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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA: THE POLITICS OF PERSUASION provides the first comprehensive treatment of why Obama's rhetorical strategies were so effective during the 2008 presidential campaign, during the first four years of his presidency, and once again during the 2012 presidential campaign. From his "Yes We Can" speech, to his "More Perfect Union Speech," to his Cairo "New Beginnings" speech, candidate-Obama-turned-President-Obama represents what a skilled rhetorician can accomplish within the public sphere. Contributors to the collection closely analyze several of Obama's most important speeches, attempting to explain why they were so rhetorically effective, while also examining the large discursive structures Obama was engaging: a worldwide financial crisis, political apathy, domestic racism, Islamophobia, the Middle East peace process, Zionism, and more. THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA will appeal to politically engaged, intelligent readers, scholars of rhetoric, and anyone interested in understanding how the strategic use of language in highly charged contexts-how the art of rhetoric-shapes our world, unites and divides people, and creates conditions that make social change possible. For those new to the formal study of rhetoric, editors Matthew Abraham and Erec Smith include a glossary of key terms and concepts. Contributors include Matthew Abraham, Rene Agustin De los Santos, David A. Frank, John Jasso, Michael Kleine, Richard Marback, Robert Rowland, Steven Salaita, Courtney Jue, Erec Smith, and Anthony Wachs. "From the inspiring slogans and speeches of his campaign to the eloquent successes and failures of his presidency, Barack Obama has been extravagantly praised and sarcastically criticized for the distinctive power of his rhetoric. The essays in this collection persuasively analyze that rhetoric in all its specific tactics and general strategies, in its idealist yearnings and its pragmatic compromises, in its ambitious strivings and its political obstacles. THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA is a must read for anyone interested in how political rhetoric works-and doesn't-in twenty-first-century America." -STEVEN MAILLOUX, President's Professor of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University "A readable yet critically engaging collection, THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA offers a robust look at the deft rhetorical strategies deployed by the first African American President. Moving beyond sentimental, hypercritical or otherwise dismissive readings of his oratory, these essays explore how Obama's speeches have addressed substantive issues, such as globalization, the American dream, political gridlock, the legacy of racism and religious bigotry. This book will appeal to rhetorical scholars and laypersons alike." -DAVID G. HOLMES, Professor of English, Pepperdine University "By confronting topics often avoided in politically correct discourse-including religious identity, racial belonging and the cultural politics of difference- THE MAKING OF BARACK OBAMA doesn't hesitate to engage divisive and difficult issues; producing some of the most challenging, insightful and provocative perspectives to date." -RHEA LATHAN, Assistant Professor of English, Florida State University
There is now a long tradition of academic literature in media studies and criminology that has analysed how we come to think about crime, deviance and punishment. This book for the first time deals specifically with the role of language in this process, showing how critical linguistic analysis can provide further crucial insights into media representations of crime and criminals. Through case studies the book develops a toolkit for the analysis of language and images in examples taken from a range of media. The Language of Crimeand Deviance covers spoken, written and visual media discourses and focuses on a number of specific areas of crime and criminal justice, including media constructions of young people and women; media and the police, 'reality crime shows; corporate crime; prison and drugs.It is therefore a welcome and valuable contribution to the fields of linguistics, criminology, media and cultural studies.
From 2002 to 2008, the Bush administration argued that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, despite years of inconclusive International Atomic Energy Agency inspection reports. In the absence of substantive evidence, much of the debate was conducted via public forums with a heavy persuasive element to the discourse. This book offers an in-depth consideration of the rhetoric surrounding Irans controversial nuclear programme. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining speeches, interviews, news reports, online message boards and newspaper layouts during the Bush Presidency (2000-2008). Engaging with visual grammar and narrative, the book looks at layouts from the Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post, amongst others. The book points out, using rhetorical theory and discourse analysis, the conditions that lent credibility to the Bush administrations position by examining the arguments Bush and his political surrogates put forward, and the discourse strategies that influenced which ideas gained salience and which were downplayed. Political communication and Foucaults theory of governmentality are brought in to articulate the implications regarding the influence, importance and expansion of executive power.
Between Saying and Doing aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates the relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings, makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classic analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.
This book is about how to teach English as a second language and how second language students learn. With Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) at its centre, it takes a practical approach to second language teaching backed up by clearly explained theory. Presenting eight essential principles across twelve chapters, the book covers Learner Autonomy, Social Learning, Integrated Curriculum, Meaning, Diversity, Thinking Skills, Alternative Assessment and Teacher Co-learning, and shows how technology and reflective teaching can be used to support and enhance these essentials in the classroom. Combining theory and practice, Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching explains how these principles interweave and support each other within the CLT paradigm, demonstrating why they are best implemented as a whole, rather than one at a time. Now revised and brought fully up to date, this new edition includes: - A brand new chapter covering technology and cooperation in teaching practice and how they support CLT-based activities - Vignettes for each essential principle to consolidate theory and demonstrate best practice - Updated real world examples, drawing on teaching experiences from North America, Africa and Asia Taking a 'big picture' view that assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics or language education, Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching is an energising and fun guide for language practitioners.
Studies of language acquisition often asume that children will simply begin to learn language, without questioning what sets the whole process in motion. In How Children Learn to Learn Language, Lorraine McCune thoroughly examines the often-neglected topic of how children discover the possibility of language and demonstrates that pre-language development involves a dynamic system of social, cognitive, and vocal variables that come together to enable the transition to referential language. The relationship with a caregiver is integral to this development because language is a system of symbolic communication that can emerge only with children's recognition that they are separate from others. McCune sees language learning as constructed equally from needing to develop meanings and learning to produce the sounds sequences that represent them. In order for this dual construction to be effective, however, children must discover their capacity to refer to objects and events in the world by having their internal states of focused attention accompanied by an autonomic, physiologically based vocalization, which is the grunt that results from physical or mental effort. When the grunt is intensified and directed at a conversational partner, as when children attempt to convey an internal state, it becomes their first protoword.
This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyas. According to the authors' view, qiyas represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common and Civil Law) but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical reasoning studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiyas and of the work of al-Shirazi penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shirazi's classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiyas al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiyas al-dalala, qiyas al-shabah). The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors' work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general.
Winner of the Tianjin Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award. This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not match up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy.
Doing Pragmatics is a popular reader-friendly introduction to pragmatics. Embracing the comprehensive and engaging style which characterized the previous editions, this fourth edition has been fully revised. Doing Pragmatics extends beyond theory to promote an applied understanding of empirical data and provides students with the opportunity to 'do' pragmatics themselves. A distinctive feature of this textbook is that virtually all the examples are taken from real world uses of language which reflect the emergent nature of communicative interaction. Peter Grundy consolidates the strengths of the original version, reinforcing its unique combination of theory and practice with new theory, exercises and up-to-date real data and examples. This book provides the ideal foundation for all those studying pragmatics within English language, linguistics and ELT/ TESOL.
This is an exploration of the police interview interaction between officers and suspects, using real interview recordings and a conversation analytic framework. This book uses transcripts from real UK police interviews, investigating previously unexplored and under-explored areas of the process. It illustrates the way in which police and suspects use language and sounds to inform, persuade and communicate with each other. It also looks closely at how interactional tools such as laughter can be used to sidestep the legal boundaries of this setting without sanction. The work reveals the delicate balance between institutional and conversational talk, the composition and maintenance of roles and the conflicts between the rules of interaction and law. The analyses offer detailed insights into the reality behind the myth and mystique of police interviews and contain findings which have the potential to inform and advance evidence-based police interview training and practice.
This book makes an original contribution to the understanding of
perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and
offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and
processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see,
taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems
for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations
between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different
kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in
verbs like seem and sound. In unravelling their complexity Nikolas
Gisborne looks closely at their meanings, modality, semantic
relatedness, and irregularity. He frames his exposition in Word
Grammar, and draws extensively on work in cognitive linguistics and
construction grammar.
Kadar and Pan's exciting researchcompares traditional and contemporary Chinese polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. The approach is innovative, because whilst intercultural politeness has received considerable attention,intracultural comparative politeness is a neglected issue. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, this understanding of Chinese politeness norms is pivotal,to both experts of communication studies and those that haveinteractions with the Chinese community. The secondary objective of the book is to study the driving forces behind the large-scale diachronic formation of Chinese politeness norms. It takes a sociolinguistic approach to examining how social changes and changes in discursive practice lead to the change of politeness norms. The study will contribute to both politeness research and historical pragmatics by comparing traditional and contemporary Chinese politeness norms and analysing the driving force behind their diachronic shift. It will be invaluable to researchers and postgradute students in the field of linguistics, in particular politeness research, pragmatics and historical pragmatics. It is clear, instructive and requires no prior knowledge of Chinese.
This edited volume focuses on the hypothesis that performativity is not a property confined to certain specific human skills, or to certain specific acts of language, nor an accidental enrichment due to creative intelligence. Instead, the executive and motor component of cognitive behavior should be considered an intrinsic part of the physiological functioning of the mind, and as endowed with self-generative power. Performativity, in this theoretical context, can be defined as a constituent component of cognitive processes. The material action allowing us to interact with reality is both the means by which the subject knows the surrounding world and one through which he experiments with the possibilities of his body. This proposal is rooted in models now widely accepted in the philosophy of mind and language; in fact, it focuses on a space of awareness that is not in the individual, or outside it, but is determined by the species-specific ways in which the body acts on the world. This theoretical hypothesis will be pursued through the latest interdisciplinary methodology typical of cognitive science, that coincide with the five sections in which the book is organized: Embodied, enactivist, philosophical approaches; Aesthetics approaches; Naturalistic and evolutionary approaches; Neuroscientific approaches; Linguistics approaches. This book is intended for: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, scholars of art and aesthetics, performing artists, researchers in embodied cognition, especially enactivists and students of the extended mind.
While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. This book addresses this gap by examining how every day, authentic language patterns used by coaches, captains and players shape relationships in a professional New Zealand rugby team. More specifically, through a discourse analysis of taken-for-granted ritual language practices in training sessions, team meetings and match-day interactions, the chapters of this book illustrate how coaches, captains and players shape particular interpersonal dynamics of power and solidarity between themselves in and through language and, in the process, reflect and reconstruct shared and underlying ideologies about how relationships of power and solidarity work in their team. Offering an evidence-based discussion of the silent and pervasive ideologies that underpin how relationships work in professional sports teams, this book extends research on this important topic by providing largely missing illustrations of consequential interpersonal dynamics that actively shape professional relationships in sports teams. Written in an approachable style, this book offers linguists, social scientists and sports practitioners a frame of reference for greater understanding of how language directly shapes relationships of power and solidarity.
Contemporary Stylistics presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the integrated study of language and literature. Written by internationally renowned researchers in stylistics, this volume of twenty chapters provides a showcase for the range of approaches and practices which form modern stylistics: from cognitive poetics to corpus linguistics, from explorations of mind-style and spoken discourse in narrative to the workings of viewpoint in lyric poetry, from word-meanings to the meanings and emotions of literary worlds, and more. Each chapter is introduced and set in context by a key figure in stylistics. The book represents the best of current stylistics practice, including the traditions, roots and rigour of the discipline. This one volume reference will be invaluable to students and researchers in stylistics.
The longevity of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that it is possible for a social change organization to simultaneously address racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, environmental justice, and peace-and to succeed. Activism, Alliance Building, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center uses ethnographic research to provide an instructive case study of the importance and challenges of confronting injustice in all of its manifestations. Through building and maintaining alliances, deploying language strategically, and using artistic expression as a central organizing mechanism, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center demonstrates the power of multi-issue organizing and intersectional/coalitional consciousness. Interweaving artistic programming with its social justice agenda, in particular, offers Esperanza a unique forum for creative and political expression, institutional collaborations, and interpersonal relationships, which promote consciousness raising, mobilization, and social change. This study will appeal to scholars of communication, Chicana feminism, and ethnography.
"Discourse, Technology and Change" presents a detailed analysis of discourses that initiate, enable, and stabilise social change in organizational contexts. The book examines the function of written discourse within this setting to examine the dynamic relationships between writing, technology, and socio-cultural change. Focusing on everyday texts used to create technical and social change, the book offers a detailed study of the intersections of discourse, technology and persuasion illustrated through an empirical case study of technological change in an academic institution. The book seriously engages the claim that texts dually construct and reflect social networks and social action. Working at both the micro and macro textual level, the book examines the functions of change discourse providing a framework for understanding how change is constituted within social networks. This cutting-edge monograph will be of interest to academics researching discourse analysis and applied linguistics.
In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey built two bikes, packed what they could, and fled wartime Paris. Among the possessions they escaped with was a manuscript that would later become one of the most celebrated books in children's literature-Curious George. Since his debut in 1941, the mischievous icon has only grown in popularity. After being captured in Africa by the Man in the Yellow Hat and taken to live in the big city's zoo, Curious George became a symbol of curiosity, adventure, and exploration. In Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre argues that the beloved character also performs within a narrative of racism, colonialism, and heroism. Using theories of colonial and rhetorical studies to explain why cultural icons like Curious George are able to avoid criticism, Schwartz-DuPre investigates the ways these characters operate as capacious figures, embodying and circulating the narratives that construct them, and effectively argues that discourses about George provide a rich training ground for children to learn US citizenship and become innocent supporters of colonial American exceptionalism. By drawing on postcolonial theory, children's criticisms, science and technology studies, and nostalgia, Schwartz-DuPre's critical reading explains the dismissal of the monkey's 1941 abduction from Africa and enslavement in the US, described in the first book, by illuminating two powerful roles he currently holds: essential STEM ambassador at a time when science and technology is central to global competitiveness and as a World War II refugee who offers a "deficient" version of the Holocaust while performing model US immigrant. Curious George's twin heroic roles highlight racist science and an Americanized Holocaust narrative. By situating George as a representation of enslaved Africans and Holocaust refugees, Curious about George illuminates the danger of contemporary zero-sum identity politics, the colonization of marginalized identities, and racist knowledge production. Importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which popular culture can be harnessed both to promote colonial benevolence and to present possibilities for resistance.
Intercultural Pragmatics studies how language systems are used in social encounters between speakers who have different first languages and cultures, yet communicate in a common language. The field first emerged in the early 21st century, joining two seemingly antagonistic approaches to pragmatics research: the cognitive-philosophical approach, which considers intention as an a priori mental state of the speaker, and the sociocultural-interactional approach, which considers it as a post factum construct created by both speaker and hearer though conversation. Istvan Kecskes, an early proponent of intercultural pragmatics, was among the first to propose merging the two to form the socio-cognitive approach now core to the field. In Intercultural Pragmatics, the first book on the subject, Kecskes establishes the foundations of the field, boldly combining the pragmatic view of cooperation with the cognitive view of egocentrism in order to incorporate emerging features of communication. He argues that people cooperate by generating and formulating intention that is relevant to the given actual situational context. At the same time, however, because of their egocentrism they activate the most salient information to their attention in the construction and comprehension of utterances. Within this approach, interlocutors are considered as social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a socio-cultural collectivity, and intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance which depends on actual situational experience. Intercultural pragmatics is a rapidly-growing field, and the only subfield of pragmatics to incorporate features of intercultural interaction into mainstream pragmatics. This volume offers both a valuable synthesis of current research and a new way to think about pragmatics.
In this carefully researched, thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Hughes examines the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life. Focusing on the historical, semantic, and cultural aspects of political correctness, it will intrigue anyone interested in this ongoing debate. * A unique and intriguing journey through the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life, focusing on the historical, semantic, and cultural aspects of what PC means* Explores the origins, progress, content and style of political correctness, discussing and analyzing around one hundred terms and lexical formations, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, Marlowe and Swift, to nursery rhymes, rap and Spike Lee films, David Mamet, J. M. Coetzee and Philip Larkin* Offers a detailed semantic analysis of the way that key words have been exploited both to advance the agendas of political correctness and to refute them
The main focus of this book is the investigation of linguistic variation in Spanish, considering spoken and written, specialised and non-specialised registers from a corpus linguistics approach and employing computational updated tools. The ten chapters represent a range of research on Spanish using a number of different corpora drawn from, amongst others, research articles, student writing, formal conversation and technical reports. A variety of methodologies are brought to bear upon these corpora including multi-dimensional and multi-register analysis, latent semantics and lexical bundles. This in-depth analysis of using Spanish corpora will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics or Spanish language. "Corpus and Discourse" series editors are: Wolfgang Teubert, University of Birmingham, and Michaela Mahlberg, Liverpool Hope University College. Editorial Board include: Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Lecce and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster and Vienna), Feng Zhiwei (Beijing). Corpus linguistics provides the methodology to extract meaning from texts. Taking as its starting point the fact that language is not a mirror of reality but lets us share what we know, believe and think about reality, it focuses on language as a social phenomenon, and makes visible the attitudes and beliefs expressed by the members of a discourse community. Consisting of both spoken and written language, discourse always has historical, social, functional, and regional dimensions. Discourse can be monolingual or multilingual, interconnected by translations. Discourse is where language and social studies meet. "The Corpus and Discourse" series consists of two strands. The first, "Research in Corpus and Discourse", features innovative contributions to various aspects of corpus linguistics and a wide range of applications, from language technology via the teaching of a second language to a history of mentalities. The second strand, "Studies in Corpus and Discourse", is comprised of key texts bridging the gap between social studies and linguistics. Although equally academically rigorous, this strand will be aimed at a wider audience of academics and postgraduate students working in both disciplines.
The book is divided into two sections, the first on monolingual
corpora and the second addressing multilingual corpora. Although
the methods used to examine these two types of corpora may differ,
the contributors reveal that there are many similarities between
the two. The chapters discuss: |
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