The last thirty years have seen the world transformed according to market models of competition and consumption. These changes have had profound consequences across the professions in areas as diverse as education, healthcare and social services. The Discourse of Commercialization examines what it means for professionals oriented towards service provision to work within this environment. Drawing on a multi-perspectived study of English Language Teaching colleges, the book explores how teaching practices are permeated and challenged by a 'discourse of commercialization' through which market priorities become normative in teachers' professional lives. For anyone who wants to understand and address issues raised by the commercialization of professional practice with a particular focus on education, The Discourse of Commercialization provides an analysis that can inform organizational practice and change.

The strikingly unrestricted syntactic distribution of nouns in many Bantu languages often leads to proposals that syntactic case does not play an active role in the grammar of Bantu. This book offers a different conclusion that the basis of Zulu that Bantu languages have not only a system of structural case, but also a complex system of morphological case that is comparable to systems found in languages like Icelandic. By comparing the system of argument licensing found in Zulu to those found in more familiar languages, Halpert introduces a number of insights onto the organization of the grammar. First, while this book argues in favor of a case-licensing analysis of Zulu, it locates the positions where case is assigned lower in the clause than what is found in nominative-accusative languages. In addition, Zulu shows evidence that case and agreement are two distinct operations in the language, located on different heads and operating independently of each other. Despite these unfamiliarities, there is evidence that the timing relationships between operations mirror those found in other languages. Second, this book proposes a novel type of morphological case that serves to mask many structural licensing effects in Zulu; the effects of this case are unfamiliar, Halpert argues that its existence is expected given the current typological picture of case. Finally, this book explores the consequences of case and agreement as dissociated operations, showing that given this situation, other unusual properties of Bantu languages, such as hyper-raising, are a natural result. This exploration yields the conclusion that some of the more unusual properties of Bantu languages in fact result from small amounts of variation to deeply familiar syntactic principles such as case, agreement, and the EPP.

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.

This book defines engagement for the field of language learning and contextualizes it within existing work on the psychology of language learning and teaching. Chapters address broad substantive questions concerned with what engagement is or looks like, and how it can be theorized for the language classroom; methodological questions related to the design, measurement and analysis of engagement in language classrooms and beyond; as well as applied issues examining its antecedents, factors inhibiting and enhancing it, and conditions fostering the re-engagement of language learners who have become disengaged. Through a mix of conceptual and empirical chapters, the book explores similarities and differences between motivation and engagement and addresses questions of whether, how and why learners actually do exert effort, allocate attention, participate and become involved in tangible language learning and use. It will serve as an authoritative benchmark for future theoretical and empirical research into engagement within the classroom and beyond, and will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the unique insights and contributions the topic of engagement can make to language learning and teaching.

Task-based language teaching is now a well-established pedagogic approach but problematic issues remain, such as whether it is appropriate for all learners and in all instructional contexts. This book draws on the author's experience of working with teachers, together with his knowledge of relevant research and theory, to examine the key issues. It proposes flexible ways in which tasks can be designed and implemented in the language classroom to address the problems that teachers often face with task-based language teaching. It will appeal to researchers and teachers who are interested in task-based language teaching and the practical and theoretical issues involved. It will also be of interest to students and researchers working in the areas of applied linguistics, TESOL and second language acquisition.

This edited volume brings together both established and emerging researcher voices from around the world to illustrate how complexity perspectives might contribute to new ways of researching and understanding the psychology of language learners and teachers in situated educational contexts. Chapter authors discuss their own perspectives on researching within a complexity paradigm, exemplified by concrete and original examples from their research histories. Moreover, chapters explore research approaches to a variety of learner and teacher psychological foci of interest in SLA. Examples include: anxiety, classroom group dynamics and group-level motivation, cognition and metacognition, emotions and emotion regulation strategies, learner reticence and silence, motivation, self-concept and willingness to communicate.

This book presents a novel analysis of the learning of motion event descriptions by Anglophone students of Spanish. The author examines cross-linguistic differences between English and Spanish, focusing on the verbal patterns of motion events, to explore how learners overcome an entrenched first-language preference to move toward the lexicalization pattern of the additional language. His findings highlight the gradual nonlinear process Anglophones traverse to acquire and produce form-meaning mappings describing motion in Spanish. The author suggests that as motion event descriptions are not normally the focus of explicit instruction, students learn this concept primarily from exposure to Spanish. Given its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be of interest to researchers working in Hispanic linguistics, cognitive semantics, and Spanish language learning and teaching.

First published in 1992, Vocabularies of Public Life explores the revolution that has taken place in our understanding of contemporary culture and decodes a number of the symbols which now dominate public life. Wuthnow divides the essays collected here into three distinct 'vocabularies.' Part I examines the ways in which religious and scientific languages function as vocabularies of conviction in public life, Part II focuses on music and art as vocabularies of expression, and Part III considers law, ideology, and public policy as vocabularies of persuasion. The contributors discuss such diverse subjects as American spiritualism, the syntax of modern dance and the social contexts of number one songs. What unifies the book is the common concern with the concrete, everyday manifestations of culture and the importance of understanding its basic structure. This book will be of interest to specialists and scholars of various disciplines such as linguistics, literature, media studies, popular culture, and sociology.

Although there is still no general agreement on the exact functions of linguistic pragmatics and the fields of activity it covers, it can generally be understood as the relationship of language to its users and the resultant practical applications of language. Thus it is one of the main concerns of research in this field to achieve a better understanding and account of the influence of extra-linguistic factors on language. In this introduction to the field, "pragmalinguistics" is seen as a field within the more general subject of "pragmatics." The book aims to familiarize those interested in linguistics with the problems and methods of what is still an "open" field of enquiry and to present its main topic areas - pragmalinguistics as a general semiotic theory, as speech act theory, as the linguistics of conversation, and as text linguistics.

In-depth ethnographic study of those active in the conspiracy milieu

This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics works in a principled way.

How is meaning constructed discursively by participants in problem discourse? To which discursive resources do they resort in order to accomplish their complicated tasks of problem presentation and negotiation of possible solutions? To what extent are these resources related to the interactional and meaningful construction of problems and solutions? Irit Kupferberg and David Green- a discourse analyst and a clinical psychologist- have explored naturally-occurring media, hotline, and cyber troubled discourse in a quest for answers. Inspired by a constructivist-interpretive theoretical framework grounded in linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, narrative inquiry, and clinical psychology as well as their professional experience, the authors put forward three novel claims that are illustrated by 70 attention-holding examples. First, sufferers often present their troubles through detailed narrative discourse as well as succinct story-internal tropes such as metaphors and similes- discursive resources that constitute two interrelated versions of the troubled self. Particularly interesting are the intriguing figurative constructions produced in acute emotional states or at crucial discursive junctions. Second, such figurative constructions often 'lubricate' the interactive negotiation of solutions. Third, when the figurative and narrative resources of self-construction are employed in the public arena they are used and sometimes abused by the media representatives, depending on a plethora of contextual resources identified in this book.

This book explores heterogeneity in the Indian academic setting. Presenting a study on the performance of Bachelor of Engineering students from various parts of the county, it analyzes the subjects' language skills on the basis of selected sociolinguistic variables and examines the possible role/impact of using multiple languages in the communicative setting described. In turn, the book investigates the differences between the way language is viewed in the Orient and in the Western world, and how, despite their differences, these views lead to similar language teaching methods in both worlds. It also highlights the limitations of current theories and frameworks in terms of accommodating modern methods of assessing language skills. Addressing socio-pragmatic issues in terms of English proficiency and language assessment, it is the first book to offer such a focused and detailed discussion of these varied but related issues, making it a valuable resource for all scholars and researchers working in the areas of socio-pragmatics, language assessment, and intercultural communication.

"For too long the Left has tried to silence the Right through a war on words. Understanding their tactics and what we can do about it is crucial. Sam Sorbo lays it all out." - Sean Spicer, Host of Spicer&Co In Words for Warriors, with her trademark wit and intelligence, Sam Sorbo shows exactly how radical left-wingers have manipulated language to fit their own socialistic and anti-freedom agenda. Sam Sorbo is on a mission to reclaim today's hot button/culture war words for all freedom-loving Americans. After hearing all the hatred spewing from ideologues, mainstream media, social justice warriors, and political hacks, Sam Sorbo was fed up: "I'm tired of their games, so I'm calling BS on them. It's time to set the record straight, especially for the folks who are just trying to enjoy the lives the Lord gave them and want a few things explained in easy-to-understand prose." Arranged in an accessible "A-Z" glossary style, readers can dip in to discover the real meanings behind the acronyms, words, and phrases that the toxic liberal left loves to force on the rest of us. From Ad hominem, antifa, and anarchy... To woke, wonk, and zeitgeist Mixed with the newly-coined concepts like covidiot, pizzagate, and TERF... Words for Warriors is a treasure trove of linguistic gymnastics the Democrats and other toxic lefties employ to further their anti-American agenda. Arm yourself with Words for Warriors, and fight back against political correctness that squashes real debate, free speech, and prosperity.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

Scholarly considerations of the relationship between the United States government and Native Americans have largely ignored the rhetoric utilized by both in the course of their ongoing conflicts. This fascinating new study concentrates on the persuasive and public strategies of both government and Indian leaders, focusing on the written and oral records of several key episodes in American history. This approach, which author Janice Schuetz calls rhetorical ancestry reveals the ways in which government and Indian spokespersons have constituted and defined issues; created, prolonged, and managed conflict; and silenced and empowered each other's voices.

Chronicling the emergence of government and Indian leaders who were forced to deal with conflicts in new ways, each chapter makes use of historical evidence to draw inferences about the rhetorical features of the discourse and its effects. Both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric--including treaties, letters, oral histories, speeches, ritual performances, media reports, biographical narratives, protests and demonstrations, political hearings, and legal proceedings--are represented here, illuminating a legacy that evolved in the personal and political language of its participants.

Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy - that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical - extending the approach to new languages and new structures - and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.

This book examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in Vedic Sanskrit, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. It is also a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression. Many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning, and Vedic scholarship is thus fraught with controversy. John J. Lowe applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. The author uses his findings to recategorize the data, by defining certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. He suggests alternative sources for these forms and considers the linguistic processes that transformed old participles into non-participial entities. In his conclusion he reassesses the category of participles within the verbal and nominal systems, looks at their prehistory in Proto-Indo-European, and describes their universal, typological characteristics. Among his conclusions are that tense-aspect-stem participles have the technical properties of adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, and that such participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verbal forms. That is, a perfect participle, for example, need not share all the semantic and functional features of the finite perfect forms built to the same stem. These and many other conclusions drawn either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.

This book provides a pragmatic analysis of presidential language. Pragmatics is concerned with "meaning in context," or the relationship between what we say and what we mean. John Wilson explores the various ways in which U.S. Presidents have used language within specific social contexts to achieve specific objectives. This includes obfuscation, misdirection, the use of metaphor or ambiguity, or in some cases simply lying. He focuses on six presidents: John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald W. Reagan, William F. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack H. Obama. These presidents cover most of the last half of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty first century, and each has been associated with a specific linguistic quality. John F. Kennedy was famed for his quality of oratory, Nixon for his manipulative use of language, Reagan for his gift of telling stories, Clinton for his ability to engage the public and to linguistically turn arguments and descriptions in particular directions. Bush, on the other hand, was famed for his inability to use language appropriately, and Obama returns us to the rhetorical flourishes of early Kennedy. In the case of each president, a range of specific examples are explored in order to highlight the ways in which a pragmatic analysis may provide an insight into presidential language. In many cases, what the president says is not necessarily what the president means.

Our understanding of the concept of narrative has undergone a significant transformation over time, particularly today as new communication technologies are developed and popularized. As new narrative genres are born and old ones undergo great change by the minute, a thorough understanding can shed light on which storytelling elements work best in what format. That deep understanding can then help build strong, satisfying stories. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions is an essential publication that examines the relationships between types of narratives in a shifting and widening scope of storytelling forms. While highlighting a wide range of topics including contemporary culture, advertising, and transmedia storytelling, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, content creators, advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

Exploring research and pedagogy on second language writing, this volume focuses on issues concerning policy decisions affecting foreign students.

Combining the World Englishes framework with First Language Acquisition methodology, this book investigates children's acquisition of L1 English in the context of multilingual Singapore, one of the traditional Kachruvian Outer Circle or ESL countries. The book investigates language choice, use, and dominance in Singaporean families, identifies common linguistic characteristics of L1 Singapore English, as well as the acquisitional route that Singaporean children take. It discusses characteristics at the different levels of language organization, i.e., phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features, drawing on a variety of systematically elicited data and Praat-based acoustic analyses. Comparing the results to similar data obtained from children living in England (both mono- and bi-/multilingual), the book also sheds light on how the acquisitional steps taken by Singaporean children differ from or are similar to traditional native speakers of English and children from immigrant families in England.

This book explores early new critical debates about intention, tracing how and why intention was dismissed across much humanities scholarship, and how it can be revisited and made relevant as a key formative, evaluative, and ethical concept. The author argues that the academic disinterest in intention occurred simultaneously as genre criticism and later the rhetorical interest in genre came into its own. Genre became a way to simultaneously elide and naturalize intention. The book elaborates on the pedagogical, ethical, and empirical consequences naturalizing intention through genre has had for rhetorical studies and it offers a new term, "curations" to identify discursive forms, actions, and intentions working simultaneously. Finally, he also examines the gap between the humanities and STEM fields and shows specific ways scientists and engineers have called for the humanities to become more invested in intention as both a critical and an operational concept. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies and critical discourse analysis, rhetoric and professional communication, including those in fields such as medicine, engineering, STS and business studies.

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

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.