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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
This is an accessible survey of the linguistic issues facing children growing up in indigenous communities.All over the world there are children who learn one (or more) language at home and then have to learn another language when they attend school. In some cases this is because children come from immigrant backgrounds; in other cases children come from indigenous communities in countries which have been colonised. This book illustrates the linguistic diversity that can be found in such communities. It examines a wide range of factors which relate to the divergence between home and school language for children growing up in indigenous multilingual communities."Children's Language and Multilingualism" explains concisely and clearly why educators, health specialists, government bodies and politicians need to understand the importance of these differences for children's social and linguistic development, particularly in relation to education and social policy. Never far from the surface are the well-documented benefits of bi- and multilingualism in education nationally and internationally. This accessible survey of the linguistic issues facing children growing up in indigenous communities will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of multilingualism and language acquisition.
The Modernist movement in literature had revolutionary aspirations and pioneered new possibilities of literary expression. One of its major projects was to question the nature of selfhood and to rewrite personal experience in terms of fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity. English literary Modernism, in particular, broke down the assumption that self-experience is unitary and coherent.;This book represents an exploration of the ways in which key modern writers challenged conventional ways of characterizing selfhood and, whether by poetic montage or stream-of-consciousness writing, developed a discourse expressive of the subtleties of experience in a post-Freudian world. It is argued that modernist texts were involved in self-representation long before post-structuralist or post-modernist theories were applied.
Kuypers, King, and their contributors explore the conception of rhetoric of eleven key American rhetoricians through analyses of their life's work. Each chapter provides a sense of that scholar's conception of rhetoric, be it through criticism, theory, or teaching. The communication discipline often highlights the work of others outside the discipline; however, it rarely acclaims the work of its own critics, teachers, and theorists. In this collection, the essays explore the innate mode of perception that guided the rhetorical understanding of the early critics. In so doing, this work dispels the myth that the discipline of Speech Communication was spawned from a monolithic and rigid center that came to be called neo-Aristotelianism. Scholars and researchers involved with the history of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism and theory, and American public address uill find this title to be a necessary addition to their collection.
Formalization plays an important role in semantics. Doing semantics and following the literature requires considerable technical sophistica tion and acquaintance with quite advanced mathematical techniques and structures. But semantics isn't mathematics. These techniques and structures are tools that help us build semantic theories. Our real aim is to understand semantic phenomena and we need the technique to make our understanding of these phenomena precise. The problems in semantics are most often too hard and slippery, to completely trust our informal understanding of them. This should not be taken as an attack on informal reasoning in semantics. On the contrary, in my view, very often the essential insight in a diagnosis of what is going on in a certain semantic phenomenon takes place at the informal level. It is very easy, however, to be misled into thinking that a certain informal insight provides a satisfying analysis of a certain problem; it will often turn out that there is a fundamental unclarity about what the informal insight actually is. Formalization helps to sharpen those insights and put them to the test."
What is a 'contemporary' understanding of literacy practices? How can 'literacy' be explained and situated? This book addresses literacy practices research, understanding it as both material and spatial, based in homes and communities, as well as in formal educational settings. It addresses a need to update the work done on theoretical literacy models, with the last major paradigms such as critical literacies and multiliteracies developed a decade ago. Kate Pahl draws on case studies to highlight experiences alternate from the traditional representations of literacy. She argues that the affordances of home and familiar spaces offer fertile ground for meaning-making. These resultant literacies are multimodal and linked to space, place and community. An important evaluative resource, this book details a range of methodologies for further researching literacy, describing ethnographic, visual, participatory and ecological approaches, together with connective ethnographies. This volume will appeal to academics and professions in literacy studies and language and education.
At a superficial examination, English has different types of nominals with similar meaning and distribution: (1)a. John's performance ofthe song b. J ohn' s performing of the song c. John's performing the song d. the fact that John performs the song These nominals are also perceived by English speakers to be related to the same sentential construction: (2) John performs the song A more accurate inspection reveals, however, that the nominals in (1) differ both in their distribution and in the range of interpretations they allow. An adequate theory of nominalization should explicate rigorously how nominals of the types in (1) are related to sentential construction (2), and should also account for their distributional differences and meaning differences. The task of this book is to develop such a theory. I defend two main theses. The first is that, in order to provide an adequate semantics for the nominals in (1), one needs to distinguish among three types of entities in the domain of discourse (in addition to the type of ordinary individuals): events, propositions, and states xiii XIV PREFACE of affairs. I argue that the nominals in (1) differ in their ability to denote entities of these types and that predicates differ in their ability to select for them.
"Formal Pragmatics" addresses issues that are on the borderline of
the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, from the point of
view of a model-theoretic semanticist. This up-to-date resource
covers a substantial body of formal work on linguistic phenomena,
and presents the way the semantics-pragmatics interface has come to
be viewed today.
"Workplace Discourse" provides an overview of the rapidly developing field of spoken and written workplace interaction, taking a fresh perspective on research methods and key issues in the field. It examines discourse in a wide variety of workplace contexts using both genre analysis and a corpus-driven approach. The book draws on Koester's previous research, but examines the current state of workplace discourse more widely. It provides a descriptive account of the linguistic characteristics of workplace discourse within their social and organizational contexts, with illustrative extracts from real texts and naturally occurring spoken interactions. It showcases specific issues at the forefront of current research and practice in this area: the use of English as a lingua franca, the importance of relationship building and the teaching applications of research. Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences as it concerns the ways language mediates and shapes our interactions with each other and with the social, political and cultural formations of our society. "The Continuum Discourse Series" aims to capture the fast-developing interest in discourse to provide students, new and experienced teachers and researchers in applied linguistics, ELT and English language with an essential bookshelf. Each book deals with a core topic in discourse studies to give an in-depth, structured and readable introduction to an aspect of the way language is used in real life.
This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries. Focusing on Wilde's relationships with many of these writers, Kingston examines and critiques 'Wildean' portraits by such celebrated authors as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, as well as some lesser-known writers. Many fascinating, little-known biographical and literary connections are revealed. While this work will be of significant interest to scholars of Wilde, it is also written in a clear, accessible style which will appeal to the non-academic reader with a general interest in Wilde or the late Victorian period.
Representing current theory and research in rhetoric, this volume
brings together scholarship from a variety of
orientations--theoretical, critical, historical, and pedagogical.
Some contributions cover work that has previously been silenced or
unrecognized, including Native American, African American, Latino,
and women's rhetorics. Others explore rhetoric's relationship to
performance and to the body, or to revising canons, stases, topoi,
and pisteis. Still others are reworking the rhetorical lexicon to
comprise contemporary theory. Among these diverse interests,
rhetoricians find common themes and share intellectual and
pedagogical enterprises that hold them together even as their
institutional situations keep them apart.
This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algun: the sentence Maria se caso con algun medico ('Maria married some doctor or other') both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker's inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question. Although epistemic indefinites have featured in recent semantic literature, a full understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking: there is currently no agreement on the source of their epistemic component; there is insufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items; and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, a team of experts in the field offer novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals. They provide a coherent overview of the issues that shape the subject as well as placing them in the context of current semantic research, moving towards the development of a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.
This book shows how the study of the evolving discourse employed during a political process spanning more than a decade can provide insights for critical discourse analysis on the one hand, and understanding of a real world political process on the other, thereby demonstrating the potential role for critical discourse analysis in historiography.
How do democratic and pluralistic societies cope with traumatic events in their past? What strategies and taboos are employed to reconstruct wars, revolutions, torturing, mass killings and genocide in a way to make their contradiction to basic human rights and values invisible? This interdisciplinary volume analyzes in detail for the first time, in multiple genres, the history and image of the "German "Wehrmacht"" and the debates in Austria and Germany surrounding two highly contested exhibitions about the war crimes of the German "Wehrmacht" during WWII.
Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. This book offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes, language variation, among others. On the other, the volume offers an overview of references describing the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL). The author provides a broad critical review of previous works to date, which has enabled her to detect areas of research still unexplored.
Police interviewing is a critical part of the justice process, and more attention is now being paid to training in interview techniques. This new study uses tools drawn from interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis for a detailed study of some police questioning of adult suspects, and work undertaken in the training of police in interviewing children - in which quite different approaches seem to be adopted. Critical discourse analytic techniques are used in interpreting the outcome and the implications for training are explored.
This book presents a case study of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) implemented by universities in Vietnam, making valuable theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the research in EMI which is currently a popular theme in the field of Higher Education. The importance of internationalization of higher education has been widely recognized by many countries all over the world. The spread of English as an international language has resulted in its crucial role in teaching and learning any disciplines. Globally, higher education in many non-English speaking countries has witnessed rapid expansion of (EMI) which was initiated in Europe, then to Asia and other continents which are featured with "Cultural Circles" spread in the world. Although there are many publications with the same theme available today, this monograph is unique because it is the first time to examine EMI classroom interaction from the cultural perspective specifically rather than from linguistic or pedagogical perspectives. It is a pioneering attempt to discuss in depth about cultural issues relating to EMI, namely (1) the social-cultural context of EMI classes in higher education; (2) the cultural backgrounds of EMI teachers and learners; and (3) culture interactions between teachers and learners in EMI classrooms. In addition, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to collect data from teachers and learners. Finally, a context-based model of EMI is proposed based on findings of this research. As a country within the Confucius Heritage Cultural Circle, Vietnam has been selected for this study because few studies to date are carried out in how EMI is culturally integrated to teaching and learning in the Vietnamese universities. This book is a joint effort by international academics, prepared for established scholars, researchers, educators, and research higher degree students who are interested in higher education, second and foreign language education and EMI teacher training.
The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.
Representing what someone else has said is an integral part of spoken and written communication. Speech representation occurs in many contexts from news reports and legal trials to everyday conversation. Although commonplace, it requires sophisticated choices regarding what to represent and how to represent it. These choices can highlight a speaker's voice, shape our perception of the reported speech, or support our claims of authority.While speech representation in Present-day English has been studied extensively, this book extends the discussion to historical periods. Speech Representation in the History of English explores speech representation of the past, providing in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods (1500-1900), this volume covers topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Chapters draw on a wide range of methodologies, including historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics, and cover many genres from witness depositions, literary texts, and letters, to the spoken language of the recent past. In this comprehensive volume, Peter Grund and Terry Walker bring together a collection of works that use cutting-edge approaches to speech representation. Researchers and students of the history of English, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies alike will find Speech Representation in the History of English to be an invaluable addition to the field.
This accessible and lively introduction to semantics and the multi-faceted nature of language guides the student and non-specialist through the major ways in which the English language makes meaning. The author discusses the meaning of linguistic units at all levels of language, from sound to discourse, while studying also the role of theories and models themselves in helping us to understand human linguistic behaviour. Through examples and exercises, readers are encouraged to think through and evaluate complex ideas and theories for themselves.
In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.
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