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.

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

This book introduces a novel approach for examining language and communication in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - discourse and conversation analysis. The authors offer a set of very different perspectives on these complex issues than are typically presented in psychological and clinical work. Emerging from a range of social scientific fields, discourse and conversation analysis involve fine-grained qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring, rather than laboratory-based, interaction, enabling broad applications. Presented in two parts, this innovative volume first provides a set of pedagogical chapters to develop the reader's knowledge and skills in using these approaches, before moving to showcase the use of discursive methods through a range of original contributions from world-leading scholars, drawn from a range of disciplines including sociology, academic and clinical psychology, speech and language therapy, critical disability studies and social theory, and medicine and psychiatry.

The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vasquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects and as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences. She also demonstrates how reviewers display their awareness about emerging conventions of the very genre in which they are participating. This book adopts an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, and explores topics such as evaluation, identity and intertextuality as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films and other consumer products.

The book addresses a controversial current topic in language acquisition studies: the impact of frequency on linguistic structure in child language. A major strength of the book is that the role of input frequency in the acquisition process is evaluated in a large variety of languages, topics and the two major theoretical frameworks: UG-based and usage-based accounts. While most papers report a clear frequency effect, different factors that may be interacting with pure statistical effects are critically assessed. An introductory statement is made by Thomas Roeper who calls for caution as he identifies frequency as a non-coherent concept and argues for a precise definition of what can and cannot be explained by statistical effects.

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?)

This book analyses processes of mode-switching in second language acquisition as they relate to Korean learners of English. In this empirical study, the author examines how native language influences and shapes usage of second language, particularly when the two are so dramatically different both in terms of grammar and the cultures in which they are anchored. Learning to speak English, she argues, entails switching from the formulaic to the strategic mode so that varying speaking norms and linguistic values are fully understood. This results in a mode switch towards the target culture. This intriguing book will be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and English language education.

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.

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.

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 is the first book-length collection of studies on the assessment of pragmatic competencies in a second or foreign language. Grounded in theoretical perspectives on communicative and interactional competencies, the first section of the book examines the reception and production of speech acts through a variety of assessment methods and a range of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The second section investigates interviewer and candidate interaction in different forms of oral proficiency interview.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The book addresses controversies around the conscious vs automatic processing of contextual information and the distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning. It sheds new light on the relation of the literal/nonliteral distinction to the distinction between the automatic and conscious retrieval of information. The question of literal meaning is inherently interwoven with the question of lexical salience on one hand and default interpretations on the other. This volume addresses these interconnected issues, stressing their mutual interdependence. It contributes new, ground-breaking insights into the questions of literalness, semantics-pragmatics interface, automatic (default) retrieval and contextual pragmatic enrichment, modelling of discourse processing, lexical pragmatics, and other related issues.

Complex Words in English presents a comprehensive account of present-day word formation in English. Starting with a discussion of some basic issues, including the definition of 'word', motivation, lexicalization, productivity, the relevance of historical information and the usefulness of dictionaries and other data-bases, the book then moves on to describe in detail a variety of prefixing, suffixing and compounding patterns - all illustrated with copious up-to-date examples.

Teaching and Researching: Lexicography explains the relationship between lexicographic practice (dictionary-making) and theory (dictionary research), with special reference to the perspectives of dictionary history, criticism, typology, structure and use. It particularly looks at the use and relevance of dictionaries in second language learning.

The present volume is a collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts. The subdiscipline of pragmatics is seen from a multilingual and multicultural perspective thus contributing to an emerging field of study, i.e. intercultural pragmatics which can be made fruitful to second language teaching/learning and contrastive analysis. The book is an important contribution to general linguistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, second language acquisition, as well as minority issues in multilingual settings.

The way speakers in multilingual contexts develop own varieties in their interactions sheds light on code switching and multimodal dynamic co-constructions of grammar in use. This volume explores the intersection of multimodality and language use of multilingual speakers. Firstly, theoretical frames are discussed and empirical studies involving Catalan, German and Spanish as L1, L2 or FL are presented interconnecting verbal and gestural modalities into grammar description or exploring actions as sources for gestures, which may nonverbally represent the argument in German dynamic motion verbs. Other chapters focus on positionings in interviews, lexical access searches or proxemics in greetings and farewells. The contributions secondly focus on verbal features of language use in multilingual contexts related to self-representation and co-construction of identity through code-switching, deixis or argumentative reasoning in different communicative events based on multilingual data of languages including Croatian, English, Italian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Polish. The findings call for a reviewed conception of grammar description with implications also for the conceptualization of deixis, for L2/foreign language acquisition and language teaching policies.

Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education explores and integrates the necessary knowledge base and practices in foreign language education in terms of the basic concepts of experiential learning, intercultural learning, autobiographical knowledge and teacher development, together with the philosophical underpinnings of foreign language education.

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.

In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference, and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

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.

With an Introduction by Anthony D. Pellegrini, this work is one of the most extensive studies of early language and literacy undertaken to date. This volume describes the four interdisciplinary facets of a three-year longitudinal investigation of the early literate and linguistic experience and knowledge of a cohort of sixty 3- and 4-year-olds. Coverage includes: an extensive survey of home literate environment and development across a broad range of earliest literate and meta-literate knowledge over the three-year span of the study; links early literate experience and knowledge to differential strategies of speech act comprehension over time, showing that early literate experience heightens dependence upon linguistic as distinct from contextual information in comprehension; the employment of parent-child book reading as the matrix for a detailed analysis of lexical development, relating forms of parent-child interaction around text to variation in sophistication of reference; and finally, the examination of child-child interaction in a detailed, naturalistic framework, in relation to aspects of literate experience and knowledge.

First-Year Writing describes significant language patterns in college writing today, how they are different from expert academic writing, and how to inform teaching and assessment with corpus-based linguistic and rhetorical genre analysis.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

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.