This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s keynote address during his visit at the University of Łódź in 2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations, published by Peter Lang.

This book provides an overview of current theories of and methods for analysing spoken discourse. It includes discussions of both the more traditional approaches of pragmatics, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis, and more recently developed approaches such as multimodal discourse analysis and critical sociolinguistics. Rather than treating these perspectives as mutually exclusive, the book introduces a framework based on principles from mediated discourse analysis in which different approaches to spoken discourse are seen as complementing and informing one another. In this framework, spoken discourse is seen as mediated through a complex collection of technological, semiotic and cultural tools which enable and constrain people's ability to engage in different kinds of social actions, enact different kinds of social identities and form different kinds of social relationships. A major focus of the volume is on the way technological tools like telephones, broadcast media, digital technologies are changing the way people communicate with spoken language. The book is suitable for use as a textbook in advanced courses in discourse analysis and language in social interaction, and will also be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields including linguistics, sociology, media studies and anthropology.

This book includes twelve articles that present new research on the Finnic and Baltic languages spoken in the southern and eastern part of the Circum-Baltic area. It aims to elaborate on the various contact situations and (dis)similarities between the languages of the area. Taking an areal, comparative, or sociolinguistic perspective, the articles offer new insights into the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and textual patterns of different types of predicates or nouns or consider the variation of grammatical categories from a typological perspective. The qualitative analyses find support in quantitative data collected from language corpora or written sources, including those representing the less studied varieties of the area.

This monograph presents a contrastive-corpus analysis of the semantic category of gratification. It takes as a case study the verb reward and its various forms in Polish and in English, as prototypical of the semantics of gratification. The study, set predominantly in the framework of semantic syntax, and drawing from the theory of valence and frame semantics, adopts a corpus-driven and usage-based approach to language analysis. By exploring the syntactic realization and distribution of arguments opened by the predicates of gratification in the two languages, the book offers new insights into language representation in English and Polish, and addresses the combinatoricity of human thought and cognitive mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of the situation of rewarding.

In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in unmarked declarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates whether different medial positions are associated with distinct discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or different focus meanings.

This volume highlights the dynamic nature of the field of English Linguistics and features selected contributions from the 8th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English. The contributions comprise studies (i) that focus on the structure of linguistic systems (or subsystems) or the internal structure of specific construction types, (ii) that take an interest in variation at all linguistic levels, or (iii) that explore what linguistic findings can tell us about human cognition in general, and language processing in particular. All chapters represent state-of-the-art research that relies on rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis and that will inform current and future linguistic practice and theory building.

Pragmatic Issues in Specialized Communicative Contexts, edited by Francesca Bianchi and Sara Gesuato, illustrates how interactants systematically and effectively employ micro and macro linguistic resources and textual strategies to engage in communicative practices in such specific contexts as healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogue, TED talks, archaeology academic communication, student-teacher communication, and multilingual classrooms. Each contribution presents a pedagogical slant, reporting on or suggesting didactic approaches to, or applications of, pragmatic aspects of communication in SL, FL and LSP learning contexts. The topics covered and the issues addressed are all directly relevant to applied pragmatics, that is, pragmatically oriented linguistic analysis that accounts for interpersonal-transactional issues in real-life situated communication.

The concept of 'populism' is currently used by scholars, the media and political actors to refer to multiple and disparate manifestations and phenomena from across both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. As a result, it defies neat definition, as scholarship on the topic has shown over the last 50 years. In this book, Sebastian Moreno Barreneche approaches populism from a semiotic perspective and argues that it constitutes a specific social discourse grounded on a distinctive narrative structure that is brought to life by political actors that are labelled 'populist'. Conceiving of populism as a mode of semiotic production that is based on a conception of the social space as divided into two groups, 'the People' and 'the Other', this book uses semiotic theory to make sense of this political phenomenon. Exploring how the categories of 'the People' and 'the Other' are discursively constructed by populist political actors through the use of semiotic resources, the ways in which meaning emerges through the oppositions between imagined collective actors is explained. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America and South America, The Social Semiotics of Populism presents a systematic semiotic approach to this multifaceted political concept and bridges semiotic theory and populism studies in an original manner.

This two-volume collection showcases a wide range of modern approaches to the philosophical study of language. Contributions illustrate how these strands of research are interconnected and show the importance of such a broad outlook. The aim is to throw light upon some of the key questions in language and communication and also to inspire, inform, and integrate a community of researchers in philosophical linguistics. Volume one concentrates on fundamental theoretical topics. This means considering vital questions about what languages are and how they relate to reality, and describing some of the key areas of thought in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Contributors also discuss how philosophy influences related fields such as translation, pragmatics, and argumentation.

This two-volume collection showcases a wide range of modern approaches to the philosophical study of language. Contributions illustrate how these strands of research are interconnected and show the importance of such a broad outlook. The aim is to throw light upon some of the key questions in language and communication and also to inspire, inform, and integrate a community of researchers in philosophical linguistics. Volume two presents analyses of several fundamental concepts and studies in which they are applied empirically. These include the linguistic topics of assertion, vagueness, and disagreement, and the philosophical themes of belief, normativity, and thought. These chapters provide unique insight into the role of philosophy in the contemporary study of communication.

Video-recordings of families and groups of friends watching the FIFA men's football World Cup in their homes allow access to the empirical rather than the imagined or inscribed audiences of a major television event. Qualitative analyses reveal how natural audiences behave in the reception situation appropriating live televised football through talk. Gerhardt shows how the mainly English television viewers use an array of linguistic and embodied resources to turn watching football into a meaningful activity in their groups. Cohesive devices and sequentiality link the fans' talk-in-interaction to the televised text (commentary and pictures). Gaze behaviour, pointing, and even jumping up and down are used as resources for a variety of functions like the construction of an identity as football fan.

Sequential images are as natural at conveying narratives as verbal language, and have appeared throughout human history, from cave paintings and tapestries right through to modern comics. Contemporary research on this visual language of sequential images has been scattered across several fields: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, art education, comics studies, and others. Only recently has this disparate research begun to be incorporated into a coherent understanding. In The Visual Narrative Reader, Neil Cohn collects chapters that cross these disciplinary divides from many of the foremost international researchers who explore fundamental questions about visual narratives. How does the style of images impact their understanding? How are metaphors and complex meanings conveyed by images? How is meaning understood across sequential images? How do children produce and comprehend sequential images? Are visual narratives beneficial for education and literacy? Do visual narrative systems differ across cultures and historical time periods? This book provides a foundation of research for readers to engage in these fundamental questions and explore the most vital thinking about visual narrative. It collects important papers and introduces review chapters summarizing the literature on specific approaches to understanding visual narratives. The result is a comprehensive "reader" that can be used as a coursebook, a researcher resource and a broad overview of fascinating topics suitable for anyone interested in the growing field of the visual language of comics and visual narratives.

This book investigates the phenomenon of control structures, configurations in which the subject of the embedded clause is missing and is construed as coreferential with the subject of the embedding clause (e.g. John wanted to leave). It draws on data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Modern Greek to investigate the relationship that control bears both to restructuring - the phenomenon whereby some apparently biclausal structures behave as though they constitute just one clause - and to the meanings of the embedding predicates that participate in these structures. Thomas Grano argues that restructuring is cross-linguistically pervasive and that, by virtue of its co-occurrence with some control predicates but not others, it serves as evidence for a basic division within the class of complement control structures. This division is connected to how the semantics of the control predicate interacts with general principles of clausal architecture and of the syntax-semantics interface. His findings have general implications both for clausal structure and for the relationship between form and meaning in natural language.

Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in certain ways, to form meaningful complex expressions. This raises questions about what meanings are, how they can be combined, and what kinds of meanings lexical items can have. According to Pietroski, meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions. He argues that meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. More specifically, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predicates) that are massively conjunctive, while lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch concepts that are monadic or dyadic. This allows for polysemy, since a lexical item can be linked to an address that is shared by a family of fetchable concepts. But the posited combinatorial operations are limited and limiting. They impose severe restrictions on which concepts can be fetched for purposes of semantic composition. Correspondingly, Pietroski argues that in lexicalization, available representations are often used to introduce concepts that can be combined via the relevant operations.

Trends in E-Tools and Resources for Translators and Interpreters offers a collection of contributions from key players in the field of translation and interpreting that accurately outline some of the most cutting-edge technologies in this field that are available or under development at the moment in both professional and academic contexts. Particularly, this volume provides a wide picture of the state of the art, looking not only at the world of technology for translators but also at the hitherto overlooked world of technology for interpreters. This volume is accessible and comprehensive enough to be of benefit to different categories of readers: scholars, professionals and trainees. Contributors are: Pierrette Bouillon, Gloria Corpas Pastor, Hernani Costa, Isabel Duran-Munoz, Claudio Fantinuoli, Johanna Gerlach, Joanna Gough, Asheesh Gulati, Veronique Hoste, Amelie Josselin, David Lewis, Lieve Macken, John Moran, Aurelie Picton, Emmanuel Planas, Eric Poirier, Victoria Porro, Celia Rico Perez, Christian Saam, Pilar Sanchez-Gijon, Miriam Seghiri Dominguez, Violeta Seretan, Arda Tezcan, Olga Torres, and Anna Zaretskaya.

This volume presents a synthesis of cognitive linguistic theory and research on first and second language acquistion, language processing, individual differences in linguistic knowledge, and on the role of multi-word chunks and low-level schemas in language production and comprehension. It highlights the tension between "linguists' grammars", which are strongly influenced by principles such as economy and elegance, and "speakers' grammars", which are often messy, less than fully general, and sometimes inconsistent, and argues that cognitive linguistics is an empirical science which combines study of real usage events and experiments which rigorously test specific hypotheses.

Effective language learning depends on effective instruction. In order to investigate whether or not this is taking place, teachers' classroom pedagogical practices, both in-service and pre-service, are frequently monitored by means of observation and feedback. However, research indicates that although this process has potential value for teacher learning and development, there are also a number of attendant problems and it is therefore important that practitioners share their experience with others in the field in order to expand the existing knowledge base. This volume investigates participant experiences, looking beyond the materials used and examining the way in which language teachers are evaluated and supported throughout their careers. Particular attention is given to the practices and frameworks involved, outlining key approaches and discussing tools for investigation and collaboration. The book highlights the importance of the use of talk to foster reflection and teacher learning, the value of learning from experienced others and the importance of giving voice to all those involved in the process of development and evaluation.

This book offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements representing evidentiality in connection to modality, focusing on theoretical/formal perspectives by eminent pioneers in the field and on recently discovered phenomena in Korean evidential markers by native scholars in particular. Evidentiality became a hot topic in semantics and pragmatics, trying to see what kind of evidential justification is provided by evidentials to support or be related to the 'at-issue' prejacent propositions. This book aims to provide a deeper understanding of such evidentiality in discourse contexts in a broad range of languages such as American Indian, Korean and Japanese, Turkish and African languages over the world. In addition, an introduction to the concept of evidentiality and theoretical perspectives and recent issues is also provided.

The world's linguistic map has changed in recent years due to the vast disappearance of indigenous languages. Many factors affect the alteration of languages in various areas of the world including governmental policies, education, and colonization. As indigenous languages continue to be affected by modern influences, there is a need for research on the current state of native linguistics that remain across the globe. Indigenous Language Acquisition, Maintenance, and Loss and Current Language Policies is a collection of innovative research on the diverse policies, influences, and frameworks of indigenous languages in various regions of the world. It discusses the maintenance, attrition, or loss of the indigenous languages; language status in the society; language policies; and the grammatical characteristics of the indigenous language that people maintained and spoke. This book is ideally designed for anthropologists, language professionals, linguists, cultural researchers, geographers, educators, government officials, policymakers, academicians, and students.