This book focuses on a particular type of formulaic expressions called Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs). Since the meaning of these pragmatic units is shaped by the interplay of linguistic and extralinguistic factors they can be best accounted for in a theoretical framework which represents a knowledge-for-use conception. A unique feature of the book is that it examines the development and use of a particular type of formulae from new perspectives. The comparison of a monolingual and multilingual approach, and the application of the graded salience hypothesis to SBUs within a cognitive-pragmatic theoretical framework reveal that issues such as the role of context in shaping situational meaning, and the existence of common or similar cognitive mechanisms and knowledge structures responsible for cognitive functions and speech behavior in different languages need revision. As a consequence, the book seeks answer to two main questions: 1) origin and extent of context-sensitiveness, and 2) the development of the particular situational functions of SBUs. On the basis of recent research it is argued that context affects comprehension only after highly salient information has been accessed. Search for the appropriate meaning stops if the information accessed initially is compatible with the context, and it continues, if it is not. This approach puts the issue of context-sensitiveness of SBUs into an entirely different perspective. It is also discussed that why exactly these utterances started to be used to express those pragmatic functions and not others. SBUs demonstrate better than any other linguistic unit that there is a strong cognitive-linguistic interdependency. The development of certain SBUs can be accounted for through cognitive mechanisms, and vice versa: learning an SBU for a culturally important category can linguistically reinforce the learning of the category itself. The book uses a cross-linguistic perspective and illustrative examples from several languages which makes its arguments and claims convincing.

This book offers new insights into how English speakers talk about their own and others' emotions. Using statistical evidence and corpus-linguistic methods, but also qualitative text analyses, the author examines how expressions that describe emotions are employed in a large corpus of conversational, newspaper, fictional and academic English.

This thought-provoking book initiates a dialogue among scholars in rhetoric and hermeneutics in many areas of the humanities. Twenty leading thinkers explore the ways these two powerful disciplines inform each other and influence a wide variety of intellectual fields. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde organize pivotal topics in rhetoric and hermeneutics with originality and coherence, dividing their book into four sections: Locating the Disciplines; Inventions and Applications; Arguments and Narratives; and Civic Discourse and Critical Theory. Contributors to this volume include Hans-Georg Gadamer (one of whose pieces is here translated into English for the first time), Paul Ricoeur, Gerald L. Bruns, Charles Altieri, Richard E. Palmer, Calvin O. Schrag,.Victoria Kahn, Eugene Garver, Michael Leff, Nancy S. Streuver, Wendy Olmsted, David Tracy, Donald G. Marshall, Allen Scult, Rita Copeland, William Rehg, and Steven Mailloux. For readers across the humanities, the book demonstrates the usefulness of rhetorical and hermeneutic approaches in literary, philosophical, legal, religious, and political thinking. With its stimulating new perspectives on the revival and interrelation of both rhetoric and hermeneutics, this collection is sure to serve as a benchmark for years to come.

enables readers to better appreciate the ways in which language functions simultaneously as an instrument to encode and communicate meaning, build and sustain interpersonal relationships, and to express identity. Provides readers with well-grounded tools that they can use to inform their daily work as well as to reflect upon their own communicative practices and – where necessary – to improve them. Features ‘discussion points’ in the form of questions, suggestions for reflection, and small analysis tasks throughout.

The book presents a comprehensive study of Russian prepositions, with a focus on expressing spatial characteristics. It primarily deals with how metaphorical and metonymical transfers motivate the use of Russian prepositional phrases, explaining the collocations of prepositional phrases with verbs as a realisation of a conceptual metaphor or a metonymy. The author confronts a problem that is attracting growing attention within present-day linguistics: the semantics of prepositions and cases. The book seeks to clarify the conceptual motivations for the use of the combinations of Russian primary prepositional phrases, as well as to demonstrate how their spatial meanings are extended into non-spatial domains. This book incorporates an analysis of a large number of items, including 30 combinations of primary prepositions with cases. An original contribution, the book is of interest to teachers and students studying Slavic languages, and to cognitive linguists.

This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 - 2011 at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as "sign", "symbol" or "legal language," demonstrate how a lawyer's professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can "say the law," or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.

Examining the overseas experience of language learners in diverse contexts through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, studies in this volume look at the acquisition of language use, socialization processes, learner motivation, identity and learning strategies. In this way, the volume offers a privileged window into learner experiences abroad while addressing current concerns central to second language acquisition.

`Peterson is an authority of a philosophical and linguistic industry that began in the 1960s with Vendler's work on nominalization. Natural languages distinguish syntactically and semantically between various sorts of what might be called `gerundive entities' - events, processes, states of affairs, propositions, facts, ... all referred to by sentence nominals of various kinds. Philosophers have worried for millennia over the ontology of such things or `things', but until twenty years ago they ignored all the useful linguistic evidence. Vendler not only began to straighten out the distinctions, but pursued more specific and more interesting questions such as that of what entities the causality relation relates (events? facts?). And that of the objects of knowledge and belief. But Vendler's work was only a start and Peterson has continued the task from then until now, both philosophically and linguistically. Fact Proposition Event constitutes the state of the art regarding gerundive entities, defended in meticulous detail. Peterson's ontology features just facts, proposition, and events, carefully distinguished from each other. Among his more specific achievements are: a nice treatment of the linguist's distinction between `factive' and nonfactive constructions; a detailed theory of the subjects and objects of causation, which impinges nicely on action theory; an interesting argument that fact, proposition, events are innate ideas in humans; a theory of complex events (with implications for law and philosophy of law); and an overall picture of syntax and semantics of causal sentences and action sentences. Though Peterson does not pursue them here, there are clear and significant implications for the philosophy of science, in particular for our understanding of scientific causation, causal explanation and law likeness.' Professor William Lycan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This volume contains a selection of papers (keynote addresses and other important papers) from the International Conference on Argumentation at Amsterdam of 2002 by prominent international scholars of argumentation theory. The contributions are representative of the main approaches to the study of argumentation: the informal logical approach, the logical approach, the dialectical approach, the rhetorical and the communicative approach. Taken together the papers in this volume provide an insightful cross-section of the current state of affairs in argumentation research.
The collection of essays as a whole will be of interest to all those working in the field of argumentation theory and to all scholars who are interested in recent developments in this field.

Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads is a collection of essays, most of them written from a cognitive linguistics standpoint by leading specialists in the fields of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, and conceptual integration (blending). The book has two main goals. One of them is to discuss in new, provocative ways the nature of these conceptual mappings in English and their interaction. The other goal is to explore by means of several detailed case studies the central role of these mappings in English. The studies are, thus, concerned with the operation of metaphor and metonymy in discourse, including literary discourse or with the effect of metaphorical and/or metonymic mappings on some aspects of linguistic structure, be it polysemy or grammar. The book is of interest to students and researchers in English and linguistics, English literature, cognitive psychology and cognitive science.

Narrative Research, once the domain of structuralist literary theory, has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. It is now commonly agreed that storytelling functions as a fundamental cognitive tool for sense-making and meaning production, and that human beings structure and communicate lived experience through oral, written and visual stories. Entitled Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, this volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermediality, as well as memory studies, musicology, theology and psychology. The topics touch on a wide range of issues, such as the current state of narratology and its potential for development, narrativity in visual and auditive art forms, the cultural functions of narrative, and the role of narrative concepts across the disciplines. The volume introduces interested newcomers to the ongoing debate, reflecting the diversity of research questions and methodological approaches involved. It takes a critical, yet cautiously optimistic stance with regard to the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between narrative researchers, and invites experienced readers from any discipline interested in narrative to join this important debate, which promotes the exchange of ideas, concepts and methods between the humanities and the social sciences.

Bringing together recent international research in the field of hospital communication and interaction, the contributors to this book contextualize clinical professional work by focussing on the rising intensity of information and communication practices in organizations generally, and in health care in particular.

In a postfactual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they confirm pre-existing or partisan beliefs, this book asks crucial questions: how can we identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can we know when their use is ethically wrong? How can we judge untruthfulness in the messiness of situated discourse? Drawing on pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing untruthful discourse in situated context. TRUST, or Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text, sees untruthfulness as encompassing not only deliberate manipulations of what is believed to be true (the insincerity of withholding, misleading, and lying) but also the distortions that arise from an irresponsible attitude towards the truth (dogma, distortion, and bullshit). Chris Heffer discusses times when truth is not "in play," as in jokes or fiction, as well as instances when concealing the truth can achieve a greater good. The TRUST framework demonstrates that untruthfulness becomes unethical in discourse, though, when it unjustifiably breaches the trust an interlocutor invests in the speaker. In addition to the theoretical framework, this book provides a clear, practical heuristic for analyzing discursive untruthfulness and applies it to such cases of public discourse as the Brexit "battle bus," Trump's tweet about voter fraud, Blair and Bush's claims about weapons of mass destruction, and the multiple forms of untruthfulness associated with the Skripal poisoning case. In All Bullshit and Lies? Chris Heffer turns a critical eye to fundamental questions of truthfulness and trust in our society. This timely and interdisciplinary investigation of discourse provides readers a deeper theoretical understanding of untruthfulness in a postfactual world.

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. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Meaning Making in Text presents new insights into forms of communication in a range of contexts: cultural, linguistic, multimodal and educational. The thirteen chapters are all linked theoretically by advances in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

First published in 1987, the Dictionary of Jargon expands on its predecessor Newspeak (Routledge Revivals, 2014) as an authoritative reference guide to specialist occupational slang, or jargon. Containing around 21, 000 entries, the dictionary encompasses a truly eclectic range of fields and includes extensive coverage of both British and U.S. jargon. Areas dealt with range from marketing to medicine, from advertising to artificial intelligence and from skiing to sociology. This is a fascinating resource for students of lexicography and professional lexicographers, as well as the general inquisitive reader.

George Orwell coined the term 'Newspeak' for his novel 1984, the purpose of which was designed to shrink vocabularies and eliminate subtlety and nuance. For this dictionary, first published to herald the year 1984, Jonathon Green compiled nearly 8, 000 entries - selected from the slangs and specific vocabularies of trades, professions and interests - covering such areas as the world of entertainment, the media, the military economics, and finance. This dictionary provides an accurate and useful linguistic guide for students of lexicography and an interesting compendium for the general inquisitive reader.

A seminal work in international communication, examining news reports, civic discourse, and images of Africa in Russian press. This book is about power and influence, politics and communication across frontiers--a thoroughly challenging analysis of Russia's foray into African and international communication. The book penetrates the intellectual, social, cultural, political, geographical, and historical aspects of the relationship between the African continent and Russia, before, during, and after the Cold War. The book is well-researched and up-to-date. The study was conducted within the framework of Russian geo-political interests, the belligerent ideological determinism of the Communist era, the implosion of historical materialism, and the delicate post-communist path to democracy, capitalism, and reconstruction. The book will appeal to a global audience of journalists, scholars, political scientists, historians, cultural and social critics, policy makers, and the general public.

De Landtsheer and Feldman draw together a collection of research essays examining the nature, characteristics, content, and reception of public rhetoric in various cultures and social settings. The volume focuses on three concerns. First, it examines public speech and symbols in various countries in both the East and the West. Second, it details various methods to study political discourse. Third, it reviews public speech and symbols in relationship to citizenship.

As a unique study of the ways in which public speech works in a variety of nations to liberate and educate when it bridges the gaps between political elites and regular citizens, this volume should appeal to anyone, including scholars and researchers, with an interest in better understanding the burgeoning world of political communication.

This title presents a collection of contributions by linguists and lawyers on topical questions of the interconnections between language and law, and opens up a wide range of theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to aspects such as politics and the public domain, court proceedings, criminology, the editing of legislation, legal training and the Europeanization of law.

This edited collection presents cutting edge research on the process of identity construction in professional and institutional contexts, from corporate workplaces, to courtrooms, classrooms, and academia. The chapters consider how interactants do identity work and how identity is indexed (often in subtle ways) in workplace discourse.

Although psychology is steeped in writing, as a discipline it has developed little explicit understanding of writing. This is the first book to examine writing (and the teaching of writing) in psychology from the standpoint of composition studies, the scholarly field that specializes in the study and teaching of writing. The book's purpose is to develop a different, richer, more explicit understanding of writing than psychology presently has. Three major aspects of writing are discussed: audience, genre, and style. After examining these, the author draws implications for the teaching of writing in psychology. The work does not aim to tell psychologists how to write better; rather, it suggests how they might think differently about writing.