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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
This second edition of the best-selling textbook "Working with Discourse" has been revised and updated throughout. The book builds an accessible set of analytic tools that can be used to explore how speakers and writers construe meaning through discourse. These techniques are introduced in clear steps, through analyses of spoken, written and visual texts that focus on truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. The new edition includes a chapter on Negotiation, clear definitions of key terms, chapter summaries and revised suggestions for further reading. Accessibly written and presupposing no prior knowledge of discourse or functional linguistics, this is the ideal textbook for students encountering discourse analysis for the first time at advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level.
This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve controversies in philosophical dialogue or public debate settings, this orientation has tended to preempt questions about where controversy is located and how it is shaped. This project contributes to descriptive, ethnographic research about controversy, using discourse analysis to address a problem in argumentation.
This book contributes to the recent theoretical developments in the area of mutual interactions of valency and aspect, as expressed in different types of verb-related nominal structures (nominalizations and synthetic compounds). A wide range of data from Slavic, Hellenic, Germanic, Romance and Semitic languages provides an empirical testing ground for competing theoretical explanations couched in the lexicalist and construction-based frameworks.
This book focuses on information literacy for the younger generation of learners and library readers. It is divided into four sections: 1. Information Literacy for Life; 2. Searching Strategies, Disciplines and Special Topics; 3. Information Literacy Tools for Evaluating and Utilizing Resources; 4. Assessment of Learning Outcomes. Written by librarians with wide experience in research and services, and a strong academic background in disciplines such as the humanities, social sciences, information technology, and library science, this valuable reference resource combines both theory and practice. In today's ever-changing era of information, it offers students of library and information studies insights into information literacy as well as learning tips they can use for life.
This book sets out to describe the multi-dimensional nature and function of rhetorical questions in the Old Testament. Biblical scholars have previously analyzed the use of rhetorical questions in both Testaments, but consistently describe their function in persuasive terms. While this understanding is appropriate in a number of instances, many rhetorical questions do not operate this way, and Jim W. Adams focuses in particular on rhetoric expressing the self-involvement of both the speaker and hearer. Among linguistic philosophers, speech act theory has illuminated the fact that uttering a sentence does not merely convey information; it may also involve the performing of an action. The concept of communicative action provides additional tools to the exegetical process as it points the interpreter beyond the assumption that the use of language is merely for descriptive purposes. Language can also have performative and self-involving dimensions. In relation to speech act theory, linguistic specialists continue to research the nature of rhetorical questions.
This book investigates the historical evolution of figurative language within the framework of cognitive linguistics. It examines how and why metaphors evolve through the ages, and it discusses the role of culture, the patterns of metaphor evolution, and how many people use particular expressions.
Globalization, the Internet and an era of mass travel have combined to produce a world with a language mix on a huge scale. Linguanomics explains this multilingualism in a material, economic and cultural sense. What is the effect of this multilingualism on society, organizations and individuals? What are the economic benefits and drawbacks? Should we invest in language skills? Should there be interventionist policies, and if so, at what level? Should there be a global lingua mundi? The debate surrounding multilingualism is often clouded by emotion and misconception. With an analysis devoid of rhetoric, Gabrielle Hogan-Brun takes an objective look at this charged area. The result is Linguanomics: a major step towards a clearer understanding of the market potential of multilingualism, its benefits, costs and points of contention. Asking significant questions of profound concern to the future of global collaboration, Linguanomics is an essential guide to students, teachers, policy makers and politicians and anyone who cares about the role of language in the modern world.
This collection of essays examines, in context, eastern Native American speeches, which are translated and reprinted in their entirety. Anthologies of Native American orators typically focus on the rhetoric of western speakers but overlook the contributions of Eastern speakers. The roles women played, both as speakers themselves and as creators of the speeches delivered by the men, are also commonly overlooked. Finally, most anthologies mine only English-language sources, ignoring the fraught records of the earliest Spanish conquistadors and French adventurers. This study fills all these gaps and also challenges the conventional assumption that Native thought had little or no impact on liberal perspectives and critiques of Europe. Essays are arranged so that the speeches progress chronologically to reveal the evolving assessments and responses to the European presence in North America, from the mid-sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Providing a discussion of the history, culture, and oratory of eastern Native Americans, this work will appeal to scholars of Native American history and of communications and rhetoric. Speeches represent the full range of the woodland east and are taken from primary sources.
An important new volume based on the results of research in language typology, and motivated by the need for a theory to explain them. Professor Croft puts forward a new approach to syntactic representation and a new model of how language and languages work. He covers a wide range of syntactic phenomena, illustrating these with examples that show the varied grammatical structures of the world's languages.
The first international volume on the topic of biosemiotics and linguistics. It aims to establish a new relationship between linguistics and biology as based on shared semiotic foundation.
This book, which emerges in the context of the European research network LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence), is concerned with European multilingualism both as a political concept and as a social reality. It features cutting-edge studies by linguists and anthropologists who perceive multilingualism as a discursive phenomenon which can be revealed and analyzed through empirical fieldwork. The book presents a fresh perspective of European multilingualism as it takes the reader through key themes of social consciousness - identity, policy, education, economy - and relevant societal levels of organization (European, national, regional). With its distinct focus on post-national society caught in unifying as well as diversifying socio-political currents, the volume problematizes emerging contradictions inherent in the idea of a Europe beyond the nation state -between speech minorities and majorities, economic realities, or socio-political ideologies.
Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics is a comprehensive new reference
work aiming to systematically describe all aspects of the study of
meaning in language. It synthesizes in one volume the latest
scholarly positions on the construction, interpretation,
clarification, obscurity, illustration, amplification,
simplification, negotiation, contradiction, contraction and
paraphrasing of meaning, and the various concepts, analyses,
methodologies and technologies that underpin their study. It
examines not only semantics but the impact of semantic study on
related fields such as morphology, syntax, and typologically
oriented studies such as grammatical semantics, where semantics has
made a considerable contribution to our understanding of verbal
categories like tense or aspect, nominal categories like case or
possession, clausal categories like causatives, comparatives, or
conditionals, and discourse phenomena like reference and anaphora.
COSE also examines lexical semantics and its relation to syntax,
pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics; and the study of how logical
semantics develops and thrives, often in interaction with
computational linguistics.
The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker's intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics
In The Magic Prism, Wettstein argues that Wittgenstein, a figure with whom the critics of Frege and Russell are typically unsympathetic, laid the foundation for much of what is revolutionary in recent developments in the movement of philosophy of language.
This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in contemporary philosophy.
This book demonstrates how the underlying principles of the English-based FrameNet project are successfully applied to the description and analysis of typologically diverse languages. The stimulating collection of articles brings together insights from lexical semantics, corpus linguistics, computational lexicography, machine learning, and psychology to address three main questions: To what degree is it possible to apply semantic frames derived from the English lexicon to the description and analysis of other languages? What types of resources are necessary for the creation of FrameNets for French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Spanish? How can the creation of multi-lingual FrameNets be automated? The contents exemplifies the liveliness of current research on cross-lingual applications of Frame Semantics to natural language processing.
This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.
The contributions in this volume focus on the Bayesian interpretation of natural languages, which is widely used in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. This is the first volume to take up topics in Bayesian Natural Language Interpretation and make proposals based on information theory, probability theory, and related fields. The methodologies offered here extend to the target semantic and pragmatic analyses of computational natural language interpretation. Bayesian approaches to natural language semantics and pragmatics are based on methods from signal processing and the causal Bayesian models pioneered by especially Pearl. In signal processing, the Bayesian method finds the most probable interpretation by finding the one that maximizes the product of the prior probability and the likelihood of the interpretation. It thus stresses the importance of a production model for interpretation as in Grice's contributions to pragmatics or in interpretation by abduction.
How do library professionals talk about and refer to library users, and how is this significant? In recent decades, the library profession has conceived of users in at least five different ways, viewing them alternatively as citizens, clients, customers, guests, or partners. This book argues that these user metaphors crucially inform librarians' interactions with the public, and, by extension, determine the quality and content of the services received. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide library professionals with insights and tools for avoiding common pitfalls associated with false or professionally inadequate conceptions of library users.
This comprehensive collection, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions, is unique in its focus on language learning strategy instruction (LLSI). The chapters, written by leading international experts, embrace both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. The issues presented include different models of strategy instruction and how they can be tailored according to context and the learners' age and attainment level. The collection will be an important resource for researchers in the field, both for its critical perspectives and its guidance on collaborating with teachers to design interventions to implement strategy instruction. It also identifies key areas for research, including the teaching of less studied groups of strategies such as grammar and affective strategies. The book will prove equally valuable to language teachers through the provision of detailed teaching materials and tasks. Those engaged in professional development, whether pre- or in-service teacher education, will find a wealth of concrete ideas for sessions, courses and assignments.
This comprehensive collection, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions, is unique in its focus on language learning strategy instruction (LLSI). The chapters, written by leading international experts, embrace both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. The issues presented include different models of strategy instruction and how they can be tailored according to context and the learners' age and attainment level. The collection will be an important resource for researchers in the field, both for its critical perspectives and its guidance on collaborating with teachers to design interventions to implement strategy instruction. It also identifies key areas for research, including the teaching of less studied groups of strategies such as grammar and affective strategies. The book will prove equally valuable to language teachers through the provision of detailed teaching materials and tasks. Those engaged in professional development, whether pre- or in-service teacher education, will find a wealth of concrete ideas for sessions, courses and assignments.
Through an analysis of the discourse practices of populist Far Right groups in France, Italy and Belgian Flanders, this book makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the ways in which homophobic discourse functions. It proposes an innovative heuristic for the conceiving of the interplay of language, context and culture: discourse ecology. The author brings linguistic theories, methods and ways of understanding and thinking about language to a study of the overt and covert homophobic discourses of three non-Anglophone populist movements, and grounds the interpretation of such practices in observable data. In doing so the book encourages us all to reconsider the power we give language in our activism and scholarship, as well as in our private lives. |
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