The term "hedging" was introduced by G. Lakoss at the beginning of the 1970s and since then has provided a starting point for theoretical and empirical studies, especially in pragmatics. This volume reviews the present state of research in the area and contains studies of hedging strategies in English, German, Finnish and Russian, using academic text-types as exemplar.This volume reviews the present state of research in the area and contains studies of hedging strategies in English, German, Finnish and Russian, using academic text-types as exemplar.

How do people understand metaphorical language? How do metaphors affect the way people experience their social interactions? Do people always interpret metaphors? Does a metaphor necessarily have the same meaning to different people? Can a commonplace metaphor affect the way people think even if they don't interpret it? Why does it matter how people interpret metaphors? In this book, Ritchie proposes an original communication-based theory of metaphor that answers these and other questions about metaphors and metaphorical language.

This book analyses the complex relationship between directness, indirectness, politeness and impoliteness. Definitions of directness and indirectness are discussed and problematised from a discursive theoretical perspective.

Methods in current instructed second language acquisition research range from laboratory experiments to ethnography using non-obtrusive participant observation, from cross-sectional designs to longitudinal case studies. Many different types of data serve as the basis for analysis, including reaction times measurements, global test scores, paper and pencil measures, introspective comments, grammaticality judgements, as well as textual data (elicited or naturalistic, oral or written, relating to comprehension or production). Some studies rely on extensive quantification of data, while others may favour a more qualitative and hermeneutic analytic approach. Many of these issues and methods are exemplified by the contributions to this volume. Data-based studies included here deal with the acquisition of specific linguistic phenomena (e.g. verb and noun morphology, lexicon, clause structures) in a range of target languages (e.g. English, French, German, Russian) from a variety of settings involving different instructional approaches (e.g. traditional foreign language classes, immersion classes, intensive ESL classes, content and language integrated language classes). Collectively, the chapters in this book illustrate the productivity and diversity of current research on instructed second language acquisition. As such they serve as a valuable resource for researchers in SLA, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and language education.

The first substantial textbook on pragmatics to focus on Spanish. The authors discuss key theories within the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatics, concentrating on the relationship between language use and socio-cultural contexts, and their uptake by Hispanists. Drawing on research by foremost scholars in the field, with reference to a wide range of 'Spanishes', including a first treatment of 'sociopragmatic variation'. Concepts throughout are illustrated with real language examples taken from different Spanish corpora. The book is carefully structured to be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate, as well as postgraduate, students.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

With the advent of new media and Web 2.0 technologies, language and discourse have taken on new meaning, and the implications of this evolution on the nature of interpersonal communication must be addressed. Innovative Methods and Technologies for Electronic Discourse Analysis highlights research, applications, frameworks, and theories of online communication to explore recent advances in the manipulation and shaping of meaning in electronic discourse. This essential research collection will appeal to academic, research, and professional audiences engaged in the design, development, and distribution of effective communications technologies in educational, social, and linguistic contexts.

This book synthesises current theory and research on L2 motivation in the EFL Japanese context carried out by internationally recognized researchers and upcoming researcher-educators working in various educational contexts in Japan. Topics covered include the issues of cultural identity, demotivation, language communities, positive psychology, possible L2 selves and internationalisation within a key EFL context. The studies in the book utilise a wide variety of research methodologies aiming to narrow the gap between theory and practice and examine L2 motivation in primary, secondary and tertiary education. This volume will be of interest to research/teacher professionals who are currently engaged in active ESL/EFL practice, EFL educators, researchers, and teacher-trainers both inside and outside Japan, who are interested in research on L2 motivation in general and within the Japanese context in particular, as well as graduate and postgraduate researchers.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

It is twenty-five years since Jurgen Habermas published his "Theory of Communicative Action." Colin B. Grant shares the same commitment to a philosophical theory of communication but issues a range of challenges to Habermas' magnum opus. "Uncertainty and Communication" mounts a critique of theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a radical rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in our interconnected global communication system.

This book examines the intersection of culture and language in Ireland and Irish contexts. The editors take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the ways in which culture, identity and meaning-making are constructed and performed through a variety of voices and discourses. This edited collection analyses the work of well-known Irish authors such as Beckett, Joyce and G. B. Shaw, combining new methodologies with more traditional approaches to the study of literary discourse and style. Over the course of the volume, the contributors also discuss how Irish voices are received in translation, and how marginal voices are portrayed in the Irish mediascape. This dynamic book brings together a multitude of contrasting perspectives, and is sure to appeal to students and scholars of Irish literature, migration studies, discourse analysis, traductology and dialectology.

Selection of 24 essays by the dictionary researcher Reinhard Hartmann on a ~Interlingual Lexicographya (TM), a genre much neglected in the literature, including interdisciplinary approaches to translation equivalence, its analysis in contrastive text linguistics and its treatment in the bilingual dictionary, with particular attention to the user perspective, in English and German.

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler's diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

Friedenberg brings to this study of Theodore Roosevelt a thorough grounding in the criticism of American public address. Basing his findings on his own detailed reading of Roosevelt's speeches and supplementing it with his own research in the primary collections of Roosevelt's manuscripts, Robert V. Friedenberg reveals the depth of Roosevelt's fascinating rhetorical career. Friedenberg's astute analysis of Roosevelt's use of classic rhetorical method shows how dependent the president was on the style of the classical masters as well as American predecessors such as Washington and Lincoln. This book demonstrates and analyzes the persuasive and expressive public speaking of the first great orator of this century, Theodore Roosevelt. Following a foreword by Halford R. Ryan and a preface by Friedenberg, the book provides critical analysis of Roosevelt's rhetoric of militant decency. After an overview, Friedenberg applies his analysis, which is followed by the application of militant decency rhetoric to foreign policy, responsible citizenship, and progressive reform. A series of Roosevelt's collected speeches forms the second part of the volume and provides concrete examples of Roosevelt's rhetorical style. A speech chronology and a bibliography close the work. As we Americans look to the twenty-first century, we might do well to look for guidance and inspiration in the writings and speeches of the man who led us into the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt.

This volume brings together ten contributions to the study of untutored (mainly) second but also first language acquisition. All chapters have been written from a functionalist perspective and take as the main theoretical framework a model of spontaneous second language acquisition centered on the "basic variety" as proposed by Klein and Perdue. The chapters in the volume are grouped around two research themes. The first theme concerns the acquisition of scope phenomena (negation, scope particles), the second one deals with referential movement (reference to person, time and space). Both parts provide insights in the structure of learner varieties at various stages of development, and are followed by a discussion chapter. Scope phenomena, such as negation and frequency adverbials present an important learning problem, as learners have to reconcile the logical structure of their utterances with the syntactic specifics of the language being learned. Their acquisition has been relatively neglected in studies up to date, however, and we even lack detailed knowledge about the interpretation of scope particles in the target languages. The chapters in this part of the volume set out to provide more knowledge about scope phenomena in general; more detailed descriptions of the particles in the languages under consideration; and a more general understanding of how scope is acquired. Strong findings resulting from the "ESF" project suggested universal trends in how untutored learners deal with acquisition in the very early stages (the basic variety). Chapters in this second part of the volume on referential movement look at acquisition at more advanced stages, including the production of near native speakers. Learners who progress beyond the basic variety increasingly grammaticalise their productions. This later development is supposedly more variable, as more specific aspects of the target languages are now being acquired. Chapters in this part allow to shed more light on the question regarding universal and language-specific influences on language acquisition.

Media are objects with content and character that we describe using in- phrases: in the story, in the picture, in the movie, in the dream... Like the propositional attitudes, these objects present a variety of hard problems for semantic and philosophical analysis. The Semantics of Media is an organized exploration of fundamental questions in the semantics of media. The first three chapters set out a straightforward model within the possible-worlds framework, and consider how it might account for a range of notions applying to media generally: implicit vs. explicit content, propositional vs. individual content, causal vs. intentional content and the idea of a single World of the Medium. The final three chapters examine ways of elaborating the model to cover a range of phenomena keyed to the functionality of particular forms of media. Chapter Four is a discussion of fiction and our apparent reference to fictional characters. Chapter Five deals with the phenomenon of viewpoint in pictorial media. Chapter Six is a study of interactions between users and characters of media centering on the puzzling case of seeing in films. The Semantics of Media will be of interest to specialists in the fields of linguistics, philosophy and communications.

This book describes an immersion program (school education conducted in a language different from that used at home) from a psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and methodological view. The research is based on the more than 70,000 children in the Catalan immersion program, and the characteristic features of this program have relevance to researchers and practitioners in other countries. The book begins by describing the conditions to be fulfilled by any immersion program in order to be of benefit to the children taking part in it. As assessment is made as to how experiments carried out in Catalonia meet these basic prerequisites. The book then examines the specific characteristics of the immersion program in Catalonia. Two features are singled out for particular attention: the low sociocultural background of the pupils and the early age, 3-4 years, of the children when the program begins. By analyzing these two variables, the author is able to revise certain theoretical and methodological aspects of second language learning-the prime role often attributed to comprehension over production and the hypothesis that a threshold level of mastery of LI (home language) is needed to gain access to the second language. The book describes a process whereby L2 is acquired in such a way as to permit meaningful and effective comprehension and production in the new language from the very outset stressing that L2 is learned as it is used instead of being learned first and used later.

Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of language acquisition, specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the previous century and that will no doubt continue engaging them into the present one.

Affectivity is at the core of everything we do in life. Thus, its development is also central to learning/acquisition and is important for educational contexts. The studies presented in this volume consider the different contexts of language learning and examine different types of participants in this process. Most of them look at a formal instruction context, while others look beyond the classroom and even report on the author's own affectivity and its involvement in learning experiences. Affectivity is discussed here in relation to learners but also to teachers in their own professional contexts of teaching foreign languages. In the majority of cases, affectivity is explored in the case of bilinguals, but there are also articles which focus on multilingual language users and their affectivity as an evolving factor.