As a student, and in any profession based on your studies, good oral communication skills are essential. It is therefore extremely important to develop your ability to converse, to discuss, to argue persuasively, and to speak in public. This is one reason why, whatever subject you study, you will be encouraged to discuss your work in seminars and you will have opportunities to give short talks or presentations.
Most people probably take for granted their ability to speak; not thinking much about it until the have to address an audience, or attend an important interview. However, just as your first impressions of other people are based on how they look and how they speak - so are their impressions of you. In every conversation, as well as when you give a talk or presentation, or are interviewed, you are not only conveying information about the subject being discussed but also presenting yourself.
"Speaking for Yourself" provides clear, straightforward advice that will help you:
Be a good listener
Express yourself clearly and persuasively
Contribute effectively to discussions
Prepare talks or presentations
Prepare effective visual aids
Deliver effective presentations
Perform well in interviews
In short, it will help you to express your thoughts clearly and persuasively - and so to achieve your short and medium-term goals as a student, and your career goals.

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.

Quantification has been at the heart of research in the syntax and semantics of natural language since Aristotle. The last few decades have seen an explosion of detailed studies of the syntax and semantics of quantification and its relation to the rest of the theory of grammar, resulting in a highly sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms of quantification. This book considers the ways natural languages vary with respect to their realisation of quantificational notions. Drawing on data from English, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Hausa and others, the authors also link the variation in the expression of quantification to the notions of polarity sensitivity, free-choice and indefiniteness.

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice's circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions (and related chapters), where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that (potential) presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

While neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce "female moral art," writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme. Papke begins with a brief examination of the ideology of true womanhood, which, she argues, permeates Chopin's and Wharton's fiction and world views. The remainder of her work offers an ideological reading of their social fiction in which their characters search for states of liminality, where they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy. Repeatedly, Papke argues, these states of liminality are literally encoded into images of characters positioned on the edge of an abyss that then becomes a repository of multiple meanings. The author presents Chopin's and Wharton's female discourse as radical art because it dares to defy that which is both alienating and destructive. Papke's provocative analysis will be of interest not only to Wharton and Chopin scholars, but also to those working in the fields of feminist and women's studies. It will also interest scholars and students of American studies, particularly those working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

This work is an in-depth analysis of the full breadth of Sojourner Truth's public discourse that places it in its proper historical context and explores the use of humor and narratives as primary rhetorical strategies used by this illiterate ex-slave to create a powerful public persona. The book provides a comprehensive survey of the life of Sojourner Truth, and includes a unique and authoritative compilation of primary rhetorical documents, such as speeches, songs, and public letters.

This is the only major work to date that analyzes the breadth of Sojourner Truth's public discourse. The volume includes a complete and authoritative compilation of her extant rhetoric, including several versions of the same speech, reports of her speaking appearances, public letters published by Truth in newspapers, and songs written and performed by her as part of her public lectures. Three chapters address the rhetorical dimensions of Truth's public persona. First, an historical survey contextualizes her life and speaking from slave to reformer, placing into perspective the variety of experiences that comprised her background. Second, an analysis of Truth's use of humor focuses upon how she employed the strategies of superiority and incongruity in her refutation of opponents and the establishment of her own credibility. Third, a critique of Truth's use of narratives in her discourse reveals how both her speeches and songs rely upon three fundamental stories for their persuasive impact: her slave life and religious conversion, her use of the black jeremiad to portray race differences, and her tales of woman's strength and moral conviction. The volume concludes with a consideration of Truth's status as a folk legend and how she wished to be remembered.

This book analyses the Youth Justice Conferencing Program in New South Wales, Australia. Exploring this form of diversionary justice from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies, the authors combine close textual analysis with ethnographic research methodologies. They examine how participants use the discourse semantic resources available to them to achieve such outcomes as reparation for the victim, reintegration of the offender into the community, and reconciliation between the various parties. This uniquely-researched work is sure to be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

What is semiotics? This term is applied in a wide range of disciplines from literary theory and film to law, architecture and communication studies. But what does it actually mean and how can we use it? "Key Terms in Semiotics "provides exactly the information that a student needs when encountering semiotics for the first time or as a more advanced reader wishing to do in-depth readings.

This book offers a metaphysical development of the notion of perspective. By explaining the functional nature of point of view, and by providing a concrete definition of point of view as a window through which to see the world, it offers a scientific realist theory that explains that points of view are real structures that ground properties and objects as well as perspectives. The notion of point of view has been of key importance in the history of philosophy, and different philosophical schools have used this notion to conduct analyses from the external reality to the inner phenomenal status, or even to construct an entire philosophical system. However, there has been a lack of systematic analysis of what a point of view is and what its structure is; this book fills the gap in the literature and makes the transition between semantics and epistemology, and the philosophy of science.

This volume brings together a wide array of papers which explore, among other things, to what extent languages and cultures are variable with respect to the interactions around the event of death. Motivated by J. L. Mey's idea of the pragmeme, a situated speech act, the volume has both theoretical and practical implications for scholars working in different fields of enquiry. As the papers in this volume reveal, despite the terminological differences between various disciplines, the interactions around the event of death serve to provide solace, not only to the dying, but also to the family and friends of the deceased, thus helping them to "accommodate" to the new state of affairs.

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfill two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.

Challenging the tendency to disparage Nashe's writing as the product of an eccentric sensibility and to explain his texts in journalistic terms more appropriate to modern commercial publishing, this work provides an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of sixteenth-century literature. Lorna Hutson reveals hitherto overlooked links between humanist approaches to the literary text and the transformation of the English economy through humanist-inspired policies of ethical and social reform; from this context, Nashe's textual prodigality emerges as an assault upon the contemporary impoverishment of literary activity caused by the political over-valuing of the printed word. Generic precedents turn out to be festive; each of Nashe's apparently unstructured pamphlets derives shaping energy from traditions of popular-festive mockery. The pamphlets bring an older conception of seasonal prosperity into subversive dialogue with the newer discourse of provident individualism. For Nashe, stylistic experiment is shown to mean more than a choice of style; it is, rather, the expression of an intricate, socially engaged imagination.

This book explores an understudied area of language development in autism - namely, how children with autism learn the meaning of verbs. The key feature is a profile of verb acquisition in autism derived from qualitative analysis of the conversational language of ten children with autism. Douglas examines whether this profile is typical or atypical compared with verb learning in neurotypical children. Verb use is central to linguistic development, and the ability of children with autism to develop and use verb categories is of interest, because verbs also encode information about the number and type of participants and the temporal location of the activity/event. Moreover, the acquisition of verb meanings is often dependent on other cognitive skills, such as the recognition that human beings have beliefs and desires which motivate their actions. All these are areas which are widely considered problematic for children with autism and continue to generate much discussion among researchers and clinicians. This investigation is among the first studies of its type, offering new insights into the process of language acquisition in autism.

Temporality surveys the ways in which languages of different types refer to past, present, and future events, through an in-depth examination of four major language types: tense-based English, tense-aspect-based Polish, aspect-based Chinese, and mood-based Kalaallisut. * Cutting-edge research on directly compositional dynamic semantics of languages with and without grammatical tense * New in-depth analysis of temporal, aspectual, modal, as well as nominal discourse reference * Presents a novel logical language for representing linguistic meaning (Update with Centering) * Develops a unified theory of tense, aspect, mood, and person as different types of grammatical centering systems

Natural language differs from artificial ones in having the "displacement property," allowing expressions to "move" from one position to another in the sentence. The mapping from syntax to phonology, therefore, must include rules specifying how objects created by movement are pronounced, or in technical jargon, how chains are linearized. One of these rules is Copy Deletion. The present study investigates the structural description of Copy Deletion. Specifically, it proposes a phrase geometric constraint on its application. The proposal is corroborated by empirical arguments based on distributional and interpretational facts concerning predicate clefts, NP-Splits, and head ordering patterns. The data are drawn from languages of different types and families including Chinese, English, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. The book, thus, contributes to our understanding of a crucial property of natural language and should be of relevance to readers who are interested in the cross-linguistic approach to Universal Grammar research.

This volume presents new and cutting-edge research on the question of how we parse, interpret and understand language in more complex discourse settings. The challenge is to find empirical evidence on how information structure and semantic processing are related. Comprehensible answers are provided by showing how syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics interact and how they influence semantic processing and interpretation. The analysis of core information structural concepts that contribute to processing such as focus and contrast, the specific discourse status of referents that add to the common ground, context dependency and markedness as well as prosodic prominence and givenness marking has added new and convincing evidence to the research of information structure and semantic processing.

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.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis is a comprehensive survey of the ways in which enhanced meaning emerges through the interaction of more than one mode of communication. Different modes of communication covered include: Language. Dynamic and static visual images. Architecture and three-dimensional objects in the realm of material lived-in space, as well as electronic media, film and print. This also includes the study of transition and phase, camera and body movement, typography, layout and the use of colour, and how such choices orientate the viewer to particular readings of the text and context. Multimodal Discourse Analysis will be useful to researchers interested in the application of systemic functional linguistics to media studies, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.

With globalization and the ever-increasing migration of professionals, issues related to learning an additional language and culture in professional contexts are prominent in many contemporary societies. Drawing upon data from an extensive research study of internationally educated professionals, this book examines the affordances and constraints to successful professional acculturation, and the relationships between identity, agency, and the acquisition of professional language and culture. The author provides a succinct review of socially informed theories of second language acquisition, and presents a unique analysis of identity and agency that incorporates the work of Erik Erikson and George Herbert Mead with Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and Lave and Wenger's community of practice framework. Given the pervasive problem of the underemployment of internationally educated professionals in many contemporary immigrant-receiving societies, this book makes a timely contribution that not only advances scholarship but also has important practical and policy implications.

This study provides a systematic overview of articles and article systems in the world's languages using a sample of 104 languages. Articles can be classified into 10 types according to their referential functions: definite, anaphoric, weak definite, recognitional, indefinite, presentational, exclusive-specific, nonspecific, inclusive-specific, and referential articles. All 10 types are described in detail with examples from various languages of the world. The book also addresses crosslinguistic trends concerning the distribution and the development of different article types, and it proposes a typology of article systems. The aim of this study is to provide a general crosslinguistic overview concerning the attested properties and distributions of articles. It is geared towards readers with interests in language typology and the nominal domain, and it can serve as a point of reference for language-specific studies of articles or determiners.