First published in 1981, Conversation and Discourse attempts to draw together papers illustrating the various different approaches to conversational analysis broadly divided into papers of description and experiment on one hand and papers of theory and analysis on the other. The ordinary speaker finds conversation to be by far the easiest variety of language and it is perhaps for this reason that its manifold, shifting and problematic nature has been overlooked for so long. The performance errors and eccentric constructions that characterise conversation make it remarkably difficult to analyse by orthodox syntactic theory- hence numerous methodologies have been formulated in the field of inquiry, ranging from Gricean theories of conversational implicature to ethnomethodological conversational analysis. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of linguistics, language and literature.

First published in 1990, this book argues that any theory of language constructs its 'object' by separating 'relevant' from 'irrelevant' phenomena - excluding the latter. This leaves a 'remainder' which consists of the untidy, creative part of how language is used - the essence of poetry and metaphor. Although this remainder can never be completely formalised, it must be fully recognised by any true account of language and thus this book attempts the first 'theory of the remainder'. As such, whether it is language or the speaker who speaks is dealt with, leading to an analysis of how all speakers are 'violently' constrained in their use of language by social and psychological realties.

What do different concepts like true lie, bad luck, honest thief, old news, spacetime, glocalization, symplexity, sustainable development, constant change, soft law, substantive due process, pure law, bureaucratic efficiency and global justice have in common? What connections do they share with innumerable paradoxes, like the ones of happiness, time, globalization, sex, and of free will and fate? Law in the Time of Oxymora provides answers to these conundrums by critically comparing the apparent rise in recent years of the use of rhetorical figures called "essentially oxymoronic concepts" (i.e. oxymoron, enantiosis and paradoxes) in the areas of art, science and law. Albeit to varying degrees, these concepts share the quality of giving expression to apparent contradictions. Through this quality, they also challenge the scientific paradigm rooted in the dualistic thinking and binary logic that is traditionally used in the West, as opposed to the East, where a paradoxical mode of thinking and fuzzy logic is said to have been cultivated. Following a review of oxymora and paradoxes in art and various scientific writings, hundreds of "hard cases" featuring oxymora and a comprehensive review of the legal literature are discussed, revealing evidence suggesting that the present scientific paradigm of dualism alone will no longer be able to tackle the challenges arising from increasing diversity and complexity coupled with an apparent acceleration of change. Law in the Time of Oxymora reaches the surprising conclusion that essentially oxymoronic concepts may inaugurate a new era of cognition, involving the ways the senses interact and how we reason, think and make decisions in law and in life.

First published in 1992, this wide-ranging collection of essays focuses on the principle of contextualisation as it applies to the interpretation, description, theorising and reading of literary and non-literary texts. The collection aims to reveal the interdependencies between theory, analysis, text and context by challenging the myth that stylistics entails a fundamental separation of text from context, linguistic description from descriptive interpretation, or language from situation. The essays cover a historically diverse set of texts, from Puttenham to Colemanballs, and a number of language-sensitive topics such as post-modernism, irony, newspaper representations, gender and narrative.

First published in 1983, this book represents a substantial body of detailed research on children's language and communication, and more generally on the nature of interactive spoken discourse. It looks at areas of competence often examined in young children's speech have that have not been described for adults - leading to insights not only in the character of adult conversation but also the process of acquiring this competence. The authors set forward strategies for conversing at different stage of life, while also relating these strategies to, and formulating hypotheses concerning, the dynamics of language variation and change.

This book is about moral talk in contemporary British political discourse, drawing on speeches, debates and radio phone-ins. Using a critical sociolinguistic approach, Spencer-Bennett explores the language people use to communicate moral judgement and highlights the relations between the things that people say, the contexts in which they are said and the circulating ideologies about meaning and morality. This is key reading for students and scholars studying language, politics and critical discourse analysis, within linguistics and anthropology.

This book explores multiple facets of femininity for marriage in India. Using language as an entry point, it looks at how and why media representations of gender identities are constructed the way they are. It works with a unique synthesis of second-wave feminist discourse and empirical linguistic research to look at how the social institution of marriage becomes the site of interaction between language, ideology, psyche and culture. This volume also brings together the personal histories and views of women who discuss how media, modernity and social norms shape their ideas about marriage and selfhood. Deconstructing perceptions of femininity in contemporary India, the book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, gender studies, linguistics, media and cultural studies and psychoanalysis.

The study of bilingualism and all of its aspects - from theory and models to social approaches and their practical applications - forms the cornerstone of the 2nd edition of this work. The chapters cover the latest advancements in the domains of psycholinguistics, neuroscience, creativity, and executive functioning. Contributions, new to this edition, offer the reader the most up-to-date research on lifespan and developmental issues. The work also provides insight into how human language is processed by all, not just by bilingual and multilingual speakers. This text is ideal for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in psycholinguistics and the psychology of language, especially those with an emphasis on bilingualism or second language learning.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary language shift and identity in a language community in the mid-Atlantic South to offer a unique window into ethnic dialect formation and sociolinguistic processes underpinning dialect acquisition. Drawing on data collected from over 100 interviews of members North Carolina Hispanicized English speakers in Durham, North Carolina, the book employs a quantitative approach and uses statistical software in analyzing the data collected to focus on the sociolinguistic variable of past tense unmarking to explore sociolinguistic processes at work in English language learner variation. The focus on a specific variable allows for the opportunity to explore specific processes in more detail, including the ways in which speakers accommodate regional and ethnic varieties of their peers and the internal and environmental factors guiding dialect acquisition. Illuminating new facets to the processes of language learning, language contact, and ethnolect emergence, this volume is key reading for students and researchers in second language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics.

This third edition of the best-selling Theories in Second Language Acquisition surveys the major theories currently used in second language acquisition (SLA) research, serving as an ideal introductory text for undergraduate and graduate students in SLA and language teaching. Designed to provide a consistent and coherent presentation for those seeking a basic understanding of the theories that underlie contemporary SLA research, each chapter focuses on a single theory. Chapters are written by leading scholars in the field and incorporate a basic foundational description of the theory, relevant data or research models used with this theory, common misunderstandings, and a sample study from the field to show the theory in practice. New to this edition is a chapter addressing the relationship between theories and L2 teaching, as well as refreshed coverage of all theories throughout the book. A key work in the study of second language acquisition, this volume will be useful to students of linguistics, language and language teaching, and to researchers as a guide to theoretical work outside their respective domains.

Second Language Processing: An Introduction is the first textbook to offer a thorough introduction to the field of second language processing (SLP). The study of SLP seeks to illuminate the cognitive processes underlying the processing of a non-native language. While current literature tends to focus on one topic or area of research, this textbook aims to bring these different research strands together in a single volume, elucidating their particularities while also demonstrating the relationships between them. The book begins by outlining what is entailed in the study of SLP, how it relates to other fields of study, and some of the main issues shared across its subareas. It then moves into an exploration of the three major areas of current research in the field-phonological processing, lexical processing, and sentence processing. Each chapter provides a broad overview of the topic and covers the major research methods, models, and studies germane to that area of study. Ideal for students and researchers working in this growing field, Second Language Processing will serve as the go-to guide for a complete examination of the major topics of study in SLP.

This groundbreaking collection showcases Jenny Cheshire's influential work in bringing greater attention to quantitative analysis of socio-grammatical variation and builds upon her contributions with new lines of inquiry pushing sociolinguistic research forward. Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, the volume is structured in six parts with a particular focus on syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, each section turning a lens on a different aspect of socio-grammatical variation. The first sections of the volume focus on the role of structure, its relevance for sociolinguistic production and perception and the impact of social structure on formal structure. Two sections look at the interface of variationist research with other aspects of linguistic research, including generative syntax and discourse-pragmatic features. The final sections consider the importance of integrating broader external factors in socio-grammatical variation, exploring the impact of interactional pressures in the sociolinguistic environment and the role of multi-ethnic contact varieties. Taken together, this volume demonstrates the critical role of socio-grammatical variation in our understanding of language change as a holistic process.

First published in 1994, this book is concerned with certain kinds of wh-clauses, whose interpretations are easily and, the author argues, plausibly rendered by a logicosemantic analysis on which wh-phrases translate as open sentences, that is, as expressions of the semantically interpreted representation which contain free variables. After a review of influential contemporary analyses of the semantics of questions, concentrating on issues related to the truthconditional interpretation of these constructions, the author goes on to analyse logicosemantic similarities between wh-phrases and indefinite NPs. This analysis is extended in chapter V to account for asymmetries between wh-phrases and indefinites, but is preceded by the engagement and refutation of some of the challenges to it. The appendices discuss some peripheral points relating to the central points made by the author which are in need of further study.

First published in 1988, this book examines the aspects of pragmatic competence involving the class of preposing constructions in English. By limiting the scope of investigation to particular grammatical categories, the author argues previous studies have failed to capture significant pragmatic generalisations. The author asserts what distinguishes one preposing type from another are the semantic and pragmatic properties of the referent of that constituent. After a review of the past literature on preposing, the book goes on to present a pragmatic theory in which two discourse functions of preposing are proposed. It then provides a functional taxonomy of the various preposing types which the theory is designed to account for. One type of preposing, Topicalization, and two of its subtypes, Proposition Affirmation and Ironic Preposing, are discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters before the book concludes with a summary along with directions for future research.

First published in 1983, this book examines anaphora - a central issue in linguistic theory as it lies at the crossroads of several major problems. On the one hand it is believed that the same conditions that govern the interpretation of anaphora also govern syntactic movement rules but on the other, while anaphora is known to interact with various discourse and semantic considerations, it also provides a clear instance of the dependency of the semantic interpretation of sentences upon semantic properties of natural language. This book has two major goals: the first is a comprehensive analysis of sentence-level anaphora that addresses the questions posed above, and the second is an examination of the broader issues of the relations between the structural properties of sentences and their semantic interpretation within the hypotheses of the autonomy of syntax and of interpretative semantics shown by Chomsky.

* Provides educational researchers with philosophical and theoretical frameworks as well as methodological practices for conducting discourse analysis of educational events * Provides multiple cases to illustrate and model the use of philosophical and theoretical frameworks and methodological practices * Provides ways for conceptualizing how discourse analysis of language and literacy in educational settings can contribute to the improvement of the everyday lives of educators through providing a new language with which to examine and re-fashion classroom life. * Expands on a popular and cutting-edge book to bring it up to date for an international audience, with a more diverse and international array of examples

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in various social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings, the authors provide clear examples of actual practices of social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. 'Why do we have stories?', 'How do stories create meaning for us?', and 'How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?' are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience, Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

Addressing a rapidly growing interest in second language research, this hands-on text provides students and researchers with the means to understand and use current methods in psycholinguistics. With a focus on the actual methods, designs, and techniques used in psycholinguistics research as they are applied to second language learners, this book offers the practical guidance readers need to determine which method is the best for what they wish to investigate as well as the tools that will enhance their research. Each methods chapter is written by a leading expert who describes, discusses, and comments on how a method is used and what its strengths and limitations are for second language research. These chapters follow a specific format to ensure cohesion and a predictable structure across all chapters. The chapters also inform the novice researcher on such key issues as ease of use, costs, potential pitfalls, and other related matters, each of which impact decisions that researchers make about the paths they take. With the most reliable information available from experienced reseachers, Research Methods in Second Language Psycholinguistics is an essential resource for anyone interested in conducting second language reserach using psycholinguistic methods.

First published in 1997, this book focuses on the semantics of definite and indefinite descriptions - taking the presuppositional theory of definiteness and indefiniteness proposed by Heim as a starting point. It seeks to show that there exists a special type of indefinites that have an interpretation commonly associated with definites. It further argues that the felicity conditions associated with indefinite NP's can vary and develops a more fine-grained theory of novelty within the framework of File Change Semantics. More generally, this work can be seen as providing an empirical argument in favour of a dynamic theory of meaning and against the more traditional truth-conditional theory.

First published in 1983, this book represents an effort to lay the groundwork for a general approach to lexical semantics that pays heed to the needs of a theory of discourse interpretation, a theory of compositional semantics, and a theory of lexical rules. The first chapter proposes a basic framework in which to undertake lexical description and a lexical semantic analogue to the classical syntactic distinction between subcategorized for complement and adjunct. This apparatus for lexical description is expanded in the second chapter. A theory of the semantics of nuclear terms along with a proposed implementation is presented in chapter three. The fourth chapter argues that a number of regular, semantically governed valence alternations could be captured in frame representations that give rise to various kinds of realisation options. The final chapter examines interaction of these phenomena with a general account of prediction or control along with the general framework of lexical representation.

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists' failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine's arguments by proposing universal 'semantic primitives' or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch's 'family resemblance' account of the 'prototype' effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like 'action' and 'event' can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Kripke and Putnam on proper names and natural kind terms. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

First published in 1990, this dissertation presents an event-based model-theoretic semantics for plural expressions in English. The author defends against counterarguments the hypothesis that distributive predicates are predicates of groups, and not just individuals. By defining the collective/distributive distinction in terms of event structure, he solves formal problems with previous group-level analyses. The author notes that certain adverbials have a systematic ambiguity between a reading indicating collective action, and readings indicating spatial or temporal proximity; the event-based definition of collective action makes possible a parallel treatment of these readings. This book presents a formal proposal on the algebraic structure of groups and events, and a semantically based analysis of number agreement.

First published in 1985, this book analyses temporal meaning in German. The framework is that of a model-theoretic semantics, more specifically one incorporating a multi-dimensional tense logic. The first chapter presents this logic and argues that three dimensions are optimal for the description of natural language temporalia. The second chapter applies this theory to the analysis of temporal meaning in German. Frame adverbials, the Present and Past Tenses, duratives, aspectual adverbials using in, and the adverbials particle schon are examined. Chapter 3 provides a formal syntax to bear the semantic analysis proposed in the second chapter and the final chapter explores syntactic and semantic extensions of the fragment, showing how the Perfect, the particle noch, the passive, and a distinct reading of frame adverbials may be accommodated.

First published in 1987, this book is an attempt to re-establish semiotic on the basis of principles consistent with its past history, rather than the 'cultural semiotics' of the European tradition, and especially with the guiding ideas of Peirce and Morris. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters providing the background for the more systematic discussions of signs at different levels taken up in the last three. In the final chapter issues that have become the focus of recent philosophy of language regarding the reference, meaning, and truth of sentences are discussed in light of the analogies to more primitive signs developed in the preceding two chapters.