The Pragmatics Reader is the indispensable set of readings for all students studying Pragmatics at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Combining key classic texts with newer extracts covering current developments in contemporary Pragmatics, each reading has been carefully selected to both showcase the best thinking and latest research and also to reflect the international nature of the field.

The 30 varied readings, including four specially commissioned papers, have been organised into eight themed sections: Linguistic Pragmatics; Post-Gricean Pragmatics; Indexicality; Historical Pragmatics; Politeness, Face and Impoliteness; Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; Pragmatics and Conversation - Development and Impairment; and Pragmaticians on Pragmatics. Each of these sections is supported and enhanced by substantial editorial commentaries, pre-reading, in-reading and post-reading activities and suggestions for further reading, both in print and online. The book also features a general introduction, a glossary of key terms, and a conclusion that explores the relationship between pragmatic theory and practice before anticipating the future directions of the subject.

Readings: Dawn Archer and Peter Grundy - J. L. Austin - John R. Searle - H. P. Grice - Pieter A. M. Seuren - Robert C. Stalnaker - Stephen C. Levinson - Reinhard Blutner - Diane Blakemore - Billy Clark - Robyn Carston - Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson - Stephen C. Levinson - Jo Rubba - Jef Verschueren - Elizabeth Close Traugott - Laurel J. Brinton - Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen - Erving Goffman - Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson - Miriam A. Locher and Richard J. Watts - Jonathan Culpeper - Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Julianne House and Gabriele Kasper - Haruko Minegishi Cook - Istvan Kecskes - Anat Ninio and Catherine E. Snow - Emanuel A. Schegloff - Heidi Ehrenberger Hamilton - Roman Kopytko - Jon F. Pressman - Charles L. Briggs

This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image. The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.

This book examines the intersection of culture and language in Ireland and Irish contexts. The editors take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the ways in which culture, identity and meaning-making are constructed and performed through a variety of voices and discourses. This edited collection analyses the work of well-known Irish authors such as Beckett, Joyce and G. B. Shaw, combining new methodologies with more traditional approaches to the study of literary discourse and style. Over the course of the volume, the contributors also discuss how Irish voices are received in translation, and how marginal voices are portrayed in the Irish mediascape. This dynamic book brings together a multitude of contrasting perspectives, and is sure to appeal to students and scholars of Irish literature, migration studies, discourse analysis, traductology and dialectology.

This volume serves as an in-depth investigation of the diversity of means and practices that constitute (dis)identification and identity construction in social media. Given the increasing prevalence of social media in everyday life and the subsequent growing diversity in the types of participants and forms of participation, the book makes the case for a rigorous analysis of social media discourses and digital literacy practices to demonstrate the range of semiotic resources used in online communication that form the foundation of (dis)identification processes. Divided into two major sections, delineating between the (dis)identification of the self across various social categories and the (dis)identification of the self in relation to the "other", the book employs a discourse-ethnographic approach to highlight the value of this type of theoretical framework in providing nuanced descriptions of identity construction in social media and illuminating their larger, long-term societal and cultural implications. This volume is a key resource for researchers, and students in sociolinguistics, discourse studies, computer-mediated communication, and cultural studies.

Sixteen years after her father was killed by an IRA bomb, Jo Berry had her first conversation with the man responsible. She had made a long journey, 'walking the footsteps of the bombers' as she put it, determined not to give in to anger and revenge but to try to understand his motivations and perspective. Her preparedness to meet Pat Magee opened up a path to empathy that developed through their conversations over the following years. This book studies their growing understandings of each other by focusing on the rich networks of metaphors that appear in their conversations, and how these evolve in the process of reconciliation. The innovative research method, reported in a rigorous but accessible style, together with the rich and often poignant data, make this book a valuable addition to the study of metaphor and discourse. In uncovering the development of empathy between these two extraordinary people, Cameron illuminates the moral necessity, and the potential rewards, in trying to imagine the world and mind of the Other. Implications are drawn for how mediators in reconciliation contexts might make positive use of metaphor in supporting the dynamics of empathy.

Infants learn to communicate through everyday social interaction with their caregivers in a multisensory world involving sight, hearing, touch and smell. The neural and behavioural underpinnings of caregiver-infant multisensory interaction and communication, however, have remained largely unexplored in research across disciplines. This book highlights this largely uncharted territory to better understand the developmental origins of human multisensory perception and communication. It emphasizes the range and complexity of multisensory infant-caregiver interaction in the real world, and its developmental and neurophysiological characteristics. Furthermore, recent theories of brain development suggest that brain, body and the environment interact with one another on an ongoing basis, influencing each other and are constantly being influenced by each other. This volume aims to elucidate the neurophysiological, behavioural and environmental factors to better understand the nature of multisensory communication as a whole. This book was originally published as a special issue of Developmental Neuropsychology.

Originally published in 1991, this book analyses the relation between writing and ethics in a number of social contexts - in politics, as language discloses its connections to the institutions of totalitarianism and democracy; in the university, as contemporary scholarly ideals find an uncomfortably accurate representation in the stylistic forms of academic writing; in daily social practice, ranging from the status of truth in journalistic writing to the connection between pronouns and affirmative action; and finally in the ethical structure of language itself.

This book approaches the topic of false friends from a theoretical perspective, arguing that false friends carry out a positive role as a cognitive device, mainly in literature and jokes, and suggesting some pragmatic strategies in order to restore the original sense of a text/utterance when a given translator (or a foreign speaker) falls victim to false friends. This theoretical account is successively verified by appealing to texts from the fields of literature, science, philosophy, journalism, and everyday speech.

This book explores the use of online and face-to-face interactions in language teacher education (LTE) by assessing the formation and practices of a community of practice (CoP), and evaluating the roles discussions between student teachers and a peer tutor can play in terms of identity formation, articulating narratives, reflective practices, and maintaining affective relationships. The specific context within which this is embedded is a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) programme, often known as English Language Teaching (ELT), at a third-level Irish institution. The data drawn on come from student teachers on a master's (MA) programme who interacted with a peer tutor (the researcher) via a number of modes (face-to-face and online). The approach to data analysis is a corpus-based discourse analytical one, which examines the linguistic features of student teacher and peer tutor talk; the features of CoP practices in the discourse; and how different modes of communication shape the nature of this discourse. Perceptive data from the student teachers is used to outline their reactions to the modes of communication and the activities they participated in.

This collection of original research highlights the legacy of Michael Toolan's pioneering contributions to the field of stylistics and in so doing provides a critical overview of the ways in which language, text, and context are analyzed in the field and its related disciplines. Featuring work from an international range of contributors, the book illustrates how the field of stylistics has evolved in the 25 years since the publication of Toolan's seminal Language, Text and Context, which laid the foundation for the analysis of the language and style in literary texts. The volume demonstrates how technological innovations and the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies, including those from corpus, cognitive, and multimodal stylistics, point to the greater degree of interplay between language, text, and context exemplified in current research and how this dynamic relationship can be understood by featuring examples from a variety of texts and media. Underscoring the significance of Michael Toolan's extensive work in the field in the evolution of literary linguistic research, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in stylistics, discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

Just as a distinctive literary voice or style is marked by the ease with which it can be parodied, so too can specific aspects of humor be unique. Playwrights, television writers, novelists, cartoonists, and film scriptwriters use many special technical devices to create humor. Just as dramatic writers and novelists use specific devices to craft their work, creators of humorous materials--from the ancient Greeks to today's stand-up comics--have continued to use certain techniques in order to generate humor.

In The Art of Comedy Writing, Arthur Asa Berger argues that there are a relatively limited number of techniques--forty-five in all--that humorists employ. Elaborating upon his prior, in-depth study of humor, An Anatomy of Humor, in which Berger provides a content analysis of humor in all forms--joke books, plays, comic books, novels, short stories, comic verse, and essays--The Art of Comedy Writing goes further. Berger groups each technique into four basic categories: humor involving identity such as burlesque, caricature, mimicry, and stereotype; humor involving logic such as analogy, comparison, and reversal; humor involving language such as puns, wordplay, sarcasm, and satire; and finally, chase, slapstick, and speed, or humor involving action.

Berger claims that if you want to know how writers or comedians create humor study and analysis of their humorous works can be immensely insightful. This book is a unique analytical offering for those interested in humor. It provides writers and critics with a sizable repertoire of techniques for use in their own future comic creations. As such, this book will be of interest to people inspired by humor and the creative process--professionals in the comedy field and students of creative writing, comedy, literary humor, communications, broadcast/media, and the humanities.

This book implements a new approach to the study of manipulative tactics in selected Congressional debates in the early history of the United States, highlighting the ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. The identification and analysis of different informal fallacies is central in the approach adopted by the authors, and they privilege the role of covert intentions as a frequent ingredient of manipulation. They also show how different speakers can use different subtypes of the same fallacy in a debate, and investigate the tension between the policy preferences and goals of politicians, and existing laws. The book has been written without jargon, all concepts and terminology from the field of linguistic pragmatics are clearly defined, and it is accessible to the interested layperson wishing to become familiar with manipulative techniques in political rhetoric.

This handbook brings together scholars from around the globe who here contribute to our understanding of how digital rhetoric is changing the landscape of writing. Increasingly, all of us must navigate networks of information, compose not just with computers but an array of mobile devices, increase our technological literacy, and understand the changing dynamics of authoring, writing, reading, and publishing in a world of rich and complex texts. Given such changes, and given the diverse ways in which younger generations of college students are writing, communicating, and designing texts in multimediated, electronic environments, we need to consider how the very act of writing itself is undergoing potentially fundamental changes. These changes are being addressed increasingly by the emerging field of digital rhetoric, a field that attempts to understand the rhetorical possibilities and affordances of writing, broadly defined, in a wide array of digital environments. Of interest to both researchers and students, this volume provides insights about the fields of rhetoric, writing, composition, digital media, literature, and multimodal studies.

Key Methods in Second Language Acquisition Research is a book written to help novice teachers and undergraduate students developing an awareness and understanding of the key methodological frameworks and processes used in second language research. The book should also help readers generating ideas and researchable questions and adopting particular research methods and procedures to collect and analyse data. The book is divided into three main parts: Key Stages in Second Language Research, Key Methodological Frameworks,and Mixed Frameworks and Psycholinguistics Methods.

This is the first book-length study of identity constructions in relation to English as a contact language in advertising of non-English-speaking countries through a critical and interpretive lens. Instead of simply presuming the role of the English language may have in constructing identities within the multimodal advertisement, this book aims to explore ethnographically the ideological underpinnings of identity constructions in the context of local politics of English. It studies the varying degrees of the contribution of the English language and its possible roles in bilingual advertising, unravels the ideological dimensions of the language as well as identity and explains the sociocultural forms and meanings of identity. To this end, it develops a new critical-cognitive approach, bringing together recent advances in English as a global language, critical sociolinguistics, multilingual studies and multimodal discourse analysis. By delving into the cognitive process of identity constructions, it provides an evidence-based account of the roles of English, and it illustrates the interconnections between identities and local politics of English. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars and students in bilingualism, multilingualism, discourse analysis, English as a global language, multimodality, advertising and marketing.

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy visits the essay as if for the first time, clearing away lore about the essay and responding to the prose itself. It shows how many of Orwell's rules and admonitions are far less useful than they are famed to be, but it also shows how some of them can be refurbished for our age, and how his major claim-that politics corrupts language, which then corrupts political discourse further, and so on indefinitely-can best be re-deployed today. "Politics and the English Language" has encouraged generations of writers and readers and teachers and students to take great care, to be skeptical and clear-sighted. The essay itself requires a fresh, clear, skeptical analysis so that it can, with reapplication, reclaim its status as a touchstone in our era of the rule of falsehood: the age of "pseudocracy."

Edited by Lancelot Hogben

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life.

But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Without language no knowledge would be possible; here we see how language is at once the source and the reservoir of all we know.

"Makes language study more hopeful and exciting than anything I have read before." —Lewis Gannett

"Rewarding and delightful . . . for everyone who has the slightest curiosity or ambition in self expression, this is a book that contains months or years of pleasurable profit." —Christopher Morley

Using Chomsky's minimalist program as a framework, this volume explores the role of formal (or functional) features in current descriptions and accounts of language acquistion. In engaging, up-to-date articles, distinguished experts examine the role of features in current versions of generative grammar and in learnibility theory as it relates to native, non-native, and impaired acquisition.

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian offers a detailed overview of the field of Persian second language acquisition and pedagogy. The Handbook discusses its development and captures critical accounts of cutting edge research within the major subfields of Persian second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as current debates and problems, and goes on to suggest productive lines of future research. The book is divided into the following four parts: I) Theory-driven research on second language acquisition of Persian, II) Language skills in second language acquisition of Persian, III) Classroom research in second language acquisition and pedagogy of Persian, and IV) Social aspects of second language acquisition and pedagogy of Persian. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian is an essential reference for scholars and students of Persian SLA and pedagogy as well as those researching in related areas.

Winner of the 2011 Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize Exploring fluency from multiple vantage points that together constitute a cognitive science perspective, this book examines research in second language acquisition and bilingualism that points to promising avenues for understanding and promoting second language fluency. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency covers essential topics such as units of analysis for measuring fluency, the relation of second language fluency to general cognitive fluidity, social and motivational contributors to fluency, and neural correlates of fluency. The author provides clear and accessible summaries of foundational empirical work on speech production, automaticity, lexical access, and other issues of relevance to second language acquisition theory. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency is a valuable reference for scholars in SLA, cognitive psychology, and language teaching, and it can also serve as an ideal textbook for advanced courses in these fields.

Winner of the 2011 Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize Exploring fluency from multiple vantage points that together constitute a cognitive science perspective, this book examines research in second language acquisition and bilingualism that points to promising avenues for understanding and promoting second language fluency. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency covers essential topics such as units of analysis for measuring fluency, the relation of second language fluency to general cognitive fluidity, social and motivational contributors to fluency, and neural correlates of fluency. The author provides clear and accessible summaries of foundational empirical work on speech production, automaticity, lexical access, and other issues of relevance to second language acquisition theory. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency is a valuable reference for scholars in SLA, cognitive psychology, and language teaching, and it can also serve as an ideal textbook for advanced courses in these fields.

Drawing on frameworks from applied linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this volume employs a linguistics approach to understanding race and racism in Latin America, with a particular focus on Peru. Building on recent debates in Peru on cultural and biological definitions of race, the book seeks to re-examine the relationship between race and culture not as a dichotomy but as one rooted in and shaped by specific historical moments. Similarly, the volume uses this discussion as a jumping-off point from which to explore notions of identity informed by language as used in local context, rather than as a fixed social category. Offering new perspectives on discursive practices of race and racism in Peru and Latin America, this collection is key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American studies.

Centring on "words" which connect vocabulary and semantic morphemes, this book makes a systemic and in-depth analysis on the study of modern Chinese lexicology. Firstly, it clarifies the definitions and properties of vocabulary, words and semantic morphemes in Chinese. Then the structure forms of Chinese words are examined. It is worth noting that this research is one of the first to distinguish word formation and lexical morphology. It observes that word formation studies how neologisms are coined, while lexical morphology refers to the ways in which semantic morphemes are combined with each other. On word meaning and its clustering, it discusses the relationship between word meaning and concept, as well as the criteria and principles of the clustering. Specifically, it studies monosemes, polysemes, synonyms, near-synonyms, antonyms, etc., including their characteristics and types. Lastly, it explores the evolution of word meaning and its laws, as well as the dynamic form of vocabulary. This book will be a valuable reference for scholars and students in linguistics, especially in Chinese lexical studies.

The Think-Aloud Controversy in Second Language Research aims to answer key questions about the validity and uses of think-alouds, verbal reports completed by research participants while they perform a task. It offers an overview of how think-alouds have been used in language research and presents a quantitative meta-analysis of findings from studies involving verbal tasks and think-alouds. The book begins by presenting the theoretical background and empirical research that has examined the reactivity of think-alouds, then offers guidance regarding the practical issues of data collection and analysis, and concludes with implications for the use of think-alouds in language research. With its focus on a much-discussed and somewhat controversial data elicitation method in language research, this timely work is relevant to students and researchers from all theoretical perspectives who collect first or second language data. It serves as a valuable guide for any language researcher who is considering using think-alouds.