Though the progress of technology continually pushes life toward virtual existence, the last decade has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman bears witness to the attention paid by literary theorists, digital humanists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and designers to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. The chapters reflect on questions about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as having equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism. Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman. Thus, this collection brings diverse disciplines together to foster a dialogue on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Occupying a still evolving but clearly established place in 20th- century intellectual history, the great Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin is best characterized as a philosopher of dialogue or human communication. Within Bakhtin's body of thought are numerous insights in the fields of linguistics and semiotics, literary theory and poetics. From their linked perspectives "The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin" approaches its subject, concentrating on problems of language and literature. Beginning with Bakhtin's assumption that the "word" represents the fundament of all human communication, this study proceeds to take up his understanding of the novel, regarded by him as the quintessential modern text.

This book throws light on ideologies, practices and sociocultural developments currently shaping language use in Japan by departing from the more common investigation of language in private contexts and examining aspects of the language found in a range of significant public spaces, from the material (an international airport, the streets of Tokyo, the JSL classroom in Japan and courtrooms) to the electronic (television dramas, local government web pages and cyberspace).

Through its study of the language encountered in such settings, the volume provides a deeper understanding of multifaceted aspects of linguistic diversity, both in terms of the use of languages other than Japanese and of issues relating to the Japanese language itself. The variety of theoretical approaches brought to bear by contributing authors ensures a substantial intellectual contribution to the literature on language in contemporary Japan.

This book was published as a special issue of Japanese Studies.

This volume presents a comprehensive introduction to the study of second language learning, multilingualism and gender. An impressive array of papers situated within a feminist poststructuralist framework demonstrates how this framework allows for a deeper understanding of second language learning, a number of language contact phenomena, intercultural communication, and critical language pedagogy. The volume has wide appeal to students and scholars in the fields of language and gender, sociolinguistics, SLA, anthropology, and language education.

An increasingly popular approach to second and foreign language education, this book focuses on incidental learning: how students learn words from reading. Despite its popularity, some researchers have questioned this theory that students can learn new words by inferring meanings based on a text they are reading. So, why does the incidental method not work for some students? What are the conditions for naturalistic learning to occur? What do students need to be able to do while reading in order to learn words successfully? Tackling these questions head-on, this book provides researchers and educators with a more specific account of the processes behind the seemingly naturalistic method. Clarifying the connection between reading and word learning processes, Megumi Hamada proposes a new model, the Cognitive Model of Word-Meaning Inference, to describe how we obtain and use word-form and contextual information for learning words and the pedagogical applications of this. A significant new contribution to research in the field, Learning Words from Reading provides a cognitive perspective on how students learn new words from reading in a second or foreign language.

Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input - the potential evidence for grammatical parameter setting - have also been ignored. Especially in linguistic approaches to language acquisition, the role of language processing has not been prominent. With few exceptions (e. g. Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982; Pinker, 1984) discussions of language perform ance tend to arise only when experimental debris, the artifact of some experiment, needs to be cleared away. Consequently, language pro cessing has been viewed as a collection of rather uninteresting perform ance factors obscuring the true object of interest, namely, grammar acquisition. On those occasions when parsing "strategies" have been incorporated into accounts of language development, they have often been discussed as vague preferences, not open to rigorous analysis. In principle, however, theories of language comprehension can and should be subjected to the same criteria of explicitness and explanatoriness as other theories, e. g., theories of grammar. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem. It seems probable that an explicit model of the way(s) processing routines are applied in acquisition would help solve some central problems of grammar acquisition, since these routines regulate the application of grammatical knowledge to novel inputs."

Traditional semantic description of Ancient Greek prepositions has struggled to synthesize the varied and seemingly arbitrary uses into something other than a disparate, sometimes overlapping list of senses. The Cognitive Linguistic approach of prototype theory holds that the meanings of a preposition are better explained as a semantic network of related senses that radially extend from a primary, spatial sense. These radial extensions arise from contextual factors that affect the metaphorical representation of the spatial scene that is profiled. Building upon the Cognitive Linguistic descriptions of Bortone (2009) and Luraghi (2009), linguists, biblical scholars, and Greek lexicographers apply these developments to offer more in-depth descriptions of select postclassical Greek prepositions and consider the exegetical and lexicographical implications of these findings. This volume will be of interest to those studying or researching the Greek of the New Testament seeking more linguistically-informed description of prepositional semantics, particularly with a focus on the exegetical implications of choice among seemingly similar prepositions in Greek and the challenges of potentially mismatched translation into English.

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

1) Covering all the layers of the sentence right periphery in Chinese, eight sentence-final particles and the interaction among them are comprehensively studied. 2) Through the lens of feature theory, the theoretical views from a variety of dimensions are discussed. 3) It allows us to see how L2 learners whose first language has no similar equivalents acquire these peripheral particles. 4) With its commonly used nature in spoken Chinese, both the linguistic analysis and the findings from the empirical studies of the particles in this book are significant for learning and teaching of Chinese.

* Features/Benefits o Uniquely provides a clear, accessible, introduction to a range of aspects of theoretical and applied metaphor studies - metaphor variability, processing, use, multimodality, and creativity - across languages (including non-Western languages), communicative settings, and modes of expression. It thus enables understanding of the main issues, terminology, and big picture relating to metaphor. o Presents diverse studies that employ a variety of empirical methods, from neuroimaging to corpus analysis to behavioral experimentation to computational modelling. o Offers a rich array of pedagogical material in every chapter and points to future directions for metaphor research. * Demand/Audience o Meets the demand for a comprehensive, introductory work in metaphor, which has had an explosion of interest and output in the research literature, conferences, and taught courses. o Students/instructor and researchers of linguistics, communication, anthropology, cognitive science, discourse analysis, and more interested in learning/teaching more about metaphor, figurative language, and cognitive linguistics will benefit from this synthesis, which will enable them to read more specifically oriented books in this area (of which there are many). * Competition o No extant book directly competes with the proposed book. Other books about metaphor are highly specialized, narrowly focused monographs on metaphor in specific domains, and are inaccessible/inappropriate for student/course or introductory use to the broad subject of metaphor. This synthetic, zoomed-out book fills that gap by pulling together a wide range of topics and offering an overview of current metaphor research.

Book 1 of the book series is targeted at beginner learners of Cantonese. This volume focuses on authentic spoken Cantonese as used in contemporary Hong Kong and sets out to provide an authentic and contextualized approach to the learning of the language. This volume provides language scenarios in daily life and cover various language functions, such as icebreaking, asking for information, describing, providing information, asking for help, making appointment, and narrating. This volume provides essential learning points and solid linguistic training to learners. Book 1 of the book series can be used by universities, colleges, schools in Hong Kong, and by institutions around the world. This book is suitable for learners who are looking for self-study materials.

This edited collection brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who together offer cutting-edge insights into the complex roles, functions, and effects of pronouns in literary texts. The book engages with a range of text-types, including poetry, drama, and prose from different periods and regions, in English and in translation. Beginning with analyses of the first-person pronoun, it moves onto studies of the subject dynamics of first- and second-person, before considering plural modes of narration and how pronoun use can help to disperse narrative perspective. The volume then debates the functional constraints of pronouns in fictional contexts and finally reflects upon the theoretical advancements presented in the collection. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, narratology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.

While organisations become more and more global, they also become more and more dispersed and virtual. This challenges the sense of a shared organisational identity and the ability of employees to communicate personally held knowledge. To address these challenges this book offers an innovative multidisciplinary approach to knowledge communication in global organisations. The book develops a multidisciplinary analytical lens through which to understand employee identity formations and knowledge communication practises. Using detailed analyses of interviews from a real organisation, the book builds an understanding of how 21st century employees make sense of a virtual organisational reality characterised by multiple simultaneous projects and virtual, dispersed teams. These analyses are conducted using a new discourse analysis method for analysing research interviews, Discursive Sensemaking Analysis. Using these methods and findings, researchers, project managers and HR professionals will be able to analyse their own organisations to discover how employees make sense of the complexity of 21st century global organisations.

This volume tracks the impact Processing Instruction has made since its conception. The authors explain Processing Instruction, both its main theoretical underpinnings as well as the guidelines for developing structured input practices. They review the empirical research conducted to date, so that readers have an overview of new research carried out on the effects of Processing Instruction. The work concludes with reflections on the generalizability and limits of the research on Processing Instruction and offers future directions for Processing Instruction research.

Many speech texts are either too theoretical or too bland for effective use in the typical classroom. This book provides students with enough theory and information to learn beginning speech, but emphasizes practical exercises and activities. Each unit supports one or two clear specific learning objectives with a number of different activities and assignments. The craft of public speaking is learned by doing it in a hands-on, workshop type of program. This text is the result of extensive research as well as practical experience. The techniques have been proven successful in the author's own public speaking courses. Eight chapters: Communication Apprehension: Techniques of Delivery: Listening Skills: Topic Selection, Organization, and Research; Different Modes of Speaking; Speaking with Different Purposes; Oral Interpretation of Literature; Applied Activities.

Over a longer period than I sometimes care to contemplate I have worked on possible-worlds semantics. The earliest work was in modal logic, to which I keep returning, but a sabbatical in 1970 took me to UCLA, there to discover the work of Richard Montague in applying possible-worlds semantics to natural lan guage. My own version of this appeared in Cresswell (1973) and was followed up in a number of articles, most of which were collected in Cresswell (1985b). A central problem for possible worlds semantics is how to accommodate propositional attitudes. This problem was addressed in Cresswell (1985a), and the three books mentioned so far represent a reasonably complete picture of my positive views on formal semantics. I have regarded the presentation of a positive view as more important than the criticism of alternatives, although the works referred to do contain many passages in which I have tried to defend my own views against those of others. But such criticism is important in that a crucial element in establishing the content of a theory is that we be able to evaluate it in relation to its com petitors. It is for that reason that I have collected in this volume a number of articles in which I attempt to defend the positive semantical picture I favour against objections and competing theories."

Iceberg semantics is a new framework of Boolean semantics for mass nouns and count nouns in which the interpretation of a noun phrase rises up from a generating base and floats with its base on its Boolean part set, like an iceberg. The framework is shown to preserve the attractive features of classical Boolean semantics for count nouns; the book argues that Iceberg semantics forms a much better framework for studying mass nouns than the classical theory does. Iceberg semantics uses its notion of base to develop a semantic theory of the differences between mass nouns and count nouns and between different types of mass nouns, in particular between prototypical mass nouns (here called mess mass nouns) like water and mud versus object mass nouns (here called neat mass nouns) like poultry and pottery. The book shows in detail how and why neat mass nouns pattern semantically both with mess mass nouns and with count nouns. Iceberg semantics is a compositional theory and in Iceberg semantics the semantic distinctions defined apply to noun phrases of any complexity. The book studies in depth the semantics of classifier noun phrases (like three glasses of wine) and measure noun phrases (like three liters of wine). The classical wisdom is that classifier interpretations are count. Recent literature has argued compellingly that measure interpretations are mass. The book shows that both connections follow from the basic architecture of Iceberg semantics. Audience: Scholars and students in linguistics - in particular semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics and syntax - and neighbouring disciplines like logic, philosophy of language, and cognitive science.

This book offers an accessible, practical and engaging guide that provides sample instructional activities supported by theoretical background information, with a focus on the nature of the instructional process in relation to several variables. It approaches instructional models, strategies, methods, techniques, tactics and planning from a new perspective and shares effective tips to help readers better understand the instructional process and its theoretical elements. The book addresses the following questions: What is the nature of the instructional process? What are the classifications of contemporary models and strategies developed within the instructional process? Which groups yield the most effective methods and techniques, and how can they best be practically implemented? What are the instructional tactics teachers need to take into consideration, in which groups are they collected, and which tips can help us employ each tactic? Additionally, readers can adapt the book's ready-to-use sample activities to their own educational settings. Overall, this book offers an enlightening discussion on contemporary practices related to the teaching process, a broad and holistic theoretical framework, and an ideal reference source for all students and scholars who are interested in the educational sciences.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Published research and conference presentations on the Chinese language in the last decade have tended to focus on adult language processing. This book provides a comprehensive resource for the critical discussion of major issues in learning to read Chinese from a child acquisition perspective. The combined contributions from researchers in Asian studies, linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, cognitive psychology, reading, and education inform international comparative studies of literacy by making apparent the features of the Chinese culture, language, writing system, and pedagogy that may facilitate or impede the acquisition of literacy.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.