This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.

This book explores communication in emergency call and response centers, taking an approach drawn from Conversation Analysis to examine how call-takers answer calls and the ways in which dispatch is issued in different contexts. It offers an original contribution to the study of the organization of emergency calls, the ways such calls are treated, and some of the practical problems that emerge when dealing with them. The author offers a systematic review of studies in the international field of the organization of emergency calls, while at the same time providing fresh case studies, illustrated with empirical materials, taken from audio- and video- recordings of the everyday activities of call and response centers. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social interaction and may be appreciated by all scholars and practitioners working on the social management of emergency situations, including in fields such as Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics.

Despite their opposite emotional effects, humor and horror are highly similar phenomena. They both can be traced back to (the detection, resolution, and emotional elaboration of) incongruities, understood as semantic violations through unexpected combinations of oppositional information. However, theoretical and experimental comparisons between humor and resolvable incongruities that elicit other emotions than exhilaration have been lacking so far. To gain more insights into the linguistic differences between humor and horror and the cognitive real-time processing of both, a main concern of this book is to discuss the transferability of linguistic humor theories to a systematic horror investigation and directly compare self-paced reading times (SPR), facial actions (FACS), and event-related brain potentials (ERP) of normed minimal quadruplets with frightening and humorous incongruities as well as (in)coherent stimuli. The results suggest that humor and horror share cognitive resources to detect and resolve incongruities. To better distinguish humor from neighboring phenomena, this book refines current humor theories by incorporating humor and horror in a cognitive incongruity processing model.

This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham "in flesh and bone" construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis that sentences and propositions about the future have a definite truth value, without any ensuing commitment to determinism or fatalism. The second topic looks at the problem whether the branching-time model needs to countenance a privileged branch (the so-called Thin Red Line). Finally, the third topic considers the idea that there are so-called soft facts. These would be the subject matter of sentences and propositions verbally about the present or the past, but metaphysically about a later time, and which might change in the future. Overall, the book provides an updated and rigorous idea of the debate about Ockhamism. It gives readers a deeper understanding into this philosophical approach influenced by William of Ockham, characterized by the rejection of the Aristotelian idea that, in order to preserve the contingency of the future, future contingents must be deemed neither true nor false.

What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting-edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse, and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.

Rhetoric of Masculinity: Male Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict lends depth and global nuance to discourse associated with the masculinity concept as it brings to bear on males' self-image, role in society, media representations of them, and the gender role stress/conflict experienced when they fail to measure up to social standards associated with what it means to be manly. Even though the concept of masculine gender role stress/conflict has received substantial scholarly attention in psychology, social learning effects of masculinity as it plays out in media warrant further study given that representations offer audiences restrictive male gender roles that may contribute to toxic masculinity. Men and boys are taught to be self-sufficient, to act tough, to be muscular, heterosexual, and to use aggression to resolve conflicts. Such contexts provide restrictive images that can result in self harm and an inflexible social milieu. Scholars and students of communication, rhetoric, and gender studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Critics shudder at mixed metaphors like 'that wet blanket is a loose cannon', but admire 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player', and all the metaphors packed into Macbeth's 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech. How is it that metaphors are sometimes mixed so badly and other times put together so well? In Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse, Karen Sullivan employs findings from linguistics and cognitive science to explore how metaphors are combined and why they sometimes mix. Once we understand the ways that metaphoric ideas are put together, we can appreciate why metaphor combinations have such a wide range of effects. Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse includes analyses of over a hundred metaphors from politicians, sportspeople, writers and other public figures, and identifies the characteristics that make these metaphors annoying, amusing or astounding.

The anthology 'Meaning and Analysis' addresses the key topics of H. Paul Grice's philosophy of language, such as rationality, non-natural meaning, communicative actions, conversational implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics distinction and recent debates concerning minimalist versus contextualist semantics.

This book provides a detailed and comprehensive design of a new second language literacy pedagogy and the results of implementing this pedagogy in different contexts in order to demonstrate that it is possible to address some long-standing second language (L2) curriculum and literacy development challenges. The author clearly explains the theory behind Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory of Mind and Systemic Functional Linguistics and how they can inform literacy pedagogy in the form of Concept-Based Language Instruction and a Division-of-Labor Pedagogy. By presenting detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses and results of multiple forms of data, the author demonstrates the effectiveness of the pedagogy. In conjunction with background on the intricate and interdependent nature of the concepts needed for second language literacy development, and in contrast with a cognitivist approach to reading pedagogy and research, the author provides all the details necessary for teachers and researchers to appreciate both the theory and how it can be applied to their practice.

Through its constuctivist orientation and Sociocultural perspective, this book contributes to an improved understanding of what it means to read and, particularly, to recall, second language texts in the context of both second language reading and research. It also serves as an introduction to Sociocultural Theory and demonstrates the usefulness of this type of analysis, not only of written recall protocols, but of other forms of learner language. Finally, it attempts to illustrate the nature of activity in relation to task, by showing the diverse ways in which learners approach the task of writing a recall protocol.

Discursive Change in Hong Kong: Sociopolitical Dynamics, Metaphor, and One Country, Two Systems is a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of socio-political and discursive change in Hong Kong, a westernized Chinese society once under British rule, now decolonized but without independence, and with a constitution promising universal suffrage sometime in the future. Starting off with interesting and frequently contradictory debates surrounding the discussions on the handover of Hong Kong to mainland China, Jennifer Eagleton provides a stimulating, politically well informed, detailed, and comprehensive "insider" account of many aspects of the press media and official discourse on democracy and political change in Hong Kong as part of "One Country, Two Systems." The book shows how historical, cultural, and identity issues have shaped and molded post-1997 political discourse and how the seemingly dramatic changes in the city since 2020 may not have been that surprising for long-term observers of Hong Kong. By going beyond consideration of the purely linguistic dimension of the selected texts to encompass the larger historical and socio-political context, and incorporating textual, discursive, and metaphoric analysis over time, this book provides a comprehensive examination of Hong Kong political discourse and its constituent themes.

This book is perhaps the most stunning available demonstration of the explanatory power of the parametric approach to linguistic theory. It is akin, not to a deductive proof, but to the discovery of a footprint in a far-off place which leaves an archeologist elated. The book is full of intricate reasoning, but the stunning aspect is that the reasoning moves between not only complex syntax and diverse languages, but it makes predictions about what two-year-old children will assume about the jumble of linguistic input that confronts them. Those predictions, Hyams shows, are supported by a discriminating analysis of acquisition data in English and Italian. Let us examine the linguistic context for a moment before we discuss her theory. The ultimate issue in linguistic theory is the explanation of how a child can acquire any human language. To capture this fact we must posit an innate mechanism which meets two opposite constraints: it must be broad enough to account for the diversity of human language, and narrow enough so that the child does not make irrelevant hypotheses about his own language, particularly ones from which there is no recovery. That is, a child must not posit a grammar which permits all of the sentences of a language as well as other sentences which are not in the language. In a word, the child must not create a language in which one cannot make adult discriminations between grammatical and ungrammatical.

Food Justice Activism and Pedagogies: Literacies and Rhetorics for Transforming Food Systems in Local and Transnational Contexts brings together national and transnational scholars in the field of rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and other interdisciplinary fields to address food as a topic of inquiry and a matter of social and environmental justice. The contributors in this edited collection demonstrate that analyzing the literacies, rhetorics, and pedagogies needed to transform food systems is vital to creating sustainable food systems. The contributors advocate that food learning be taught and engaged at all levels of schooling and in society, including college courses and community settings. Scholars of rhetoric, interdisciplinary food studies, and sociology will find this book of particular interest.

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.

The volume brings together important essays on syntax and semantics by Aikhenvald and Dixon, highlighting their expertise in various fields of linguistics. The first part focusses on linguistic typology, covering case markers used on verbs, argument-determined constructions, unusual meanings of causatives, the semantic basis for a typology, word-class-changing derivations, speech reports and semi-direct speech. The second part concentrates on documentation and analysis of previously undescribed languages, from South America and Indigenous Australia. The third part addresses a variety of issues in grammar and lexicography of English. This includes pronouns with transferred reference, comparative constructions, features of the noun phrase, and the discussion of 'twice'. The treatment of Australian Aboriginal words in dictionaries is discussed in the final chapter.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

This book introduces multimodality and technology as key concepts for understanding learning in the 21st century. The author investigates how a nationwide socio-educational policy in Uruguay becomes recontextualised across time/space scales, impacting interaction and learning in an English as a Foreign Language classroom. The book introduces scalar analysis to better understand the situated and fractal nature of education policy as meaning-making, subsequently defining learning from a multimodal socio-semiotic approach. The analytical integration of different policy scales shows what policy means to various stakeholders, and what learning means for students and teachers. This depends both on how they position themselves and how they engage with the policy educational media. This innovative book will appeal to students and scholars of technology and learning, as well as multimodality.

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies like instant messaging, textmessaging, blogging, photo-sharing, mobile phones, gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts (journalism, gaming, tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay, young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, and French). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists, including genre, style and stance. With commentaries from the two most internationally recognized scholars of new media discourse (Naomi Baron and Susan Herring) and essays by well-established scholars and new voices in sociolinguistics, the volume will be more current, more diverse, and more thematically unified than any other collection on the topic.

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking 'enunciative' tradition and the English-speaking 'pragmatic' tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of 'signs', rather than 'strings'. This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky's heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories.

Yet the concept of 'compositionality' itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents.

The volume aims to bring together original, unpublished papers on discourse structure and meaning from different frameworks or theoretical perspectives to address research questions revolving around issues instigated by Turkish. Another goal is to offer methodologically different solutions for the research gaps identified in individual chapters. The contributions are based on empirical generalizations and make use of, for example, computerized corpora as the data, examples compiled from naturally occurring discourse, or data gathered in experimental conditions. Hence, the book has a firm theoretical standing and it is empirically well-grounded. The collection is expected to be of direct interest to the community of scholars and researchers in discourse structure and semantics as well as corpus linguistics. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and all interested readers, offering them a fresh view on various discourse-related phenomena from the perspective of Turkish.

This book explores the problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement comprised of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) for scholars, teachers, and students from many backgrounds. Beginning with a Preface by renowned CDA/CDS scholar Ruth Wodak, it introduces CDA/CDS through examples of what its research looks like, delineates various precursors to CDA/CDS and important foundational concepts and theories, and traces its development from its early years until it became established. After the relationship between CDA and CDS is discussed, seven commonly cited approaches to CDA/CDS are outlined, including their connections and differences, their origins and development, major and associated scholars, research focus(es), and central concepts and distinguishing features. After a summary of critiques of CDA/CDS and responses by CDA/CDS scholars, the book provides an overview of its salient connections to other interdisciplinary areas of scholarship such as critical applied linguistics, education, anthropology/ ethnography, sociolinguistics, gender studies, queer linguistics, pragmatics and ecolinguistics. The final chapter describes how scholars use their knowledge of CDA/CDS to make a difference in the world.

This volume is an important instalment in the rapidly expanding literature on multilingualism in education and language teaching. Within multilingual studies the volume is highly innovative in its application of the concept, theory and perspectives of the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC). The volume reports original research on language education policy and practice which address contemporary DLC-informed multilingualism within family settings and institutional domains such as teacher education, primary and secondary schooling, and higher education. Deploying the DLC concept as an analytical and conceptual category the chapters explore both personal and institutional life of multilingualism, enriched through visualizations. Specific chapters examine issues connected to career opportunities of adults of refugee background in Norway, multilingual transnational couples, and language teacher preparation in settings as diverse as Austria, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Israel, and the Basque Country and Catalonia in Spain. This volume is of direct relevance to coursework students and researchers pursuing programs in education, linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and multilingualism, but will also attract interest in disciplines such as social work and psychology. Additionally the volume will appeal to members of the general public wishing to acquaint themselves with current research and thinking on critical issues in multilingual studies, such as learning experiences within and beyond classrooms, and aspects of public policy and institutional decision-making processes.

This book documents an understudied phenomenon in Austronesian languages, namely the existence of recurrent submorphemic sound-meaning associations of the general form -CVC. It fills a critical gap in scholarship on these languages by bringing together a large body of data in one place, and by discussing some of the theoretical issues that arise in analyzing this data. Following an introduction which presents the topic, it includes a critical review of the relevant literature over the past century, and discussions of the following: 1. problems in finding the root (the "needle in the haystack" problem), 2. root ambiguity, 3. controls on chance as an interfering factor, 4. unrecognized morphology as a possible factor in duplicating evidence, 5. the shape/structure of the root, 6. referents of roots, 7. the origin of roots, 8. the problem of distinguishing false cognates produced by convergence in root-bearing morphemes from legitimate comparisons resulting from divergent descent, and 9. the problem of explaining how submorphemes are transmitted across generations of speakers independently of the morphemes that host them. The remainder of the book consists of a list of sources for the 197 languages from which data is drawn, followed by the roots with supporting evidence, a short appendix, and references.

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.