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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by
questions of how children learn to read. Especially among
Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on
reading has been the only approach to studying written language
education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to
read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents
an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a
central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive
psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity
involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational
uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have
revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a
surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational
constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this
understanding long before they can read conventional writing on
their own.
The design arts -- from the design of buildings and machines to
software and interfaces -- are associated with types of knowledge
and performance thought to be structured, modular, and systematic.
Such arts have become increasingly prestigious in our technocratic
society. Since Aristotle, the art of rhetoric was conceived as a
loosely structured "practical" art thought to be limited in the
extent to which it could mimic more precise subject matters. The
art of rhetoric has been controversial since classical times, but
its status has sunk even lower since the industrial revolution -- a
point when civic cultures began to cede authority and control to
the cultures of specialized experts. Many sympathizers of rhetoric
have resisted its decline by calling for a civic art of public
discourse to stand in opposition to a technocratic specialized
discourse that has come, increasingly, to disenfranchise the
ordinary citizen.
This collection examines and uses discourse to promote a better understanding of culture and identity, with the primary goal of advancing an understanding of how discourse can be used to examine social and linguistic issues. Many of the contributions explore how the formation of culture and identity is shaped by national and transnational issues, such as migration, immigration, technology, and language policy. The collection contributes to a better understanding of the process of intercultural communication research, as each author takes a different theoretical or methodological approach to examining discourse. Although different aspects of discourse are analyzed in this collection, each contribution examines issues and concepts that are central to understanding and carrying out intercultural communication research (e.g., structure and agency, static and dynamic cultural constructs, sociolinguistic scales, power and discourse, othering and alienness, native and non-native). This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.
In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse,
there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without
exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile
of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological
endowment for language learning may be. But little is given
directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever
listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can
attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or
whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic
analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an
infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first
year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech.
Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations
of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate
over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech
stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential
source of information.
During the last 15 years, cognitive scientists have discovered
things about the nature and importance of metaphor that are
startling because of their radical implications for metaphor
research and because they require us to rethink some of our most
fundamental received notions of meaning, concepts, and reason. Many
of the theoretical assumptions that guided earlier generations who
worked on metaphor have been undermined by this new research, which
has profound implications for philosophy.
In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse,
there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without
exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile
of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological
endowment for language learning may be. But little is given
directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever
listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can
attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or
whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic
analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an
infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first
year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech.
Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations
of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate
over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech
stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential
source of information.
A volume on second-language acquisition theory and pedagogy is, at
the same time, a mark of progress and a bit of an anomaly. The
progress is shown by the fact that the two disciplines have
established themselves as areas of study not only distinct from
each other, but also different from linguistic theory. This was not
always the case, at least not in the United States. The anomaly
results from the fact that this book deals with the relationship
between L2 theory and pedagogy despite the conclusion that there is
currently no widely-accepted theory of SLA.
Memory has long been ignored by rhetoricians because the written
word has made memorization virtually obsolete. Recently however, as
part of a revival of interest in classical rhetoric, scholars have
begun to realize that memory offers vast possibilities for today's
writers. Synthesizing research from rhetoric, psychology,
philosophy, and literary and composition studies, this volume
brings together many historical and contemporary theories of
memory. Yet its focus is clear: memory is a generator of knowledge
and a creative force which deserves attention at the beginning of
and throughout the writing process.
The subject of semantics has been appropriated by various
disciplines including linguistic philosophy, logic, cognitive
psychology, anthropological linguistics, and computer technology.
As a result, it is difficult to define the study of semantics as an
actual discipline without discovering what each field using a
semantic approach to its subject matter has contributed to the
understanding of what words mean. This volume is a result of those
discoveries.
Designed to provide practical information to those who are
concerned with the development of young children, this book has
three goals. First, the authors offer details about patterns of
language development over the first three years of life. Although
intensive studies have been carried out by examining from one to 20
children in the age range of zero to three years, there has been no
longitudinal study of a sample as large as this--53 children--nor
have as many measures of language development been obtained from
the same children. Examining language development from a broad
perspective in this size population allows us to see what
generalizations can be made about patterns of language development.
To provide a view of the history of western rhetoric, this volume
presents original articles by a number of world-renowned scholars
representing different countries and varying viewpoints. In
discussing the status of the historical perspectives on rhetoric,
these international scholars also present a tribute to James J.
Murphy, whose scholarship and service did much to shape the field.
The book will introduce new insights into western European rhetoric
and its connections with English rhetoric.
Anglophone students abroad: Identity, social relationships and language learning presents the findings of a major study of British students of French and Spanish undertaking residence abroad. The new dataset presented here provides both quantitative and qualitative information on language learning, social networking and integration and identity development during residence abroad. The book tracks in detail the language development of participants and relates this systematically to individual participants' social and linguistic experiences and evolving relationship. It shows that language learning is increasingly dependent on students' own agency and skill and the negotiation of identity in multilingual and lingua franca environments.
This volume presents a representative cross-section of the more
than 200 papers presented at the 1994 conference of the Rhetoric
Society of America. The contributors reflect multi- and
inter-disciplinary perspectives -- English, speech communication,
philosophy, rhetoric, composition studies, comparative literature,
and film and media studies. Exploring the historical relationships
and changing relationships between rhetoric, cultural studies, and
literacy in the United States, this text seeks answers to such
questions as what constitutes "literacy" in a post-modern,
high-tech, multi-cultural society?
Focusing on language and the assessment of its meaning, this volume
concentrates on a method of content analysis developed by the
author and Goldine Gleser. Applicable to transcripts of speech or
verbal texts, this method uses the grammatical clause as its
smallest unit of communication, considers whether or not a verb is
transitive and involves an object, or is intransitive and describes
a state of being. It derives scores on many scales that have been
tested for reliability of scoring and for construct validity with
concurrently administered measures, such as rating and self-report
scales as well as biochemical and pharmacological criteria.
Finally, this volume provides detailed descriptions of the clinical
and basic research establishing the validity of these scales, so
that a reader can locate studies that have pertinence to any
special interest area.
The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections: Methods and modalities Established fields Pragmatics across disciplines Applications of pragmatic research in today's world. With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.
The correct use of English verb argument structure is crucial for foreign learners of the English language. Based on an experimental study recruiting 162 Chinese English learners at different proficiency levels, this book suggests that the acquisition of English transitivity alternation follows as a consequence of the cognitive processing of language input, which is induced by the nature of task requirements in different learning conditions and influenced by individual differences in language learning aptitude and proficiency level. Readers of this book will have a deeper understanding of all these variables involved and will learn that pedagogical issues should be considered in a more thorough, comprehensive manner to explore better solutions for English learning and teaching.
This book brings together papers which address a range of issues
regarding the nature and structure of sign languages and other
gestural systems, and how they exploit the space in which they are
conveyed. The chapters focus on five pertinent areas reflecting
different, but related research topics:
Originally published in 1983, the aim of this book was to discuss some fundamental problems of cognitive developmental psychology at the time. The theme which underlies the discussion is that scientific knowledge of the cognitive characteristics of other people starts from the cognitive instruments that we psychologist employ, viz. our theories, models, assumptions, methods of enquiry etc. Thus our scientific cognitive equipment not only provides the format in which cognition in other people is expressed, it also exemplifies, in some abstract sense, this cognition. The first part of the book deals with the concept of development in relation to the structure of developmental theories. It is argued that theories originate from (implicit) conceptual analyses of (implicit) final state definitions. Starting from this specific view on the nature of developmental theories, the second part of the book discusses perception and perceptual development.
This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference
hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter
Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters,
varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to
some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an
edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a
primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and
research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the
more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the
contributors.
Each child is spoken to by genetic heritage and by the rich current
set of interactional environments -- familial, local community, and
broader cultural voices. Using past structures and paradigms of
scholarship, scholars seek to understand what the child achieves in
language and how. The tools available for this research are not
static but evolve jointly through the sharing of information, and
with each "brief moment in time" in efforts to look at children's
languages "just as they are."
Foundations of Speech Act Theory investigates the importance of
speech act theory to the problem of meaning in linguistics and
philosophy. The papers in this volume, written by respected
philosophers and linguists, significantly advance standards of
debate in this area.
Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental
principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in
the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes
approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both
linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In
particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number
of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of
international scholars.
Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.
In this edited collection, authors from various academic, cultural, racial, linguistic, and personal backgrounds use critical discourse analysis as a conceptual framework and method to examine social inequities, identity issues, and linguistic discrimination faced by historically oppressed groups in schools and society. Language, Race, and Power in Schools unravels the ways and degrees to which these groups have faced and resisted oppression, and draws on critical discourse analysis to examine how multiple forms of oppression intersect. This volume interrogates areas of discrimination and injustice and discusses possibilities of developing coalitions and concerted efforts across the lines of diversity. |
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