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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
This volume provides descriptions and interpretations of social and cognitive phenomena as well as processes that emerge at the interface of languages and cultures in the context of contrastive and contact linguistics and media discourse. Different contexts are explored with rich empirical findings and authentic exemplifying materials. The book includes fifteen papers, divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses conceptual reflection on languages and cultures in contact and contrast, while Part 2 focuses on contact linguistics and borrowing. Part 3 discusses cultural and linguistic aspects of media discourses.
An analysis of the rhetoric of science in the evolution of American ornithological discourse. It covers: the emergence of American ornithological discourse; discourse models for natural history and experimental science; diachronic changes; and more.
Constructed opposition has proved as viable an area of research as traditional antonymy, and a useful tool in looking at ideologically orientated texts. This book investigates how binary oppositions are constructed discursively and the potential ideological repercussions of their usage in news reports in the British press. The focus is particularly on the positive presentation of groups and individuals subsumed under the first person plural pronouns 'us' and 'we', and the simultaneous marginalization of groups designated as 'they' or 'them'. Exploring the dynamic relations between the linguistic system and language in context this is a key publication for those involved in discourse analysis and stylistics.
This book combines ideas about the architecture of grammar and language acquisition, processing, and change to explain why languages show regular patterns when there is so much irregularity in their use and so much complexity when there is such regularity in linguistic phenomena. Peter Culicover argues that the structure of language can be understood and explained in terms of two kinds of complexity: firstly that of the correspondence between form and meaning; secondly in the real-time processes involved in the construction of meanings in linguistic expressions. Mainstream syntactic theory has focused largely on regularities within and across languages, relegating to the periphery exceptional and idiosyncratic phenomena. But, the author argues, a languages irregular and unique features offer fundamental insights into the nature of language, how it changes, and how it is produced and understood. Peter Culicover's new book offers a pertinent and original contribution to key current debates in linguistic theory. It will interest scholars and advanced students of linguists of all theoretical persuasions.
This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image. The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.
An innovative introduction to writing poetry designed for students
of creative writing and budding poets alike.
This book traces the pedagogical evolution of technical communication in America as it grew out of Engineering English requirements from roughly the turn of the century to 1950. This study examines specific curricular patterns, texts, and writers on the subject of technical communication, while also tracing engineering educational patterns as they emerge from the proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education. Unique to the second edition of the book is a new preface by the recent past ATTW series editor, Jimmie Killingsworth, a new introduction by Elizabeth Tebeaux, and an epilogue by Katherine Staples. Writing in a Milieu of Utility concludes that technical writing, as we teach it today, likely found its roots in engineering composition pedagogy, when, at approximately the turn of the century, engineering educators recognized that writing about science and technology not only made sense in an academic milieu that emphasized utility, but that such writing could also contribute to the professional success of engineering students. Existing somewhat tenuously as engineering itself sought academic status, technical communication emerged ultimately as a re-conceptualized composition course, after early to mid twentieth century calls for English and engineering cooperation made traditional composition offerings less relevant. Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.
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.
In this provocative book, Edward Schiappa argues that rhetorical theory did not originate with the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.E, as is commonly believed, but came into being a century later. Schiappa examines closely the terminology of the Sophists-such as Gorgias and Protagoras-and of their reporters and opponents-especially Plato and Aristotle-and contends that the terms and problems that make up what we think of as rhetorical theory had not yet formed in the era of the early Sophists. His revision of rhetoric's early history enables him to change the way we read both the Sophists and Aristotle and Plato. Schiappa contends, for example, that Plato probably coined the Greek word for rhetoric; that Gorgias is a "prose rhapsode" whose style does not deserve the criticism it has received; that Isocrates deliberately never uses the Greek work for "rhetoric" and that our habit of pitting him versus Plato as "rhetoric versus philosophy" is problematic; and that Aristotle "disciplined" the genre of epideictic in a way that robs the genre of its political importance. His book will be of great interest to students of classics, communications, philosophy, and rhetoric.
This is the definitive state-of-the art resource to discourse analysis, providing a guide for advanced students and researchers in the field. "The Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis" is designed to be the essential one-volume resource for advanced students and academics. This companion offers a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary discourse studies. In 21 chapters written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of key terms, methods and current research topics and directions. It offers both a survey of current research and gives more practical guidance for advanced study in the area. The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field and features a glossary of key terms in the area of discourse analysis. It is the complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working within discourse studies, applied linguistics, TESOL and the social sciences. "The Continuum Companions" series is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.
Metaphor has long provided a rich way to speak about the unspeakable, to refer to delicate issues. Sex is one such area. This book follows a cognitive-linguistic and relevance-theoretic approach to the language of sex, considering metaphor as a bridge that brings together mind and language. It does this through the analysis of the antithetical mechanisms of verbal mitigation and offence. These two mechanisms are (more commonly know as) euphemism and (its lesser known companion term) dysphemism. The volume reflects on the social and communicative functions that sexual metaphors perform in a sample of almost two hundred postings taken from internet forums. How do people think about sex? How do people avoid talking about sex? How do people paraphrase sexual topics? It offers an account of how real language users understand sexual taboo in present-day English and also a great grounding in manual corpus work on a qualitative level.
Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The 'Head' edited by Iwona Kraska-Szlenk adds to linguistic studies on embodied cognition and conceptualization while focusing on one body part term from a comparative perspective. The 'head' is investigated as a source domain for extending multiple concepts in various target domains accessed via metaphor or metonymy. The contributions in the volume provide comparative and case studies based on analyses of the first-hand data from languages representing all continents and diversified linguistic groups, including endangered languages of Africa, Australia and Americas. The book offers new reflections on the relationship between embodiment, cultural situatedness and universal tendencies of semantic change. The findings contribute to general research on metaphor, metonymy, and polysemy within a paradigm of cognitive linguistics.
The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor presents papers by well-known philosophers, linguists, and a semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives independent from any one school of thought.
Popular music has long been used to entertain, provoke, challenge and liberate but also to oppress and control. Can popular music be political? What types of popular music work best with politics? How can songs, videos, concerts or any other musical commodity convey ideas about power, politics and identity? Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS), this book reveals the deeply political role played by popular music. Lyndon Way demonstrates how MCDS can provide important and timely insights on the political nature of popular music, due to its focus on how communication takes place, as well as its interest in discourse and how ideologies are naturalised and legitimised. The book considers the example of contemporary Turkish society, with its complex and deep ideological divisions increasingly obvious under the stewardship of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his centre-right political party, in power since 2002. It looks at how the authorities seek to harness and control popular music and considers a wide range of popular music genres including rock, rap, protest and folk music. It shows how official promotional videos, protest cut-and-paste offerings, party-political election songs, live music events and internet discussions about popular music emerge as sites of power and resistance in certain venues and particularly across social media. Throughout the book, Lyndon Way shows that popular music is also deeply political.
This volume is the second part of a project which hosts an interdisciplinary discussion about the relationship among law and language, legal practice and ordinary conversation, legal philosophy and the linguistics sciences. An international group of authors, from cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law question about how legal theory and pragmatics can enrich each other. In particular, the first part is devoted to the analysis of how pragmatics can solve problems related to legal theory: What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and its relationship with moral, and, in particular, about the eternal dispute between legal positivism and legal naturalism? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and/or legal disagreements? The second part is focused on legal adjudication: it aims to construct a pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal trial and/or to test the tenure of the traditional pragmatics tools in the field. The authors face questions such as: Which interesting pragmatic features emerge from legal adjudication? What pragmatic theories are better suited to account for the practice of judgment or its particular aspects (such as the testimony or the binding force of legal precedents)? Which pragmatic and socio-linguistic problems are highlighted by this practice?
"While feminist critics have re-invented the canon, studies of male
authors have remained oddly ungendered. The authors in Peter
Murphy's enlightening collection hold male authors up to a gender
lens' to explore how in their lives and in their texts, these
writers were working out issues of masculinity and sexuality. The
refreshing results cross all boundaries cultural, sexual, even
disciplinary." We are just beginning to understand masculinity as a fiction or
a localizable, historical, and therefore unstable construct. This
book points the way to a much-needed interrogation of the many
modes of masculinity, as represented in literature. Both women and
men who are engaged in critical thinking about genders and
sexualities will find these essays always thoughtful and often
provocative. Peter Murphy has assembled an innovative, challenging, and
important set of contributions to a growing field of inquiry into
constructions of masculinities in literature, inspired principally
by feminist and gay studies. Illuminatingly crossing lines of
genders, sexualities, cultures, and methodologies, "Fictions of
Masculinity" greatly advances our understanding of representations
of men, masculinities, misandry, and misogyny in a wide range of
literary works and genres, and helps us to imagine (and thereby
ultimately bring about) alternative constructions. Women writing about women dominates contemporary work on sexuality. Men have been far more willing to discuss female sexuality than male sexuality, while the most radical and insightful analyses of male sexuality have come from women. When men consider the issue of female sexuality they often speak from assumptions of security about their own unexamined sexuality. This book maintains that men have to interrogate their own sexuality if there is to be a revision of phallocentric discourse; and, that this revision of masculinity must be done in dialogue with women. The essays included in this collection examine the deep structure of masculine codes. They ask the question Who are the men in modern literature? Examining the force of the dominant values of Western masculinity, they synthesize insights from feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and new historicism. These perspectives help explain how male sexuality has been structured by fictional representations. By examining the images of masculinity in modern literature, the essays explore traditional and non-traditional roles of men in society and in personal relationships. They look at how men are represented in literature, the fiction of manhood. They attempt to unravel the assumptions behind these representations by looking at the implications of this imagination. And they speculate on possibilities for creating a new imaginary of masculinity by identifying what literature has to say about that change. With analyses of a range of genres (novels, poetry, plays and
autobiography), Western and Third World literatures, and
theoretical perspectives, "Fictions of Masculinity" provides a
significant contribution to thisrapidly growing field of
study.
This book is a stylistic study of D. H. Lawrence's presentation of narrative viewpoint. The focus is mainly on Lawrence's third novel, Sons and Lovers, occupying a crucial position in his oeuvre and judged by critics to be his first mature piece.While sharing many features typical of nineteenth-century novels, it marks the emergence of a new technique of writing consciousness that functioned as a precursor to the modernist practice of dialogic shifts across viewpoints. Through a detailed linguistic analysis, Sotirova shows that different characters' viewpoints are not simply juxtaposed in the narrative, but linked in a way that creates dialogic resonances between them. The dialogic linking is achieved through the use of devices that have parallel functions in conversational discourse - referring expressions, sentence-initial correctives and repetition. The book uses stylistics to resolve current controversies in narratology and Lawrence criticism.In approaching the study of narrative viewpoint from the angle of discourse, Sotirova arrives at cutting-edge insights into Lawrence's work. This book will be required reading for stylisticians, narratologists, literary linguists and literary studies scholars.
The new edition of Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition defines the key terminology within second language acquisition, and also provides accessible summaries of the key issues within this complex area of study. The final section presents a list of key readings in second language acquisition that signposts the reader towards classic articles and also provides a springboard to further study. The whole book has been updated and expanded to take into account a wider range of theories and developments since the first edition. It remains at the top of its game. The text is accessibly written, with complicated terms and concepts explained in an easy to understand way. Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition is an essential resource for students.
This book offers an easily accessible specific methodology for describing the nuances of spoken and written texts, of any length, in meaning and manageable ways. "Phasal Analysis" is a book that offers an approach to discourse analysis for both linguists and non-linguistics. If offers an easily accessible specific methodology for describing the nuances of spoken and written texts, of any length, in meaning and manageable ways. It demonstrates, in eight clearly structured chapters, how to compile, contextualize and communicate the intricacies of a language analysis. Based around the communication linguistics framework developed with Michael Gregory, Karen Malcolm's book functions as an introduction to the description process that has come to be known as phasal analysis. The process is a method of capturing the way meanings are made and communicated, relationships are established and maintained and ideologies are supported and challenged. Featuring a wealth of student exercises and sample texts, this book is firmly pedagogic. "Phasal Analysis" reveals the innate structuring principles encoded in language, and will enable students from a range of disciplines, from linguistics to language studies to creative writing, to communicate on the message and purpose of the discourse under analysis.
Making a new contribution to the developing field of multimodal critical discourse studies, Ian Roderick's book demonstrates how technologies that tend to be widely represented as innovative, or as simple pragmatic solutions, are always anchored in power relations and are therefore deeply ideological. A series of examples analysing technologies such as robotics, smart phones or bio-medicine, their functioning and uses, as well as their representations in the media, show that these are embedded within discourses that tell us about social and power relations, identities and political values. The book takes a tour of everyday technologies and how they are represented in different settings. A Disney theme park attraction showing how technology has improved family life makes many assumptions about what is natural in terms of interpersonal relations, pleasure and satisfaction. Advertisements that represent robot workers inform us about the kinds of worker-management relations now characterising work places. Roderick looks at the way that technologies, while often represented as divorced from their production and maintenance, as objects of wonder, need to be seen within a fabric of social relations that tends to be supressed from how we see them as part of a wider technological fetishism. Engaging with existing theories of technology, the book argues that we must take a more interdisciplinary approach to avoid the pitfalls of social constructivism and technological determinism. Our experiences of technologies are shaped through the relationship between knowledge, practices and institutional forms.
Corpus linguistics is often regarded as a methodology in its own right, but little attention has been given to the theoretical perspectives from which the subject can be approached. The present book contributes to filling this gap. Bringing together original contributions by internationally renowned authors, the chapters include coverage of the lexical priming theory, parole-linguistics, a four-part model of language system and language use, and the concept of local textual functions. The theoretical arguments are illustrated and complemented by case studies using data from large corpora such as the BNC, smaller purpose-built corpora, and Google searches. By presenting theoretical positions in corpus linguistics, "Text, Discourse, and Corpora" provides an essential overview for advanced undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers. "Corpus and Discourse Series" editors are: Wolfgang Teubert, University of Birmingham, and Michaela Mahlberg, Liverpool Hope University College. Editorial Board: Frantisek Cermak (Prague), Susan Conrad (Portland), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster), Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Lecce and TWC), Ruth Wodak (Lancaster and Vienna), and 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.
Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, Laine Berman shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the rigid constraints of an hierarchical social order. She does this by identifying the silences, the "unsaid," and by revealing both the structure and function of silence in terms of its indexical reference to local meaning. It is here that the force of the Javanese language as used in everyday interaction shows itself to be an extremely potent philosophical entity as well as a means of social control. Thus, at least in regard to the urban poor, the book boldly questions the difference between traditional definitions of Javanese elegance and oppression. This study will contribute to our understanding of the social consequences of language use, to the linguistic knowledge of Indonesia and Java, and to such basic linguistic issues as narrative structure and function, speech levels and styles, and indexicality features. |
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