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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
Metaphor from the Ground Up introduces Conceptual Filtering Theory, a theory of mental processing that describes figurative language communication in terms of conceptual domain projection and contextual disambiguation. In an attempt to match theoretical observations from cognitive semantics and pragmatics with related knowledge about mental processes from cognitive neuroscience, CFT first examines the distributed nature of conceptualization and then uses this background information to explain metonymic "binding" and metaphoric "mapping." Once the perceptual origins of metonymy and metaphor have been demonstrated, CFT offers a detailed account of how salient aspects of conceptualization differentially combine to achieve predictable inferencing results in linguistic communication. In addition, CFT characterizes the role of contextual effects in pruning salient inferencing options and demonstrates how situational frames can be manipulated to guide semantic outcomes. The book as a whole will assert that figurative language processing cannot be characterized in terms of a generically constituted base system that receives inputs and spits out predictable results according to logical probability in a situational vacuum. Rather, it is a dynamic, context-sensitive process that continually reweights the underlying system so as to rapidly select situation-relevant lines of inferencing from among a variety of salient inferencing options.
I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences.
Combines research with pedagogy to provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the topic for students approaching it for the first time. With a focus on the cognitive side of language contact, drawing on the closely related subjects of bilingualism and multilingualism, this textbook will also appeal to students beyond those taking Language Contact modules, on modules such as Bilingualism and SLA. The closest competitors all published at least 11 years ago, so this will be far and away the most up-to-date textbook on the market, combining cutting-edge insights from research with a core grounding in the subject.
Positioning Gender in Discourse offers a newly emerging approach to the study of spoken discourse. Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis has particular relevance to analyzing the significance of gender in relation to the competing and intertextualized ways in which speakers construct their identities and their relationships through talk. This book gives readers a full account of the methodology through a study of teenagers' conversations in class, and a study of managers' discussions in team meetings.
This book is an anthology of articles on teaching English to speakers of other languages. The emphasis is on practical concerns of classroom procedures and on the cross-cultural aspects of teaching English around the world. Several of the articles focus on communicative language teaching.
The papers in this volume address central issues in the study of Plurality and Quantification from three different perspectives: * Algebraic approaches to Plurals and Quantification * Distributivity and Collectivity: Theoretical Foundations * Distributivity and Collectivity: Empirical Investigations Algebraic approaches to the semantics of natural languages were in dependently introduced for the study of generalized quantification, pred ication, intensionality, mass terms and plurality. The most prominent modern advocate for an algebraic theory of plurality (and mass terms) is certainly Godehard Link. It is indicative of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Link's work that most of the contributions in this volume take the logic of plurals proposed by Godehard Link (Link 1983, 1987) as their foundation or, at the very least, as their point of reference. Link's own paper in this volume provides a concise summary of many of the central research issues that have engaged semanticists during the last decade. Link's paper also contains an extensive bibliography that provides an excellent resource for scholars interested in the semantics of plurals. Since we can refer readers to Link's paper for an excellent survey of the subject matter of this book, we will limit our attention in this in troduction to summarizing the individual contributions in this volume. The book is organized into three main sections; within each section the papers are ordered alphabetically. However, as in much of linguistic the orizing, there is an exception: for reasons pointed out above, Godehard Link's article appears as Chapter 1.
The present volume brings together various strands of research focusing on aspects of the syntax of agreement, and the role that agreement plays in linguistic theory. The essays collected here show how and why agreement has emerged in recent years as the central theoretical construct in minimalism. Although the theoretical context of the volume is minimalist in character, Boeckx attempts to formulate formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.
Rhetoric has shaped our understanding of the nature of language and the purpose of literature for over two millennia. It is of crucial importance in understanding the development of literary history as well as elements of philosophy, politics and culture. The nature and practise of rhetoric was central to Classical, Renaissance and Enlightenment cultures and its relevance continues in our own postmodern world to inspire further debate. Examining both the practice and theory of this controversial concept, Jennifer Richards explores: historical and contemporary definitions of the term 'rhetoric' uses of rhetoric in literature, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce classical traditions of rhetoric, as seen in the work of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero the rebirth of rhetoric in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment the current status and future of rhetoric in literary and critical theory as envisaged by critics such as Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. This insightful volume offers an accessible account of this contentious yet unavoidable term, making this book invaluable reading for students of literature, philosophy and cultural studies.
This book closes the gap between theory and classroom application by capitalizing on learners' individuality in second or foreign language learning. The book examines the existing literature and theoretical underpinnings of each of the most prominent learner characteristics including anxiety, beliefs, cognitive abilities, motivation, strategies, styles and willingness to communicate. This strong foundation, coupled with the wide variety of activities that are suggested at the end of each chapter, arms the reader with ideas to conquer the problems created by negative affect and to capitalize on positive, facilitative emotions. The tasks are unrestricted by language and can be modified for use with technology, emergent learners and large classes, making this book a useful resource for both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers in university language teacher education programs.
This book explores the relationship between conversation analysis and applied linguistics, demonstrating how the analysis of institutional talk can contribute to professional practice. With a foreword by Paul Drew, the core of the collection brings together researchers from a wide range of applied areas, dealing with topics such as language impairment and speech therapy, medical general practice, retailing, cross-cultural training, radio journalism, higher education and language teaching and learning.
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 volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.
Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this
book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial
problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a
subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and
nouns in the sentence. Special attention is paid to the role nouns
and noun phrases play in the explication of aspect in English (and
similar languages). The grammatical marking of aspect is shown to
be a compensatory phenomenon imposed by language structure.
Comparisons made using Slavic (mainly Bulgarian) data reveal that
compositional aspect is a mirror image of verbal aspect. When
explicated compositionally, aspect is also determined by pragmatic
factors. Ultimately, it is part of man's cognitive potential.
This book offers original corpus research in a range of workplace contexts including office-based settings, call center interactions and healthcare communication. Chapters in this edited volume bring together leading scholars in the field of corpus analysis in workplace discourse and include data from multiple corpora. Employing a range of qualitative and quantitative analytic approaches including Conversation Analysis, Linguistic Profiling and Register Analysis, the book introduces unique specialized corpus data in the areas of Augmentative and Alternative Communication, nursing, and cross-cultural communication, among others.
The first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of all of Marguerite Duras' major works. Through close textual readings with a particular focus on women's access to language, this book shows how Duras critiques and subverts dominant discourse. Duras' textual strategies are described within a discussion of narrativity which also addresses factors of race and class. Cohen demonstrates how Duras achieves the famous ritual atmosphere of her prose through precise techniques which connect to her critique of representation.
This project is aimed the 16+ age range inside or outside any kind of educational institution. It is for courses concerned with general education - either in general studies programmes or as aspects of specialist teaching. Narrative has been kept to a minimum. Instead, the books are more a collection of different items of teaching and learning materials: for example, the collection of key concepts, and the list of key questions connected withe the study. The books are compact in content and flexible in use. This book was first published in 1974.
This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar, functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics. An attempt is made to develop a fairly abstract unified theoretical frame work for the description of discourse which actually helps explain concrete facts of the discourse grammar of a naturallanguage.2 This plan is reflected in the division of the study into two parts. In the first part, a semiformal framework for describing conversational discourse is developed in some detail. In the second part, this framework is applied to the functional syntax of English. The relation of the discourse grammar of Part II to the descriptive frame work of Part I can be instructively compared to the relation of Tarskian semantics to model theory. Tarski's semantics defmes a concept of truth of a sentence in a model, an independently identified construct. Analogously, my rules of discourse grammar defme a concept of appropriateness of a sentence to a given context. The task of the first Part of the essay is to characterize the relevant notion of context. Although my original statement of the problem was linguistic - how to describe the meaning, or function, of certain aspects of word order and intonation - Part I is largely an application of various methods and results of philosophical logic. The justification of the interdisciplinary approach is the simplicity and naturalness of the eventual answers to specific linguistic problems in Part II."
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.
Drawing on ethnographic research inside and outside the classroom,
Janet Maybin investigates how 10-12 year-old children use talk and
literacy to construct knowledge about their social worlds and about
themselves, as they negotiate the transition from childhood into
adolescence. Through the analysis of examples of talk, she shows
how children use collaborative verbal strategies, stories of
personal experience and the reworked voices of others to
investigate the moral order and forge their own identities.
The only modern collection of speeches by southerners on the themes that have shaped the history and culture of the region, this anthology, which spans eighty tumultuous years of southern history, reflects the strategies of southern orators as they attempted to defend the indefensible, as well as those few who advocated a more compassionate South. Southern leaders were judged largely by their oratorical ability and their skills in defending the southern way of life. Accordingly, they placed much emphasis on developing consummate rhetorical skills. Thus, one can read the history of the region in the speeches of its politicians, ministers, and other public figures. Beginning in 1820 with the debates over the admission of Missouri to the Union, many southerners took a defensive posture against those forces from outside the region which they saw as threats to their culture. While the rhetoric of most southern leaders was clearly defensive, one must remember that they were dealing with the difficult issues of slavery; the relationship of federal and state government; their vision of the ideal society; the coming civil war and its aftermath; and living in a defeated, desolate, war-torn region. As demagogic, defensive, and archaic as they may seem today, these speakers developed and expanded patterns of thought and rhetorical strategy that echoed throughout the region. The collective memory that they created would shape their contemporaries and affect the lives of generations to follow.
The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some seminal work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy.
This book looks at changes in the first language of people who know a second language, thus seeing L2 users as people in their own right differing from the monolingual in both first and second languages. It presents theories and research that investigate the first language of second language users from a variety of perspectives including vocabulary, pragmatics, cognition, and syntax and using a variety of linguistic and psychological models.
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.
"Textual Metonymy" employs a theoretical framework combining
rhetoric, figurative theory and textlinguistics. In the process, a
very full historical account of treatments of metonymy from
classical traditions up to the present time is given and critiqued.
The author proposes a semiotic approach to the treatment of
metonymy, on the basis of which a textual model of metonymy as a
process of representation is developed to account for text cohesion
and text coherence. |
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