![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
Brummett explores the ways people use three key terms-reality, representation, and simulation-as rhetorical devices with political and social effect. Human perception, language, and aesthetics experiences are the bases for the fluidity among these terms. Each term's rhetoric is illustrated in an analysis of texts in popular culture: William Gibson's novels, the usenet group rec.motorcycles, and the film Groundhog Day. Brummett explores the ways people use three key terms-reality, representation, and simulation-as rhetorical devices with political and social effect. People write and speak as if there were such things as reality, representation, and simulation. People treat the terms as if they were clearly referential and as if those referents were clearly distinct. But what kind of political, social work do people do when they write and speak in those terms? What kind of claim is being made, or accusation leveled when such a term is used? How do the dimensions and parameters of meaning facilitated by each term work in the management and distribution of power? These are questions of rhetoric, the manipulation of signs and symbols for influence and effect. Brummett illustates the rhetoric of reality in a critical analysis of William Gibson's science fiction novels. The rhetoric of representation is shown in discusions on the usenet group rec.motorcyles. The rhetoric of simulation is explained through the film Groundhog Day. Of particular interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with rhetoric and popular culture, media, communication, and technology, and the literature of science and science fiction.
This volume collects twenty-nine published and unpublished papers by the linguist James Gair, considered the foremost western scholar of the Sri Lankan languages Sinhala and Jaffna Tamil. Ranging over thirty years, his work also considers issues in a variety of Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali. The collection reflects the wide range of Gair's interests, from morpho-syntactic questions to questions regarding historical and areal linguistics, especially language contact and diglossia, and extending to language acquisition. By collecting these papers and making them newly accessible, this volume will provide an important resource not only for scholars of these languages but for linguists interested in the theoretical issues Gair explores.
The Second Edition of The Grammar of Discourse critically evaluates and updates Robert E. Longacre's ambitious work dedicated to the thesis that language is language only in context, and that context's natural role in the resolution of sentence ambiguities has been overlooked for too long by linguists. This new edition advances even further the discourse revolution' which Longacre predicted in the First Edition would come in response to the demand for greater explanatory power through context. The most cogent application of this, one which makes the book unique among linguistics texts, is the author's exhaustive investigation into the interface of the morphosyntax of a language with its textual structures. This expanded volume builds upon its predecessor's major points, with new chapters increasing the coverage of paragraph and clause structure-the latter being handled in a new chapter which solves a problem posed in the original edition: how holistic concerns of structure, especially the recognition of different strands of information, relate to the constituent structure of discourse. The insights contained in this chapter create an opportunity to tie in current discussions of transitivity, ergativity, the antipassive, agency hierarchy, order-preserving transformations, and word-order concerns into the structure of discourse.Other noteworthy features of the Second Edition include: The integration of information salience, local dominance, and paragraph type to answer the question What makes a discourse followable ?' -A study of dialogue relations-The formalization of the interrelations of tagmeme and syntagmeme, and of the varieties of exponence on the various levels of hierarchy-Theuse of an expanded and enriched statement calculus to better pinpoint logical relations between predications-The use of a similarly enriched predicate calculus to present case frames-A stepped diagram presentation of paragraph level analyses. With material tested in classes at the University of Texas, Arlington, this influential work merits serious consideration as a text for first-year graduate courses in linguistics.
This collection of research offers an initial step in the pursuit of an appliable linguistics. Appliable Linguistics takes everyday real-life language-related problems both theoretical and practical in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as its starting point. It then uses and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of appliable linguistics used in this volume is informed by the work of M.A.K. Halliday, who believes that "the value of a theory lies in the use that can be made of it." The chapters in this volume thus use and contribute to an appliable linguistics that engages with a range of issues including: translation, education, language teaching/learning, multimodality, media, social policy and action, and positive discourse analysis. This collection of research is offered as an initial step in the pursuit of Appliable Linguistics, which we hope will serve as a foundation for future work across the discipline.
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.
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.
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.
This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and "wh-"), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes Split-DP structures or Floating quantification. Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of "wh" in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between "not an N" and "not all the N" in French. "
This is the first study of the typological change of English from a synthetic towards an analytic language that focuses exclusively on the lexical domain of the language. It presents an innovative approach to linguistic typology by focusing on the different encoding techniques used in the lexicon, providing a theoretical framework for the description of structural types (synthetic, analytic) and encoding techniques (fusional, isolating, agglutinative, incorporating) found in the lexicon of a language. It is argued that, in the case of English, the change from syntheticity to analyticity did not only affect its inflectional system and the encoding of grammatical information, but also the derivational component. Based on a cognitive approach to derivation, the book provides empirical evidence for a considerable decline in the use of synthetic structures and a trend towards higher degrees of analyticity in a specific lexical domain of English, the formation of nouns by means of derivation. The full extent of this change surfaced during the transition from Old English to early Middle English, but it was later partly reversed though influence from French. The typological shift was thus the result of a global structural reorganization of the language that resulted in a fundamental change of the structure of words. The book also presents a comprehensive account of the historical development of nominal derivation from the beginnings of Old English until the end of the early Middle English period. Based on empirical data from written sources the study documents the frequency of use of all Germanic-based derivational morphemes for nominalizations over different subperiods and discusses their origin as well as important changes of their semantic and morphological properties.
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.
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.
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.
*assumes no prior knowledge of pragmatics and will take readers through the basics quickly so that they can apply the ideas to online environments *covers a wide range of online media platforms from email, chatrooms, and IM through to social media including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube *won't date fast as focus is on how ideas and topics from pragmatics can be applied to mediated contexts, irrespective of the particular media
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."
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.
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.
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.
The second edition of this highly regarded textbook is designed to introduce students at the tertiary level to both Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. It develops critical analytical skills by rooting analysis in SFL methodology so that students can learn to analyze a range of discourse types. Each chapter builds a methodological foundation for the development of critical discourse analytical skills. SFL provides novice analysts with a rich set of resources for CDA and equips them to better reflect on what language is doing and why. The Power of Language offers explanations along with a range of sample analyses to illustrate theory and provide applications of the methodologies introduced in each chapter. Students not only learn by studying a number of analyses but carry out their own analytical work on other samples, thus gaining experience. Each chapter also includes examples of analyses by well know researchers so that novice analysts become familiar with various approaches to analysis.This new edition has been thoroughly updated throughout and features an expanded first chapter on language and international conflict, a new second chapter focusing on language and political fear, an expanded chapter on multimodal communication and an entirely new chapter on language and social media. Other chapters have been updated with new sample analyses and activities.
|
You may like...
Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic…
Ernest LePore, Kirk Ludwig
Hardcover
R3,034
Discovery Miles 30 340
The Oxford Handbook of Information…
Caroline Fery, Shinichiro Ishihara
Hardcover
R4,569
Discovery Miles 45 690
|