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.

A Functional Analysis of Political Television Advertisements examines theory and research on election advertisements. William Benoit employs the Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse to understand the nature or content of television spots in election campaigns. Beginning with a look at American presidential spots from 1952-2012, Benoit investigates the three functions-acclaims, attacks, and defenses-and the topics of policy and character for these groups of political commercials. The following chapters are devoted to reporting similar data on presidential primary advertisements, presidential third party spots, other theories including Issue Ownership Theory and Functional Federalism Theory, as well as nonpresidential and non-U.S. election advertising. Benoit considers the data, discusses the development of political advertising over time, and finally, presents areas for further research. This book is a uniquely comprehensive examination of the value and use of television spots in political election rhetoric.

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.

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.

How did Ancient Greek express that an event occurred at a particular time, for a certain duration, or within a given time frame? The answer to these questions depends on a variety of conditions - the nature of the time noun, the tense and aspect of the verb, the particular historical period of Greek during which the author lived - that existing studies of the language do not take sufficiently into account. This book accordingly examines the circumstances that govern the use of the genitive, dative, and accusative of time, as well as the relevant prepositional constructions, primarily in Greek prose of the fifth century BC through the second century AD, but also in Homer. While the focus is on developments in Greek, translations of the examples, as well as a fully glossed summary chapter, make it accessible to linguists interested in the expression of time generally.

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.

This book uses the 2015 Charleston shooting as a case study to analyze the connections between race, rhetoric, religion, and the growing trend of mass gun violence in the United States. The authors claim that this analysis fills a gap in rhetorical scholarship that can lead to increased understanding of the causes and motivations of these crimes.

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

This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett argues that it is possible to distinguish between particular subclasses of adjectival predicates-relative adjectives like tall, total adjectives like dry, partial adjectives like wet, and non-scalar adjectives like hexagonal-on the basis of how their criteria of application vary depending on the context; how they display the characteristic properties of vague language; and what the properties of their associated orders are. It has been known for a long time that there exist empirical connections between context-sensitivity, vagueness, and scale structure; however, a formal system that expresses these connections had yet to be developed. This volume sets out a new logical system, called DelTCS, that brings together insights from the Delineation Semantics framework and from the Tolerant, Classical, Strict non-classical framework, to arrive at a full theory of gradability and scale structure in the adjectival domain. The analysis is further extended to examine vagueness and gradability associated with particular classes of determiner phrases, showing that the correspondences that exist between the major adjectival scale structure classes and subclasses of determiner phrases can also be captured within the DelTCS system.

Analysis of improvisation as a compositional practice in the Commedia dell'Arte and related traditions from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Domenic Pietropaolo takes textual material from the stage traditions of Italy, France, Germany and England, and covers comedic drama, dance, pantomime and dramatic theory, and more. He shines a light onto 'the signs of improvised communication'. The book is comprehensive in its analysis of improvised dramatic art across theatrical genres, and is multimodal in looking at the spoken word, gestural and non-verbal signs. The book focusses on dramatic text as well as: - The semiotics of stage discourse, including semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of sign production - The physical and material conditions of sign-production including biomechanical limitations of masks and costumes. Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation is the product of an entire career spent researching the semiotics of the stage and it is essential reading for semioticians and students of performance arts.

Poetry, defined as language divided into lines, is found in most known human cultures. This masterful survey of poetry and its constituent components demonstrates the functions performed by metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism, arguing that each line of a poem fits as a whole unit into the limited capacity of human working memory. Using examples from around the world, Fabb surveys the wide varieties of poetry and the ways they are performed, including those in songs and signed literatures. Focusing on language, form and memory, he helps us understand why poetry is a particularly valued way of using language. A fresh exploration of poetry, the book will be welcomed by students and researchers of literature, linguistics and psychology, as well as anyone interested in poetry.

This book explores the construct of language in use, specifically as operationalised through different item types in the Austrian Matura (school-leaving exam). Empirical research on some of these item types is scarce. The author reports on a mixed-methods study. The theoretical frameworks employed are Purpura's (2004) model of language ability and Weir's (2005) socio-cognitive framework. The findings suggest that the tasks under investigation assess grammatical form and meaning at the sub-sentential and sentential level. Different item types were also found to target different elements of lexicogrammatical competence. The study contributes to understanding the nature of language in use and sheds light on the application of the socio-cognitive framework to the validation of language in use tasks.

From an abundance of intensifiers to frequent repetition and parallelisms, Donald Trump’s idiolect is highly distinctive from that of other politicians and previous Presidents of the United States. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book identifies the characteristic features of Trump’s language and argues that his speech style, often sensationalized by the media, differs from the usual political rhetoric on more levels than is immediately apparent. Chapters examine Trump’s tweets, inaugural address, political speeches, interviews, and presidential debates, revealing populist language traits that establish his idiolect as a direct reflection of changing social and political norms. The authors scrutinize Trump’s conspicuous use of nicknames, the definite article, and conceptual metaphors as strategies of othering and antagonising his opponents. They further shed light on Trump’s fake news agenda and his mutation of the conventional political apology which are strategically implemented for a political purpose. Drawing on methods from corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, this book provides a multifaceted investigation of Trump’s language use and addresses essential questions about Trump as a political phenomenon.

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.

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 explores how First World War commemoration events are presented, reported and mediated on the websites of mainstream daily newspapers from seven European countries. The book is the result of a research group - DIREPA-EUROPE (Discours, representations, passe de l'Europe), part of Lemel research network - characterized by a shared interest in media discourse and online newspapers. It presents a fluid analysis chain on the commemoration discourse generated by the WWI Armistice Centenary in 2018, and will be of interest not only to scholars of discourse and media studies, but also of European history, cultural memory, journalism and conflict studies.

This book takes a fresh look at Tolkien's literary artistry from the points of view of both linguistics and literary history, with the aim of shedding light on the literary techniques used in The Lord of the Rings. The authors study Tolkien's use of words, style, narrative techniques, rhetoric and symbolism to highlight his status as literary artist. Dirk Siepmann uses a corpus stylistic approach to analyse Tolkien's vocabulary and syntax, while Thomas Kullmann uses discourse theory, literary history and concepts of intertextuality to explore Tolkien's literary techniques, relating them to the history of English fiction and poetry. Issues discussed include point of view, speeches, story-telling, landscape descriptions, the poems inserted into the body of the narrative, and the role of language in the characterization of the novel's protagonists. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of literature, corpus linguistics and stylistics, as well as Tolkien fans and specialists.

Repairing the Athlete's Image: Studies in Sports Image Restoration, edited by Joseph R. Blaney, Lance Lippert, and J. Scott Smith, offers twenty-one case studies and conceptual frameworks about athletes and their organizations as they attempt to mitigate the effects of malfeasance. Employing traditional Image Restoration Theory (IRT) approaches to athletic communication (and other innovative approaches), the contributors to this volume add to our understanding of which communicative strategies work best for athletes when their reputations are sullied. This comprehensive text presents case studies of varying athletes, sports, and public relations scenarios with prescriptive advice for those attempting to repair athletic reputations. The contributors variously explore such controversies and mischief as the steroids accusations lobbed at Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the Michael Phelps marijuana controversy, the sexual misconduct of Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, and other topical subjects in sports communication and image repair. While this book will be useful for athletes, coaches, managers, and agents in varying athletic endeavors and levels, it is also a dream collection for teachers and scholars of sports communication. The subjects examined in this study span country, gender, and popularity of sport (not to mention a healthy variety of types of accusations.) Repairing the Athlete's Image is an essential resource for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in sports communication and popular culture.

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.

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.