This book is all about ellipsis in natural language - the phenomena in which words and phrases go missing in the linguistic signal, but are nonethe less interpreted by the receiver, eg in the following sentence, the second instance of read is understood whether or not it is spoken Claire read a book and Heather [read] a magazine. Contemporary theoretical linguistics has described several forms of ellipsis in English, and different syntactic mechanisms have been proposed which account for their structures. Kirsten Gengel investigates pseudogapping, which, she proposes, is one variety of ellipsis. At the heart of her discussion lies the interaction between focus and deletion. Her analysis - which draws on new research in Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch, as well as data from Portuguese, French, and English - provides a novel approach to not only this particular form of ellipsis but to the derivation of ellipsis in general, and has the potential of unifying several elliptical phenomena in generative grammar.

This book offers a collection of conversation analytic investigations into how one US-based philanthropic organization communicates its mission of improving public health. In contrast to political speeches or news interviews with prominent figures, much communication with the public involves the routine work undertaken by institutional representatives as they interact with external audiences: this book considers precisely how this work is accomplished. Communicating with the Public broadens the scope of conversation analysis by unveiling the interactive, multi-party, and multi-modal nature of institutional messaging that might otherwise be construed as a scripted, monologic undertaking. To this end, it examines a diverse array of contemporary platforms, including webinars, podcasts, and television interviews, as well as face-to-face conversations following public talks and panel discussions. Chapters reveal how both foundation representatives and their interlocutors target messaging to specific audiences that may or may not be present, manage the logistics of delivering this messaging, and position themselves as credible experts or a unified institutional collective.

Understanding metaphor raises key questions about the relationship between language and meaning, and between language and mind. This book explores how this understanding can impact upon the theory and practice of language teaching. After summarising the cognitive basis of metaphor and other figures of speech, it looks at how this knowledge can inform classroom practice. Finally, it sets out how we can use these insights to re appraise language learning theory in a way that treats it as consonant with the cognitive nature of language. MARKET 1: Academic libraries and departments of English as a Second Language, Modern Languages, Linguistics, especially Applied Linguistics and Language Learning Theory, and Cognitive Linguistics MARKET 2: English language teachers

Ongoing interest in the turmoil of the 1960s clearly demonstrates how these social conflicts continue to affect contemporary politics. In The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements, Kristen Hoerl focuses on fictionalized portrayals of 1960s activism in popular television and film. Hoerl shows how Hollywood has perpetuated politics deploring the detrimental consequences of the 1960s on traditional American values. During the decade, people collectively raised fundamental questions about the limits of democracy under capitalism. But Hollywood has proved dismissive, if not adversarial, to the role of dissent in fostering progressive social change. Film and television are salient resources of shared understanding for audiences born after the 1960s because movies and television programs are the most accessible visual medium for observing the decade's social movements. Hoerl indicates that a variety of television programs, such as Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and Law and Order, along with Hollywood films, including Forrest Gump, have reinforced images of the ""bad sixties."" These stories portray a period in which urban riots, antiwar protests, sexual experimentation, drug abuse, and feminism led to national division and moral decay. According to Hoerl, these messages supply distorted civics lessons about what we should value and how we might legitimately participate in our democracy. These warped messages contribute to ""selective amnesia,"" a term that stresses how popular media renders radical ideas and political projects null or nonexistent. Selective amnesia removes the spectacular events and figures that define the late-1960s from their motives and context, flattening their meaning into reductive stereotypes. Despite popular television and film, Hoerl explains, memory of 1960s activism still offers a potent resource for imagining how we can strive collectively to achieve social justice and equality.

This book is a history composed of histories. Its particular focus is the way in which computers entered and changed the field of composition studies, a field that defines itself both as a research community and as a community of teachers. This may have a somewhat sinister suggestion that technology alone has agency, but this history (made of histories) is not principally about computers. It is about people-the teachers and scholars who have adapted the computer to their personal and professional purposes. From the authors' perspectives, change in technology drives changes in the ways we live and work, and we, agents to a degree in control of our own lives, use technology to achieve our human purposes. REVIEW: . . . This book reminds those of us now using computers to teach writing where we have been, and it brings those who are just entering the field up to date. More important, it will inform administrators, curriculum specialists, and others responsible for implementing the future uses of technology in writing instruction. - Computers and Composition

Human Rights in the International Public Sphere has an interdisciplinary focus and can be used as a text in communication studies, cultural studies, political science, current events, discourse analysis, area and international studies, and other courses in the social sciences and humanities.

The aim of this volume is to bring together researchers interested in investigating the role that Discourse Markers play in language production and comprehension from an experimental or corpus-based perspective. In any kind of human communication, Discourse Markers are part of the game. This omnipresence informs us of a crucial inherent aspect of human language. Yet, as a linguistic category, Discourse Markers remain underdetermined. To gain deeper insight into this complex linguistic category, more systematic work is needed on the production and on the interpretation of Discourse Markers in a variety of situational settings, resorting to different methodological approaches. The contributions in this volume aim at drawing more attention to the double face of Discourse Markers, namely as signals intentionally used by the speaker to facilitate the addressee's interpretation of the discourse, but also as potential traces of the speaker's production difficulties. The combination of experimental and corpus-based approaches and the focus on processing of Discourse Markers in both production and comprehension makes this volume a unique contribution in answering the question why we use Discourse Markers in certain situations, but also when we do not.

Spaces of Communication offers a concise introduction to semiopragmatics and condenses the intellectual trajectory of one of the foundational figures of film studies into a relatively short and accessible volume. It testifies to the author's deep and rich intellectual engagement with a vast array of objects ranging from the classics of the cinephile canon to television news programs, home movies and mobile phone films.

New Playwriting Strategies offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.

This book examines the concept of authentic English in today's world, where cultures are in constant interaction and the English language works as a binding agent for many cross-cultural exchanges. It offers a comprehensive review of decades of debate around authenticity in language teaching and learning and attempts to synthesise the complexities by presenting them as a continuum. This continuum builds on the work of eminent scholars and combines them within a flexible framework that celebrates the process of interaction whilst acknowledging the complexity and individual subjectivity of authenticity. Authenticity is approached as a complex dynamic construct that can only be understood by examining it from social, individual and contextual dimensions, in relation to actual people. Authenticity is a problem not just for language acquisition but one which affects us as individuals belonging to society.

Addressing issues related to the physical, cultural, ideological and psychological relocation of English, this volume provides a critical examination of current sociolinguistic study of English in the world and suggests a new approach which focuses more on ideological and psychological aspects of the phenomenon.

The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape. This book contains concise yet thorough and lucid overviews of ancient Near Eastern languages united by alphabetic writing and illuminates their interaction during the first 1000 years of their attestation. All chapters are informed by the most recent scholarship, contain fresh insights, provide numerous examples from the most pertinent sources, and share a clear historical framework that makes it easier to trace processes of contact and convergence in this highly diversified speech area. They also address non-specialists. The following topics are discussed: Alphabetic writing (A. Millard), Ugaritic (A. Gianto), Phoenician and Hebrew (H. Gzella), Transjordanian languages (K. Beyer), Old and Imperial Aramaic (M. Folmer), Epigraphic South Arabian (R. Hasselbach), Old Persian (M. de Vaan/A. Lubotsky), Greek (A. Willi).

The first aim of this anthology is to illustrate the variety of resources that Austronesian and Papuan languages offer their speakers for referring to space. The languages here described are spread from Madagascar to Tonga, and there are many differences between them. They also offer a striking contrast to Indo-European languages, and call into question universalistic claims about human spatial concepts and spatial reference based solely on evidence from Indo-European languages and their speakers. There are, however, striking parallels between the kinds of systems that languages offer and that their speakers employ when referring to space. Understanding the differences in the ways that coordinate systems are used requires not only linguistic, but also cultural, historical, and geographical knowledge. Thus the second aim of the collection is to illustrate the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of space if we are to understand the underlying logic of conceptions of space manifest in verbal expressions. The first three papers offer overviews of the conception of space in Austronesian languages and analyse the coordinate systems employed for spatial reference. The seven papers which follow offer anthropological linguistic descriptions of directionals and locatives in Austronesian and Papuan languages, and the last three contributions offer a more structurally-oriented perspective.

The present book provides a detailed criticism of experientialist semantics, focusing both on philosophical issues connected with experientialism and on cognitive approaches to metaphor and metonymy. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, but other cognitivists are also taken into consideration. Verena Haser proposes a new approach to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which contrasts with familiar cognitivist models, but also builds on some insights gained in cognitivist research. She also offers an account of metaphorical transfer which dispenses with the notion of conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. She argues that conceptual metaphors are not a useful construct for explaining metaphorical transfer, and that the clustering of metaphorical expressions is better accounted for in terms of family resemblances between metaphorical expressions. Another major goal of this work is a reassessment of the relationship between experientialism and traditional Western philosophy (often subsumed under the vague term "objectivism"). This book contrasts with most other critical approaches to experientialism by providing close readings of key passages from the works of Lakoff and Johnson, which enables the author to pinpoint theory-internal inconsistencies and other shortcomings not noted in previous publications. This book will be relevant to students and scholars interested in semantics and cognitive linguistics, and also in psychology and philosophy of language.

This book offers something quite new - an advanced textbook that considers professional writing as a negotiated process between writer and reader. Arguing that ethics, imagination and rhetoric are integral to professional writing praxis, the book encourages students to look critically at various writing practices in a range of contexts. A textbook for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in Linguistics, Communication, Journalism and Media Studies.

Most of the expressions we use in ordinary language are vague, in the sense that their meaning does not allow us to specify a unique and constant boundary between the objects to which they apply and those to which they don't. An adjective like 'young', for instance, does not select for a sharp range of ages (does 29 still count as 'young'? what about 37, 43?); likewise a determiner like 'many' does not determine a precise number of objects in order to count as many. The phenomenon of vagueness raises substantial puzzles about how we reason and manage to communicate successfully with vague expressions. This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers which contribute novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness, with special attention to the linguistic mechanisms by which vagueness is regulated. The volume is organized in three main parts which concern respectively: * the link between vagueness, gradability and the expression of comparison in language (how does the meaning of the vague adjective 'young' relate to that of the precise comparative 'younger'?) * the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (how do adverbs like 'clearly', 'approximately' or 'surprisingly' constrain the meaning of the expressions they modify?) * ways of evading the sorites paradox (what are the prospects for contextualist and pragmatic solutions?)

Terence Parsons presents a lively and original study of philosophical questions about identity, such as: Is a person identical with that person's body? Puzzles of this kind have not been solved; Parsons argues, controversially, that this is because there is genuine indeterminacy of identity in the world, rather than in the language used to formulate the questions.

In the age of information, an essential priority in the context of international education is the development of language learning and its inconsistencies. The gap between language and education has intermittently grown through time, with mistaken assumptions about how linguistic shortcomings are being solved around the world. Research on comparative educational approaches to teaching verbiage and the foundation of future language development are instrumental in positively impacting the global narrative of dialectal education. International Approaches to Bridging the Language Gap is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of second language teaching as well as social developments regarding intercultural learning. While highlighting topics including curricular approaches, digital competence, and linguistic disparities, this book is ideally designed for language instructors, linguists, teachers, researchers, public administrators, cultural centers, policymakers, government officials, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the latest advancements of multilingual education.

The overall aim of this book is to advance a Gricean theoretical framework of conventional implicature within which Chinese pragmatic markers can be accommodated. It has two linked objectives. Firstly it sets out to advance a theory of conventional implicature. Conventional implicature is itself a highly controversial term, understood very differently by various brands of contemporary pragmatic theory, and is a pivotal concept in the debates between the Gricean and Neo-Gricean theorists on the one hand and proponents of Relevance Theory on the other. This book offers an exemplary analysis and definition of what is involved in these current debates, and it both clarifies and 'problematises' a large range of associated issues. The second objective is to offer a principled and systematic analysis of pragmatic markers in Chinese. Markers of this sort (and a range of interconnnected categories including discourse particles) have been the subject of intense investigation in recent years, and this detailed study of Chinese markers is a contribution in this area which is of substantial importance, both theoretical and empirical.

This book presents developments of discourse analysis in France and applies its tools to key texts from five theorists of structuralism: Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Sollers. It pays special attention to enunciative pragmatics as a poststructuralist approach which analyzes the discursive construction of subjectivity.

Journalist Brian Wendell Morton has spent more than eight years documenting Washington, D.C.'s Oz-like world in weekly columns for Baltimore's City Paper titled, "Political Animal." Eric Engberg of CBS News once said, "Washington is ten square miles, surrounded by reality." Morton points out the surreality of a city where a popular president was almost hounded out of office for a consensual sex act, yet another president whose popularity ratings hover at historic lows can't be held accountable for a war waged under false pretenses, torture, malfeasance, and the destruction of an entire American city. Political Animal points out the discrepancy between reality and the skewed views of the political media who cover it. Some would argue that this media would fiddle while Rome burned if it meant rising stock prices and better ratings. From the early 1990s through the pages of last week's headlines, Morton takes a fearless and provocative stroll through the issues of politics, race, the media, guns, drugs, religion, and more.

This volume depicts the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influences in the specific context of multilingual language acquisition. It consists of articles on various issues relating to the syntactic and lexical development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such as Russian, Croatian, Greek and Portuguese. Individual chapters highlight different areas expected to be especially transfer-prone at the level of grammatical and lexical transfer in particular contexts of language contact.

The author, a well-known development psychologist, challenges Piagetian theories of language development. Rondal studies verbal and nonverbal interactions between children and parents from a social-behavioristic perspective.

Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" -- Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. Linguist John McWhorter agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become a hot issue in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. As McWhorter describes, when languages came into contact over the years (when French speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly, and this came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non-interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. McWhorter makes the case that this kind of simplification happens in degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simply simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. He analyzes how various languages that seem simple but are not creoles, actually are simpler than they would be if they had not been broken down by large numbers of adult learners. In addition to English, he looks at Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Malay, and some Arabic varieties. His work will interest not just experts in creole studies and historical linguistics, but the wider community interested in language complexity.