This work comprises a collection of the writings of Ruqaiya Hasan, an influential figure in the systemic functional linguistic learning school. It discusses the relation between text and context and the realization of context in language; the 'network', which is outlined as analytic tool which can be applied at two strata of language, the lexico-grammatical and the semantic; as well as aspects of the social structure that are implicated in the way cultures and subcultures express themselves.

Deaths by suicide are high: every 40 seconds, someone in the world chooses to end their life. Despite acknowledgement that suicide notes are social texts, there has been no book which analyzes suicide notes as discursive texts and no attempt at a qualitative discourse analysis of them. Discourses of Men's Suicide Notes redresses this gap in the literature. Focussing on men and masculinity and anchored in qualitative discourse analysis, Dariusz Galasinski responds to the need for a more thorough understanding of suicidal behaviour. Culturally, men have been posited to be 'masters of the universe' and yet some choose to end their lives. This book takes a qualitative approach to data gathered from the Polish Corpus of Suicide Notes, a unique repository of over 600 suicide notes, to explore discourse from and about men at the most traumatic juncture of their lives. Discussing how men construct suicide notes and the ways in which they position their relationships and identities within them, Discourses of Men's Suicide Notes seeks to understand what these notes mean and what significance and power they are invested with.

What is legal language and where is it found? What does a forensic linguist do? How can linguistic skills help legal professionals? We are constantly surrounded by legal language, but sometimes it is almost impossible to understand. Providing extracts from real-life legal cases, this highly usable and accessible textbook brims with helpful examples and activities that will help you to navigate this area. Language and Law: * introduces useful linguistic concepts and tools * outlines the methods linguists employ to analyse legal language and language in legal situations * includes topics on such as: written legal language; threats, warnings and speech act theory; courtroom interactions and the work linguists do to help solve crimes; physical and 'spoken' signs; and the creativity of legal language

While previous research on collective nouns in Romance languages mostly adopts a semasiological and theoretical perspective focusing mainly on one single language, the present study takes an onomasiological and comparative approach which is strongly based on empirical evidence. Against this background and in analogy to the verbal domain, the work elaborates further the functional category of nominal aspectuality which describes the construal of extra-linguistic entities as well as the linguistic means reflecting it. In this sense, collective nouns are systematically compared with other (nominal) means of expression of collectivity in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, focusing especially on object mass nouns, which have hardly been studied so far for Romance languages. On the basis of corpus analyses and acceptability judgement studies, a holistic picture is thus drawn of the semantic-syntactic and derivational properties of various noun types in the synchrony of present-day language as well as of the diachronic lexicalisation paths of these very nouns. The work thus contributes to the understanding of the verbalisation of pluralities by linking and complementing previous monodimensional approaches and, above all, by placing them on a broad empirical basis.

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. In this dictionary, Seino van Breugel provides a rigorous, well-illustrated and well-referenced lexical description of the language, making this book of great interest and value to general linguists, typologists, as well as area specialists and cultural anthropologists. Comprising not only of an Atong-English, but also an English-Atong dictionary, as well as semantic lexica, this volume is one of the most thorough lexical descriptions of a Bodo-Garo language to date. The grammatical lexica allow the reader quick access to lists of members of the various Atong word classes, collocations and idiomatic expressions. The grammatical compendium makes this book self-contained, while its many references link it to the rest of the author's corpus on the Atong language. The appendix of photos not only provides visual illustrations to many of the Atong dictionary entries, but also offers the reader a glance at the physical environment in which the language is spoken.

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.

In recent years there has been much interest in collective memory and commemoration. It is often assumed that when nations celebrate a historic day, they put aside the divisions of the present to recall the past in a spirit of unity. As Billig and Marinho show, this does not apply to the Portuguese parliament's annual celebration of 25 April 1974, the day when the dictatorship, established by Salazar and continued by Caetano, was finally overthrown. Most speakers at the ceremony say little about the actual events of the day itself; and in their speeches they continue with the partisan politics of the present as combatively as ever. To understand this, the authors examine in detail how the members of parliament do politics within the ceremony of remembrance; how they engage in remembering and forgetting the great day; how they use the low rhetoric of manipulation and point-scoring, as well as high-minded political rhetoric. The book stresses that the members of the audience contribute to the meaning of the ceremony by their partisan displays of approval and disapproval. Throughout, the authors demonstrate that, to uncover the deeper meanings of political rhetoric, it is necessary to take note of significant absences. The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration illustrates how an in-depth case-study can be invaluable for understanding wider processes. The authors are not content just to uncover unnoticed features of the Portuguese celebration. They use the particular example to provide original insights about the rhetoric of celebrating and the politics of remembering, as well as throwing new light onto the nature of party political discourse.

Together with the first volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments," this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data - which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning - looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issues such as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication. Chapter 12 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book addresses different forms of discourse by analysing the emergence of power dynamics in communication and their importance in shaping the production and reception of messages. The chapters focus on specific cognitive aspects, such as the verbal expression of reasoning or emotions, as well as on linguistic and discursive processes. The interaction between reasoning, feelings, and emotions is described in relation to several fields of discourse where power dynamics may emerge and includes, among others, political, media, and academic discourse. This volume aims to include representative instances of this heterogeneity and is deeply rooted, both theoretically and methodologically, in the acknowledgment that the investigation of the complex interaction between reason and emotion in discursive productions cannot be exempt from the adoption of a multi-disciplinary perspective. By providing a critical reflection of their methodological decisions, and describing the implications of their research projects, the contributors offer insights which are relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners operating in the broad field of discourse studies.

Language learning research aims to describe and fully explain how and why language learning takes place, but can fall short of its stated purpose. Systematic, rigorous research is needed if the growing field of language learning is to progress methodically. This book demonstrates and fully explains such a methodology. Given that research in language acquisition yields practical pedagogical implications, it is crucial that it is rigorous and accurate. This book offers a quantitative research methodology that relies on statistical analysis in order to make inferences and conclusions about language learning. Experimental research aims to understand differences between or within groups of learners under manipulated environments. It requires strict control of conditions, enabling interpretations with a low factor of error. Aek Phakiti provides step-by-step guidelines and underlying principles, epistemology and methodology, in a book that is essential for advanced students of language acquisition and language and education.

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.

Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds. In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience index of gustatory terms in both American and British English. The second part of the book is an overview of the metaphorical extensions that motivate the polysemy of Taste terms, with the aid of corpus analysis methods and various texts. This book is the first to review systematically and in a usage-based perspective the role of the sensory domain of Taste in English, showing a more complicated picture and suggesting that its under-representation and difficulty of encoding does not correspond to lack of importance.

Pragmatic Particles sheds new light on the linguistic theory and application of Asian languages with a particular focus on the role of particles and their socio-pragmatic nature. Drawing on a range of data that spans Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and beyond, the multidimensionality of Asian languages is brought to attention. Particles are central in this discourse and their constructive, expressive and attitudinal behaviours are revealed to be neither arbitrary nor peripheral. By branching away from a predominantly Euro-centric discussion and covering the relevant formal and functional foundations of syntax and semantics, this book offers an alternative lens to the appropriate treatment of Asian languages in contemporary linguistics.

An essential companion for IELTS writing instructors and students, Developing Writing Skills for IELTS provides IELTS test-takers with the necessary skills to succeed in the two academic writing tasks in IELTS. Adopting an original exemplar-based writing instructional approach, this text offers an in-depth and reader-friendly analysis of the assessment standards of the two academic writing tasks in IELTS. Authentic exemplars written by EFL university students are included to illustrate high (Bands 8-9), average (Bands 6-7), and low (Bands 4-5) performances in IELTS writing. Key Features: * Diagrammatical representation of assessment standards of the two academic writing tasks by experienced IELTS writing examiners and instructors. * 100 writing questions modelled after the IELTS format, designed by the authors, and categorised according to question types and topics that emerge from an analysis of over 400 IELTS writing questions. * Over 100 writing exemplars by EFL university students, accompanied by guided activities and suggested answers. Designed as a classroom text, a resource for workshops and consultations, or a self-study material, Developing Writing Skills for IELTS: A Research-based Approach will support IELTS writing instructors and test-takers with a variety of writing proficiencies.

In this comprehensive introduction, Anne-Michelle Tessier examines how we acquire the sounds and sound patterns of language. Analyzing child speech patterns and their analogues among adult languages while also teaching the basics of Optimality Theory, this novel textbook will help students develop a broad grammatical understanding of phonological acquisition. Phonological Acquisition provides - Evidence to support theory from multiple language families, populations and data collection methods - Connections to lexical, morphological and perceptual learning Assuming only a basic knowledge of phonology, this textbook is aimed at students of linguistics, developmental psychology, speech pathology and communication disorders. It will also be of interest to professional psychologists, acquisition researchers, clinicians, and anyone concerned with child speech development.

This book emphasizes the advantages of examining discourse connectivity from a constructionist perspective and highlights the role of discourse configurations in the construction of meaning. The research contained advances the field of cognitive classification and categorization of discourse constructions. The text is a great improvement in the discourse analysis literature, since it uniquely clarifies the subtleties of meaning between different discourse markers that are frequently treated as equivalent by lexicographers. It is unique in being the first contribution to the creation of a Constructicon at the discourse level and it fills an important gap within cognitively oriented constructionist accounts that have mostly restricted their analyses to argument-structure and illocutionary constructions. This yearbook appeals to students and researchers working within corpus linguistics.

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.

Roberta Piazza's book is a linguistic investigation of the dialogue of Italian cinema covering a selection of films from the 1950s to the present day. It looks at how speech is dealt with in studies of the cinema and tackles the lack of engagement with dialogue in film studies. It explores the representation of discourse in cinema -- the way particular manifestations of verbal interaction are reproduced in film. Whereas representation generally refers to the language used in texts to assign meaning to a group and its social practices, here discourse representation more directly refers to the relationship between real-life and cinematic discourse. Piazza analyses how fictional dialogue reinterprets authentic interaction in order to construe particular meanings. Beginning by exploring the relationship between discourse and genre, the second half of the book takes a topic-based approach and reflects on the themes of narrative and identity. The analysis carried out takes on board the multi-semiotic and multimodal components of film discourse. The book uses also uses concepts and methodologies from pragmatics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis.