This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Allais' story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.

Online Teaching and Learning shows how learning through the internet depends on complex human interactions for success. The text uses sociocultural theory as its foundational stance to empirically examine the dynamics of these interactions. It seeks to understand meaning making in all of its social, linguistic and cultural complexity. Each chapter examines how it is that culturally and historically situated meanings get negotiated through social mediation in online instructional venues. It extends the ways we think and talk about online teaching and learning.

Young people around the world are increasingly able to access English language media online for leisure purposes and interact with other users of English. This book examines the extent of these phenomena, their effect on language acquisition and their implications for the teaching of English in the 21st century.

Joe Bray’s careful analysis of Jane Austen’s stylistic techniques reveals that the genius of her writing is far from effortless; rather he makes the case for her as a meticulous craftswoman and a radical stylistic pioneer. Countering those who have detected in her novels a dominant, authoritative perspective, Bray begins by highlighting the complex, ever-shifting and ambiguous nature of the point of view through which her narratives are presented. This argument is then advanced through an exploration of the subtle representation of speech, thought and writing in Austen’s novels. Subsequent chapters investigate and challenge the common critical associations of Austen’s style with moral prescriptivism, ideas of balance and harmony, and literal as opposed to figurative expression. The book demonstrates that the wit and humour of her fiction is derived instead from a complex and subtle interplay between different styles. This compelling reassessment of Austen’s language will offer a valuable resource for students and scholars of stylistics, English literature and language and linguistics.

"Susan Crossman has created one of the most comprehensive books on writing ever written. Whether you're writing a business report, an essay or a full-length novel, Crossman offers invaluable advice on making the process move more smoothly and efficiently. She also provides insightful tips on avoiding writer's block. If you want to be a truly effective and successful writer, this is the book you need."
- Michael B. Davie, author "Winning Ways "
Solid, expert advice from a professional writer and author of several critically acclaimed books. From tips on overcoming writer's block and engaging your audience to focusing on specific markets, Susan Crossman, also author of " Shades of Teale " and "Passages to Epiphany," delivers insightful commentary that will help anyone become a more efficient, effective and successful writer. Of tremendous benefit to business writers - and to anyone crafting works of fiction and non-fiction - a must-read
- Manor House Publishing Inc.
Susan Crossman on "The Write Way": "We all recognize that writing is a creative process but we also tend to think of the physical process of writing as a mechanical skill that takes good grammar and a decent vocabulary and somehow blends them all together to create clear communication. That's not a bad start but decades of experience have taught me that writing with impact is much more complex. This book provides tips on: - How to structure your written work - How to write with style and - How to engage an audience - Avoiding and overcoming writer's block - Writing for key markets and marketing your writing in a highly effective manner I hope The Write Way will help you write with more clarity and conviction and I also hope that it will make the task of writing that much more enjoyable."

This book traces the narrative strategies framing austerity policies through an illuminating analysis of policy documents and political discourses, exposing the political consequences for women, racialized minorities and disabled people. While many have critiqued the ways in which austerity has captured the contemporary political narrative, this is the first book to systematically examine how these narratives work to shift the terms within which policy debates about inequality and difference play out. Gedalof's exceptional readings of these texts pay close attention to the formal qualities of these narratives: the chronologies they impose, their articulation of crisis and resolution, the points of view they construct and the affective registers they deploy. In this manner she argues persuasively that the differences of gender, race, ethnicity and disability have been stitched into the fabric of austerity as excesses that must be disavowed, as reproductive burdens that are too great for the austere state to bear. This innovative, intersectional analysis will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, gender studies, politics and public policy.

The collection of papers addresses the perennial problem of the relation between language and meaning. It proposes various theoretical approaches to the issue ranging from a synergetic theory of meaning merging the cognitive and the socio-historical perspectives, through holistic, evolutionary models and a revision of some of the assumptions of Cognitive Metaphor Theory to the discussion of the role of pragmatic competence in meaning construction. A number of papers make recourse to corpus based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The topics of specific linguistic investigations cover such diverse issues as idiom processing, emotion words in Chinese, valuation of abstract nouns, the preposition at and scalar adjectives. Several papers explore the application of the reflections on the nature of meaning to lexicography and translation. One, self-reflective article investigates the consequences of the unformulated assumptions about meaning for the coherence of proposed linguistic theories. The volume firmly places the study of meaning in the centre of the linguistic research by showing its significance for linguistic theory and its applications.

In this discourse history, W J Dodd analyses the 'unquiet voices' of opponents whose contemporary critiques of Nazism, from positions of territorial and inner exile, focused on the 'language of Nazism'. Individual chapters review 'precursor' discourses; Nazi public discourse from 1933 to 1945; the testimonies of 'unquiet voices' abroad, and in private and published texts in the 'Reich'; attempts to 'denazify the language' (1945-49), and the legacies of the Nazi past in a retrospective discourse of 'coming to terms' with the Nazi past. In the period from 1945, the book focuses on contestations of 'tainted language' and instrumentalizations of the Nazi past, and the persistence of linguistic taboos in contemporary German usage. Highly engaging, with English translations provided throughout, this book will provide an invaluable resource for scholars of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and German history and culture; as well as readers with a general interest in language and politics.

The concept of polarization has become an important topic of interest in politics, society, and discourse around the world today. In the European Union (EU), polarizing rhetoric has driven politics into divided camps on issues ranging from immigration to economic integration. In the United States, polarization has become a universal buzzword, and significant research has been done on it as a political and sociological phenomenon. But there has been little scholarly work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon since the late 1970s. At the same time, holes remain in contemporary rhetorical theory regarding the concept of the orator. In short, the discipline lacks a clearly defined category to deal with strategic communication by collective entities such as social and political movements. This work fills both gaps at once. It focuses on polarization as a rhetorical strategy that seeks to create division and solidarity in audiences. In doing so, it establishes and develops new theoretical categories for contemporary rhetoric, updates and refines existing work on polarization as a communicative phenomenon, and illustrates the utility of new concepts by providing a case study involving the tea party network in the United States.

New speakers are an increasingly important aspect of the revitalization of minority languages since, in some cases, they can make up the majority of the language community in question. This volume examines this phenomenon from the viewpoint of three minority languages: Breton, Yiddish and Lemko.

In this book, Miriam Urgelles-Col examines the syntax and semantics of discourse markers. A discourse marker can loosely be defined as an item such as well or now, coming at the beginning of an utterance and marking a boundary between one part of spoken discourse and the next, signalling the start of a new section of the discourse. They perform important functions in conversation --but defining discourse markers is problematic in itself. The syntactic approach employed in this book to describe discourse markers is Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) which is relevant in a theory of discourse because it provides a framework in which all levels of grammar can be integrated. Since discourse markers operate at discourse level, a well developed discourse theory is required - in this case, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) is employed. During the course of the book, Minimal Recourse Semantics is explained as it provides an integration of HPSG and SDRT. The approach described is exemplified with an analysis of 'anyway'. This book offers a detailed overview of research on discourse markers covering different areas of linguistics: from a discourse analysis point of view, to a Relevance Theory perspective going through a computational linguistics approach. Moreover, the book contains a precise summary of HPSG and the recently developed SDRT. It will be of great interest to researchers in semantics, pragmatics, grammar and discourse analysis.

Languages across the world differ from each other in a number of respects, and one such difference is in terms of how their lexicons are categorized. Compared to most European languages with distinct, functionally dedicated word classes in the traditional sense, quite a few languages are observed to possess lexical items that can fulfill the functions typically associated with more than one traditional word class such as 'noun' and 'verb'. According to Rijkhoff and van Lier (2013), these lexemes exhibit what is called 'flexibility'. Classical Chinese is observed to feature word-class flexibility, in the sense that there are lexemes that can be used to serve the functions of two or more traditional word classes, without the functional change being marked by any derivational means. For instance, a lexical item like xin can either function as a verb meaning 'to be trustworthy [intr.]' or 'to believe, to trust [tr.]' or serve as a noun meaning 'trust, oath of alliance'. Similarly, a human-denoting lexeme such as you FRIEND cannot only mean 'a friend' but also 'to be a friend, to behave friendly [intr.]', 'to make friends with [tr.]' or 'to consider as a friend [tr.]'; an instrument word like bian WHIP cannot only mean 'a whip' but also 'to whip'. This situation is often thought to be related to the fact that Classical Chinese does not have any kind of productive morphology in the traditional sense (e.g. Zadrapa 2011). This is reflected in the lack of markedness distinctions across Croft's (2000, 2001) conceptual space for parts of speech. This study ascribes flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese to precategoriality, in line with Bisang (2008 a, b). Precategoriality can roughly be defined as the absence of the noun-verb distinction in the lexicon; instead, the linking of individual words to the syntactic position of N or V as well as their text frequency in these positions are subject to pragmatics. Precategorial lexical items are those that are not preclassified into parts of speech in the lexicon; rather, their word-class specification is ultimately determined at the syntactic level, according to their position/function in a given word-class indicating construction. From a diachronic viewpoint, this study assumes that precategoriality and categoriality of individual lexical items are not static, but that they are potentialities and tendencies that may change over time. Specifically, (full) precategoriality and (full) categoriality are assumed to constitute a continuum in the lexicon of Chinese throughout its history. In any given historical period, lexical items of the language are distributed between the two extremes on the continuum, according to the intensity of the association between their lexical meaning and the syntactic position/function of e.g. N or V. Generally, along the continuum at a given historical stage, lexemes with a strong association between meaning and function (i.e. lexemes that are normally associated only with one word-class specification for a particular syntactic role) tend to be located close to the extreme of (full) categoriality. In contrast, lexemes that are not necessarily related to one specific association between meaning and function, but can potentially occur in a variety of such associations, are assumed to be placed closer to (full) precategoriality instead. Roughly speaking, the group of lexemes that is located towards (full) precategoriality are flexible lexemes, though with varying degrees of flexibility, whose semantics licenses a syntactic variety and can thus be linked to more than one word-class specification through syntactic specification, a syntactically specified process of category assignment. Based on these considerations, this study aims to present the results of a corpus-based investigation into flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese. The research focuses on two types of syntactic specifications of flexible lexemes, namely, those using action-denoting lexemes in nominal function (the V N type), and those using object-denoting lexemes in verbal function (the N V type). The two types of syntactic specifications are investigated for this study in the five Classical Chinese texts (Zuozhuan, Mengzi, Guoyu, Mozi, and Zhanguoce). Based on empirical facts, flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese is addressed at three descriptive levels in this study: First, at the level of syntax, the discussion focuses on the most important syntactic configurations for the use of flexible lexemes and their relations to the basic word order of this language, with flexibility being observed in two positions of an argument structure construction: the V-position and the syntactic position of an argument. The findings of this study demonstrate that as far as the argument structure constructions formed with flexible lexemes are concerned, VO word order is much more frequent than OV. This strong preference for VO is, in connection with lexical flexibility, explained as follows: With the loss of derivational morphology in early stages of Old Chinese (e.g. Sagart 1999), word order became the most important indicator of word class and strongly supported the omission of strict verb-noun distinctions (co-existence of precategoriality and categoriality) in the lexicon of this language. Second, at the level of cognitive semantics (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Koevecses and Radden 1998; Schoenefeld 2005), the discussion concentrates on the metonymic relationships that constitute the cognitive-semantic foundation of the use of flexible lexemes in Classical Chinese. In a metonymic mapping of either the V N or the N V type, the original semantics of a lexical item (which may typically be associated with a certain syntactic role of N or V) is used as a reference point to provide mental access to the newly derived meaning of the item in another syntactic function. Given the typologically salient characteristics of Classical Chinese discussed in this book, the argument is that the flexible use of an existing word form as a metonymically related but syntactically distinct item is one of the most economic ways in this language to name a new concept or a newly construed situation in discourse. Third, at the level of argument structure constructions (Bisang 2008a, b), the discussion focuses on how the different metonymic relationships mentioned interact with a given argument structure construction (which carries its own meaning within itself), and how these are further concretized into rule-based or metaphorically motivated pragmatic implicatures. A closer examination of an argument structure construction with an object word in the V-position reveals that there are two underlying frameworks for deriving the concrete meaning of the construction. In the rule-based framework, the verbal function of a given object word can basically be derived through grammatical analysis of the whole construction. In the metaphorical framework, the composed semantics of the construction actively interacts with the outside world in our conceptual system, where metaphor (Lakoff 1987, 1993; Koevecses 2010) serves as an essential cognitive principle in establishing and (re-)interpreting relations in the construction. The two mechanisms, rule-based and metaphorical, complement each other and work together to account for flexibility in Classical Chinese. This study argues that flexibility of parts of speech in Classical Chinese can only be fully understood by integrating a wide range of aspects, both linguistic and non-linguistic. The components that are needed to account for it include constructions (form-meaning pairings), semantics (Croft's conceptual space), pragmatic implicatures, metonymies, metaphors, as well as world knowledge as reflected within a culture. In my view, it is reasonable to argue that these components need not be specific to the language investigated here; they are applicable to any language that shows flexibility in its parts-of-speech system.

The first book length study of this genre, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography facilitates new understandings of how people and cultures are displaced and reinvent themselves. Through the examination of visual arts and literature, Juan Velasco analyzes the space for self-expression that gave way to a new paradigm in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography. By bringing together self-representation with complex theoretical work around culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sex, and nationality, this work is at the crossroads of intersectional analysis and engages with scholarship on the creation of cross-border communities, the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival, and the reclaiming of new art fashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured.

This ground-breaking book takes an interdisciplinary approach to language, religion and media using an audience-response study. In this book, the author investigates how the three Abrahamic faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are represented in mainstream British media and analyses how members of each religious group and those with no religion receive those representations. Employing Critical Discourse Analysis, Al-Azami considers the way the media use their power of language to influence the audience's perceptions of the three religions through newspaper articles, television documentaries and television dramas. Chapter 3 presents the results of an original investigation into the responses of members of the three religious groups and those with no religion when exposed to those same media materials. The author applies the encoding/decoding model and also considers people's views in face-to-face interactions compared to comments on online newspapers. Comprehensive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to students of Linguistics, Media Studies, Religious Studies, and Journalism.

This is the third in a series of conference papers on rhetorical criticism. Held in July 1995 in London, the conference included participants from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Republic of South Africa. Part I is concerned with the past, present and future of rhetorical analysis; Parts II, III and IV are concerned with rhetorical analysis of scriptural texts; and Part V provides a conclusion reflecting on a number of questions raised in Part I. Most of the participants would characterize themselves as advocates of rhetorical criticism; but there were others less convinced that rhetorical criticism is developing as it ought.>

This book presents overwhelming evidence of the positive impact of language training and filial language learning. By surveying and condensing the rich empirical findings that have been established over the last 35 years, Moerk specifies how relatively straightforward the training and learning interactions are. By surveying also the known relationship between less than optimal language training and delayed acquisition of even deficient end-products, the professional, whether in a clinical or educational setting, can also infer what interactional flaws to avoid. An extensive list of references provides detailed support for the arguments presented; support that shows that many of the fashionable denials of "the teachability" or "the learnability" of language have been disproved empirically. Lastly, the tens of thousands of children with language delay or deficiency are, though not a direct audience of the book, intended as the main beneficiaries. As professionals focusing on remedies are lead back from airy speculations of innate knowledge--and therefore pessimistic inferences is this knowledge if not shown in behavior--and are shown how language skills can be transmitted. Their clients can gain not only language skills, but could reap educational and professional success.

This book provides a basic approach to the linguistic analysis of conversation, building toward a theory of the aesthetics of conversation by analyzing spontaneous talk among friends. It sheds light on such issues as pacing, turn-taking, storytelling, and humor, showing the effects on interaction when participants' conversational styles differ. Its readability makes it suitable for use as a text in discourse analysis at all levels.

The book contains essays in honor of Victor Raskin. The contributions are all directly related to some of the major areas of work in which Raskin's scholarship has spanned for decades. The obvious connecting idea is the encyclopedic script-based foundation of lexical meaning, which informs his pioneering work in semantics in the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of the book collects articles directly concerned with script-based semantics, which examine both the theoretical and methodological premises of the idea and its applications. Script-based semantics is the foundation of both Raskin's ground-breaking work in humor research (addressed by the articles in part 2) and in Ontological semantics (addressed in part 3), the most recent development of script-based semantics. The fourth part is dedicated to a less-known, but equally important, strand of Raskin's research, the applications of linguistics to other fields, including writing, lexicography, and professional applications (e,g., tourism). Overall, the book provides and up-to-date, in-depth discussion of an influential strand of the discussion on semantics and its most recent developments and influence on other seemingly unrelated fields, such as Cognitive Linguistics.

Corpus Linguistics is becoming an increasingly important branch of language research and interest has spread noticeably beyond the confines of academia, fuelled by applications like text predicting software. The idea of priming in language goes back to the early 1960s with the concept of a 'Teachable Language Comprehender', which started experiments into language processing and which inspired one of Google's chief engineers. The concept of Lexical Priming (Hoey: 2005) aims to supply answers as to how we can explain word choices and construction forms that are more frequent than laws of probability would allow. This book provides a range of arguments to support the validity of Lexical Priming as a linguistic theory, while it also extends the reach of what Lexical Priming has been used to describe. Beyond the written-text material originally used, this book provides evidence that lexical priming also applies to everyday spoken conversations as its psychological foundations predict that it should.

Together with the volume "Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues," this book provides a journey through the more recent developments of pragmatics, considering both its philosophical and linguistic nature. This first volume is devoted to the theoretical models developed from a philosophical perspective, including both the newest advances of the classical theories and approaches, and pioneering and interdisciplinary ideas proposed to face the challenges of the fields and areas of practice and analysis. The topics investigated, which include implicatures, reference, presupposition, speech acts, metaphor, relevance, and common ground, represent the core of the state of the art in philosophical pragmatics. Research on these matters have been continuously changing the way that we can look at them. This book serves as a collection of works from the most eminent authors who represent the theoretical developments of the approaches that defined this field, together with the new philosophical insights coming from more applied disciplines such as argumentation, discourse analysis, or linguistics. The combination of these two perspectives provides a unique outline of the current research in pragmatics.

Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, this study proposes an analytical model focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories. This model is further exploited in language teaching to cultivate students' cultural sensitivity and critical literacy.

This volume is a series of nine (9) contributions to our understanding of relativization strategies in eleven (11) languages of Cameroon spread into the seven (7) sub-branches of the Niger-Congo phylum: Ekoid, Mambiloid, Mamfe, Mbam, Narrow Bantu, Wide Grassfields, Yemne-Kimbi. As a productive strategy in the world's languages, and considering the evidence that the African language are either under-described, poorly described or not described at all, investigations into the forms, structures and functions of relative clauses and relativization start filling the gap of the absence of analytical descriptive works on the topic. The papers dwelt on the construction of relative clauses, their structure and constraints, their morphosyntactic properties, how they are used to give prominence to topics or participants that are thematic in a given discourse, and to mark the boundaries of units of text, and the formal characteristics of restrictive relative clause constructions. The findings generated so far constitute an endless tank for many fields of hyphenated linguistics including general linguistics, cognitive linguist, applied psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive psychology, linguistics and pragmatics.

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic review of multilingual L2 learners' spoken Chinese, focusing on the dual dimensions of speech competence and speech performance. Specifically, by adopting a mixed-methods approach, it explores the cognitive, affective, and socio-cultural differences between intermediate and advanced multilingual learners' L2 Chinese speech competence and speech performance. Drawing on a theoretical framework underpinned by the affective filter hypothesis, L2 willingness to communicate model, L2 motivational self-system, and L2 speech production models, this book not only contributes to our theoretical understanding of the roles of various factors in L2 Chinese speech competence and speech performance, but also offers practical insights into the implications for both teachers and learners in terms of how to minimize the gap between these two dimensions among L2 Chinese learners. It concludes with a discussion on the limitations of L2 Chinese speech and on future directions for the field.

This book examines the simultaneous contribution of learner vocabulary size and speed to second language performance differences across learner levels and settings. Harrington considers vocabulary size and speed, as reflected in retrieval speed and consistency, as a three-dimensional measurement construct termed lexical facility. While size and retrieval speed are generally known, this is the first attempt to incorporate consistency, as measured by the coefficient of variation, as an index of vocabulary skill. Part 1 describes the three dimensions and the roles they play on lower level text processing and thus on second language performance more generally. Part 2 reports on seven studies and related research that investigate the sensitivity of the three dimensions, both individually and in combination, to proficiency differences in common domains of academic English performance. Harrington's framework and the theoretical and methodological issues that arise are presented in a manner accessible to a wide readership, including second language acquisition vocabulary researchers, testing and assessment practitioners, and those interested in second language research methodology.