion questions
throughout With each chapter supplemented with exercises,
discussion questions and lists of further reading, along with a
comprehensive companion website featuring lecture slides, extended
readings and enhanced bibliographies, this is the only book you
need for discourse analysis.
Studying narratives is an ideal method to gain a good understanding
of how various aspects of human information are organized and
integrated. The concept and methods of a narrative, which have been
explored in narratology and literary theories, are likely to be
connected with contemporary information studies in the future,
including those in computational fields such as AI, and in
cognitive science. This will result in the emergence of a
significant conceptual and methodological foundation for various
technologies of novel contents, media, human interface, etc.
Post-Narratology Through Computational and Cognitive Approaches
explores the new possibilities and directions of narrative-related
technologies and theories and their implications on the innovative
design, development, and creation of future media and contents
(such as automatic narrative or story generation systems) through
interdisciplinary approaches to narratology that are dependent on
computational and cognitive studies. While highlighting topics
including artificial intelligence, narrative analysis, and rhetoric
generation, this book is ideally designed for designers, creators,
developers, researchers, and advanced-level students.
Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Award by the Society for
Linguistic Anthropology Exploring the ways in which the development
of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote,
rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the
Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the
creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of
the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center–periphery dynamics
in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens.
Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction'
and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical
evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic
practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in
Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations
participate in the formation and contestation of state power
through daily practices and the use of different speech genres,
emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce
revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and
semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this
book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or
ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish,
it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate
indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were
transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote
loyalty to the regime.
A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of
clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units
which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a
hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to
investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic
communication, it has been controversially discussed what the
appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be
and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are.
Linguistic structure-and more precisely, the extraction and
integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information-is
shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse
comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic
building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of
debate. This collection addresses these issues using various
methodological approaches. It presents current results in
theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational
research on structuring information in discourse.
The volume offers an up-to-date overview of the influence of
English on Italian, bringing together the linguistic and the
cultural dimensions. The history of language contact between Italy
and Anglo-American societies is the basis for understanding lexical
borrowing and for identifying the domains of vocabulary more
intensely affected in time. Drawing on previous research and on
existing lexicographic evidence, this book presents a typology of
borrowings based on a new, usage-based word list of Italian
Anglicisms which is part of a larger multilingual project (GLAD -
Global Anglicism Database). The topics covered are the number of
Anglicisms in Italian, their frequency in specialist fields and
registers, the blurred area between borrowing and the circulation
of international vocabulary, luxury loans and casuals. The book
rounds up with the cultural debate on English-only education, which
has recently stirred purist concerns, marking an attitudinal shift
of Italian from an 'open' to a 'protectionist' language towards
exogenous influences. This book is addressed primarily to scholars
and university students, but also to a lay audience of non-experts,
interested in the linguistic and cultural contacts between English
and Italian.
Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and
political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the
formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological
landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse
extends. Drawing on rich and dynamic models in critical cognitive
linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor analysis, context, and
multimodality studies, leading scholars provide tools to analyse a
broad range of traditional and modern genres of political
communication. Taking a historical dive into formative traditions
in political discourse, including rhetoric and social and
poststructuralist theories, this Handbook revises these classical
models of political communication against new empirical contexts,
to offer the most fruitful, objective and universal methodologies
to date. Examining propaganda, advertising, political speeches and
election campaigns, this Handbook pays particular attention to
newly arising genres and discourses which reflect the momentous
changes in the public domain, fuelled by recent and developing
events including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Drawing diverse insights from a wide array of disciplines, this
Handbook will prove invaluable to students and scholars of
political theory, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, discourse
analysis and communication studies who are looking for innovative
methodologies with which to analyse political discourse.
This book provides curriculum planners, materials developers, and
language educators with curricular perspectives and classroom
activities in order to address the needs of learners of English as
a global lingua franca in an increasingly globalized and
interdependent world. The authors argue that language educators
would benefit from synthesizing and using research and
evidence-based cooperative learning methods and structures to
address the current world-readiness standards for learning
languages in the five domains of Communication, Cultures,
Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. The book outlines the
main cooperative learning principles of heterogenous grouping,
positive interdependence, individual accountability,
social/collaborative skills, and group processing, then
demonstrates their relevance to language teaching and learning.
This book will be of interest to students in pre-service teacher
education programmes as well as in-service practitioners, teacher
trainers and educational administrators.
No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry
McNeal Turner is a history of the career of Bishop Henry McNeal
Turner (1834-1915), specifically focusing on his work from 1896 to
1915. Drawing on the copious amount of material from Turner's
speeches, editorial, and open and private letters, Andre E. Johnson
tells a story of how Turner provided rhetorical leadership during a
period in which America defaulted on many of the rights and
privileges gained for African Americans during Reconstruction.
Unlike many of his contemporaries during this period, Turner did
not opt to proclaim an optimistic view of race relations. Instead,
Johnson argues that Turner adopted a prophetic persona of a
pessimistic prophet who not only spoke truth to power but, in so
doing, also challenged and pushed African Americans to believe in
themselves. At this time in his life, Turner had no confidence in
American institutions or that the American people would live up to
the promises outlined in their sacred documents. While he argued
that emigration was the only way for African Americans to retain
their "personhood" status, he also would come to believe that
African Americans would never emigrate to Africa. He argued that
many African Americans were so oppressed and so stripped of agency
because they were surrounded by continued negative assessments of
their personhood that belief in emigration was not possible.
Turner's position limited his rhetorical options, but by adopting a
pessimistic prophetic voice that bore witness to the atrocities
African Americans faced, Turner found space for his oratory, which
reflected itself within the lament tradition of prophecy.
Why do people take offence at things that are said? What is it
exactly about an offending utterance which causes this negative
reaction? How well motivated is the response to the offence?
Offensive Language addresses these questions by applying an array
of concepts from linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics to a
wide range of examples, from TV to Twitter and from Mel Gibson to
Donald Trump. Establishing a sharp distinction between potential
offence and actual offence, Jim O'Driscoll then examines a series
of case studies where offence has been caused, assessing the nature
and degree of both the offence and the documented response to it.
Through close linguistic analysis, this book explores the fine line
between free speech and criminal activity, searching for a
principled way to distinguish the merely embarrassing from the
reprehensible and the censurable. In this way, a new approach to
offensive language emerges, involving both how we study it and how
it might be handled in public life.
Contemporary children's picture books provide a rich domain for
developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation
to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of
the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of
furthering the project of 'multimodal' discourse analysis and of
explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of
children's earliest literature. The book uses the principles of
systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of
visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual
construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational
meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices
related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and
The book uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to
organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three
perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and
characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the
reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal
(interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual
meanings through choices in framing and composition (compositional
meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples
from highly regarded children's picture books. This book extends
previous social-semiotic accounts of the 'grammar' of the image, by
focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic
relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it
extends current understandings of how picture books work through
its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and
their integration with verbal aspects of the texts. It will be of
interest to researchers in (multimodal) discourse analysis,
systemic-functional theory and children's literature and literacy.
What is suicide? When does suicide start and when does it end? Who
is involved? Examining narratives of suicide through a discourse
analytic framework, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal
Process demonstrates how linguistic theories and methodologies can
help answer these questions and cast light upon what suicide
involves and means, both for those who commit an act and their
loved ones. Engaging in close analysis of suicide letters written
before the act and post-hoc narratives from after the event, this
book is the first qualitative study to view suicide not as a single
event outside time, but as a time-extended process. Exploring how
suicide is experienced and narrated from two temporal perspectives,
Dariusz Galasinski and Justyna Ziolkowska introduce discourse
analysis to the field of suicidology. Arguing that studying suicide
narratives and the reality they represent can add significantly to
our understanding of the process, and in particular its experiences
and meanings, Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process
demonstrates the value of discourse analytic insights in informing,
enriching and contextualising our knowledge of suicide.
Telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as humans.
Yet in scholarship, stories considered to be "traditional", such as
myths, folk tales, and epics, have often been analyzed separately
from the narratives of personal experience that we all tell on a
daily basis. In Storytelling as Narrative Practice, editors
Elizabeth Falconi and Kathryn Graber argue that storytelling is
best understood by erasing this analytic divide. Chapter authors
carefully examine language use in-situ, drawing on in-depth
knowledge gained from long-term fieldwork, to present rich and
nuanced analyses of storytelling-as-narrative-practice across a
diverse range of global contexts. Each chapter takes a holistic
ethnographic approach to show the practices, processes, and social
consequences of telling stories.
The volume explores the body part 'eye' as a source domain in
conceptualization and a vehicle of embodied cognition. It includes
in-depth case studies of languages situated in different cultural
contexts in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. It also
provides insights into cross-linguistic comparison of
conceptualization patterns and semantic extension of the term 'eye'
on various target domains. The contributions in the volume present
a range of cultural models associated with the visual organ which
take into account socio-cultural factors and language usage
practices. The book offers new material and novel analyses within
the subject of polysemy of body part terms. It also adds to studies
on metaphor, metonymy and cultural conceptualizations within a
cognitive linguistic paradigm.
Modern Irish is a VSO language, in common with the other Celtic
languages, and the order of elements in the structure of transitive
sentences is verb-subject-object. This book provides a
characterisation of the nominal, verb, clause and information
structure of the Irish language from a functional perspective based
on Role and Reference Grammar. We include in this analysis the
layered structure of the noun phrase of Irish and the various NP
operators, the layered structure of the clause and the verbal
system at the syntax-semantic interface along with a number of verb
valence behaviours as mediated by event and argument structure.
Additionally, we survey previous treatments of Irish within a
functionalist approach. The verbal noun has a special place within
the Irish language and its deployment is particularly productive.
We examine the derivation of the verbal noun and the contexts in
which it is used. We also provide an account of light verbs and
complex predicates as they occur within Irish and link this to a
characterisation of the information structure of Irish. We will, in
addition, provide an analysis of certain linguistically interesting
phenomena that are particular to Irish (and the other Celtic
languages) including the two verbs of 'to be'. Within the verbal
system our concern is with the relationship between the semantic
representation of a verbal predicate in the context of a clause and
its syntactic expression through the argument structure of the
verb. We will suggest that lexical specification is via a logical
representation that reflects the aspectual decomposition of the
verbal predicate and that this determines, with an actor-undergoer
hierarchy, the operation of the mapping into syntax via the linking
system. This book will be of interest to all linguists operating
within the broad functional paradigm, along with scholars,
researchers and postgraduate students interested in Irish, in
particular, and the Celtic languages in general.
Despite the key role played by second language acquisition (SLA)
courses in linguistics, teacher education and language teaching
degrees, participants often struggle to bridge the gap between SLA
theories and their many applications in the classroom. In order to
overcome the 'transfer' problem from theory to practice, Andrea
Nava and Luciana Pedrazzini present SLA principles through the
actions and words of teachers and learners. Second Language
Acquisition in Action identifies eight important SLA principles and
involves readers in an 'experiential' approach which enables them
to explore these principles 'in action'. Each chapter is structured
around three stages: experience and reflection; conceptualisation;
and restructuring and planning. Discussion questions and tasks
represent the core of the book. These help readers in the process
of 'experiencing' SLA research and provide them with opportunities
to try their hands at different areas of language teachers'
professional expertise. Aimed at those on applied linguistics MA
courses, TESOL/EFL trainees and in-service teachers, Second
Language Acquisition in Action features: * Key Questions at the
start of each chapter * Data-based tasks to foster reflection and
to help bridge the gap between theory and practice * Audiovisual
extracts of lessons on an accompanying website * Further Reading
suggestions at the end of each chapter
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'.
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