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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
The book will provide an introduction into a highly developed, coherent, and extensively tested cognitive linguistic approach to lexical semantics, which is not currently accessible to readers of English. This will make the book important to researchers and students in lexical semantics, in Cognitive Linguistics and beyond. It will also strengthen the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise in general, by showing that the main tenets of this approach are not an incidental historical development in a particular corner of the world, but rather are arrived at by scholars working in hugely different contexts independently of each other. The book should therefore have an appeal to all researchers in Cognitive Linguistics. Furthermore, the book constitutes a contribution to the intellectual exchange between international academic discourses that mostly develop independently of each other - an exchange that has often provided major impetus for scientific development, as illustrated by the influence of the belated translations of works by Bakhtin, Lotman, Vygotsky, and Luria, among others.
This new addition to Routledge 's Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, brings together the very best and most influential scholarly research in over half a century of language-acquisition research. The collection represents and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, by highlighting models and methodologies from and implications for adjacent fields such as psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, computer science, and comparative cognition. In addition, the collection steers users to the most important, as well as controversial, issues that lie at the frontier of language acquisition research. With a new introduction by the editor, comprehensive index, and a chronological table of the gathered materials, this four-volume collection provides both student and scholar alike with all the key writings on language acquisition in one convenient and authoritative reference resource
This book emerges as a response to the increasing use of English as a lingua franca in the multilingual European context. It provides an up-to-date overview of the sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and educational aspects of research on third language acquisition by focusing on English as a third language.
Gila Schauer's study of interlanguage pragmatic development in English is situated in the context of studying abroad. It is the first book-length study of a common occurrence worldwide, but one that has not received the focus it deserves. Schauer examines the interlanguage pragmatic development of German learners of English at a British University over the course of a year. The focus is not only on the learners' productive pragmatic development, but also on their pragmatic awareness, which is compared with their grammatical awareness. The analysis undertaken is both qualitative and quantitative, and the book draws some important conclusions relevant to the whole field of interlanguage pragmatics. It will be engaging reading for researchers and for those doing postgraduate studies in applied linguistics, especially those working on interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, multilingualism and second language acquisition.
In June 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission determined that J. Robert Oppenheimer, wartime director of the Manhattan Project and Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk. Consequently, America's most prominent scientist was removed from government service. In contrast to historical and political explanations of the Oppenheimer case, Holloway explores the role that rhetoric played in Oppenheimer's demise. In doing so, the author draws attention to the symbolic nature of politics and character and highlights the significant interaction of political and scientific terminologies in American discourse. Holloway's analysis and evaluation suggest that the accusations against Oppenheimer used the most powerful terms of the mid-1950s--communism, progress, and science--to legitimize the government's questionable action. Oppenheimer, for his part, failed to use his most strategic rhetorical resources in his defense, and therefore participated in his own ruin. Holloway highlights the rhetorical interaction among accusation, self-defense, and decision statements through a microscopic rhetorical analysis of the case's five central documents. An original extension and refinement of Kenneth Burke's cluster-agon method, which Holloway calls terminological algebra, is proposed as a systematic analytical tool consistent with Burke's theories. Recommended for critics of rhetoric and political communication.
The contributors present a coherent collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background, providing a state-of-the-art overview of research on the discursive grounding of metaphor from a cognitive-linguistic perspective.
All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.
Denis Donoghue turns his attention to the practice of metaphor and to its lesser cousins, simile, metonym, and synecdoche. Metaphor ("a carrying or bearing across") supposes that an ordinary word could have been used in a statement but hasn't been. Instead, something else, something unexpected, appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich the reader's experience by bringing different associations to mind. The force of a good metaphor is to give something a different life, a new life. The essential character of metaphor, Donoghue says, is prophetic. Metaphors intend to change the world by changing our sense of it. At the center of Donoghue's study is the idea that metaphor permits the greatest freedom in the use of language because it exempts language from the local duties of reference and denotation. Metaphors conspire with the mind in its enjoyment of freedom. Metaphor" celebrates imaginative life par excellence, from Donoghue's musings on Aquinas' Latin hymns, interspersed with autobiographical reflection, to his agile and perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens. When Donoghue surveys the history of metaphor and resistance to it, going back to Aristotle and forward to George Lakoff, he is a sly, cogent, and persuasive companion. He also addresses the question of whether or not metaphors can ever truly die. Reflected on every page of Metaphor" are the accumulated wisdom of decades of reading and a sheer love of language and life.
This book contains an account of language and drama between 1945 and 2005, synthesizing linguistic and dramatic knowledge in order to illuminate the ways in which anxieties and attitudes toward language manifest themselves in discourses on and around English theatre of the period, and how these anxieties and attitudes reflect back through the theatre of this period.
Pragmatics, often defined as the study of language use and language users, sets out to explain what people wish to achieve and how they go about achieving it in using language. Such a study is clearly of direct relevance to an understanding of translation and translators. The thirteen chapters in this volume show how translation - skill, art, process and product - is affected by pragmatic factors such as the acts performed by people when they use language, how writers try to be polite, relevant and cooperative, the distinctions they make between what their readers may already know and what is likely to be new to them, what is presupposed and what is openly affirmed, time and space, how they refer to things and make their discourse coherent, how issues may be hedged or attempts made to produce in readers of the translation effects equivalent to those stimulated in readers of the original. Particular attention is paid to legal, political, humorous, poetic and other literary texts.
"Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence" seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. It examines global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.
The genitive/accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum. Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian, this volume analyzes two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements-the genitive of negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and thus require an integrated analysis. Further, that the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics, and that the genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack commitment to existence. Kagan's subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between case-marking and other properties, such as definiteness, specificity, number and aspect. It also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood, and relates her overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.
Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.
Nonveridicality and evaluation interact in obvious ways in conveying opinion and subjectivity in language. In Nonveridicality and Evaluation Maite Taboada and Radoslava Trnavac bring together a diverse group of researchers with interests in evaluation, Appraisal, nonveridicality and coherence relations. The papers in the volume approach the intersection of these areas from two different points of view: theoretical and empirical. From a theoretical point of view, contributions reflect the interface between evaluation, nonveridicality and coherence. The empirical perspective is shown in papers that employ corpus methodology, qualitative descriptions of texts, and computational implementations.
This book introduces a new linguistic reconstruction of the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Old Chinese, the first Sino-Tibetan language to be reduced to writing. Old Chinese is the language of the earliest Chinese classical texts (1st millennium BCE) and the ancestor of later varieties of Chinese, including all modern Chinese dialects. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart's new reconstruction of Old Chinese moves beyond earlier reconstructions by taking into account important new evidence that has recently become available: better documentation of Chinese dialects that preserve archaic features, such as the Min and Waxiang dialects; better documentation of languages with very early loanwords from Chinese, such as the Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Vietnamese languages; and a flood of Chinese manuscripts from the first millennium BCE, excavated or discovered in the last several decades. Baxter and Sagart also incorporate recent advances in our understanding of the derivational processes that connect different words that have the same root. They expand our knowledge of Chinese etymology and identify, for the first time, phonological markers of pre-Han dialects, such as the development of *r to -j in a group of east coast dialects, but to -n elsewhere. The most up-to-date reconstruction available, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction brings the methodology of Old Chinese reconstruction closer to that of comparative reconstructions that have been used successfully in other language families. It is critical reading for anyone seeking an advanced understanding of Old Chinese.
In A Multidisciplinary Approach to Service Encounters, Maria de la O Hernandez-Lopez and Lucia Fernandez-Amaya have joined marketing researchers and linguists to provide the tools to understand consumers' communication in different professional settings. Service encounters have been widely studied due to the fact that the communicative exchange between the customer and the server is essential for the success of the service encounter itself. In this volume, the role of language, linguistics and communication is examined in an area of research that has traditionally been related to business and marketing. This is achieved through the presentation of works from a variety of perspectives that may help to advance in this particular context and also contribute to improving communication in service encounters.
claim is that such morphological processes can be learnt without symbolization and innate knowledge. See Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) for the original model of past tense acquisition, Plunkett and Marchman (1993), Nakisa, Plunkett and Hahn (1996) and Elman et al. (1996) for developments and extensions to other morphological processes, and Marcus et al. (1992) and Pinker and Prince (1988) for criticism. One line of investigation supporting the view of language as a genetic endowment is closely linked to traditional research on language acquisition and argues as follows: If language is innate there must be phenomena that should be accessible from birth in one form or the other. Thus it is clear that the language of children, especially young children and preferably babies should be investigated. As babies unfortunately don't talk, the abilities that are available from birth must be established in ways different from the usual linguistic analysis. Psycholinguistic research of the last few years has shown that at the age of 4 and 8 months and even during their first week of life children already have important language skills. From the fourth day, infants distinguish their mother tongue from other languages. From the first months children prefer the sound of speech to 'other noise'. At the age of 4 months, infants prefer pauses at syntactic boundaries to random pauses.
Over half a century ago, J. L. Austin predicted developments in the discipline of grammar which, in properly establishing it as a science, would at the same time displace a large part of philosophy - philosophical logic, to be specific. With the boundary finally removed between what philosophers then called 'logical syntax' (essentially logical form) and what grammarians study as syntax, Austin believed that 'we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy ...in the only way we ever can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs'. It was a radical, almost heretical, vision - the study of logic, one of the original and fundamental planks of philosophy, subsumed under the science of grammar. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Victor Dudman developed an English grammar of the kind Austin had predicted. His work impressed many, but was ultimately misunderstood. Jean Curthoys' introduction explores the philosophical issues involved in those misunderstandings. Dudman's later, unfinished, but conceptually most complete, work is the second part of this book.
David Brazil's pioneering work on the grammar of spoken discourse ended at A Grammar Of Speech (1995) due to his untimely death. Gerard O'Grady picks up the baton in this book and teststhedescription of usedlanguageagainst a spoken corpus. He incorporates findings from the last decade of corpus linguistics study, notably concerning phrases and lexical items larger than single orthographic words and ellipsis. He demonstrates theadded communicative significance that the incorporation of two systems of intonation ('Key' and 'Termination') bring to the grammar. O'Grady reviews the literature andcovers the theorybefore moving on to a practical, analytic section. His final chapter reviews the arguments, maps the road ahead and lays out the practical applications of the grammar. The book will be of great interest to researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis and also EFL/ESL.
Organisations which act on behalf of society are expected to act fairly, explaining themselves and their procedures to people they encounter. For the police, explanation is routine and repetitive. It is also extremely powerful. "Rights Communication" provides an unusual opportunity to observe different speakers and writers explaining the same texts in their own words in British police stations. Data analyses cast explanation not as a skill but a technology, a rich resource for making meaning, representing identities and organising social participation.
The contributions in this volume provide a kaleidoscope of state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexicogrammar. Central issues are the presentation of major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), the findings (especially about frequency) which are simply not accessible without such resources, their theoretical implications relating to both lexical units and word meanings, and the practical - especially pedagogical - applications of corpus findings. This is complemented by a lexicographer's view on the data structures implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The volume, which has sprung from the 36th ICAME conference, held in at Trier University in May 2015, will be of relevance for theoretical and applied linguists interested in corpora, word usage, and the mental lexicon.
Language is one of humanity's greatest achievements, yet one which virtually all children achieve remarkably quickly. How much more remarkable, therefore, when children learn not one but two languages! There are many single case studies describing children from families where determined parents adopt strategies to maximise their children's chances of becoming bilingual. Many more children, whose parents speak a mixture of languages, also become bilingual without this extra help. How this occurs and why some children have more problems than others in a bilingual environment are some of the issues addressed by this book, which is a longitudinal study of how children learn to use more than one language. The family is assumed to be the key factor in these processes, and bilingual language development is placed firmly within an interactive context, as it is from this context that the development of childhood bilingualism can best be understood. Thus the aims of this book are to examine how young children become bilingual, and to show what factors predict early childhood bilingualism.
This volume is about dislocation, i.e. the removal of phrases
from their canonical positions in a sentence to its left or right
edge. Dislocation encompasses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, related to nominal and adverbial expressions and to the information structuring notions of topic and focus; and takes intriguingly different forms across languages. This book reveals some of the empirical richness of dislocation and some key puzzles related to its syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis. |
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