The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This book is a collection of eight articles by leading scholars investigating of the acquisition of English by native speakers of Japanese. It deals with a wide range of topics from the acquisiton of VP structures to functional categories and presents new empirical data. The studies all contribute to our understanding of these topics, and they are of current interest to researchers working on Second Language Acquisition.

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.

This collection of twelve papers demonstrates that the concepts developed within the Cognitive Linguistics movement afford an insightful perspective on several important areas of second language acquisition and pedagogy. In the first part of the book, three papers show how three Cognitive Linguistics constructs provide a useful theoretical frame within which second language acquisition data can be analyzed. First, Talmy's typology of motion events is argued to constitute the base relative to which acquisition discrepancies in motion events are most valuably investigated. Secondly, the notion of "construction" is invoked in order to account for systematic differences between the native and non-native speakers' use of the English verb get. Finally, frequency and similarity effects are shown to play a crucial part in the learning of prepositions in a second language. The second part of the book shows that the key concepts commonly invoked in Cognitive Linguistics analyses allow language teachers to insightfully structure the presentation of problematic material in the foreign language classroom. These concepts include among others polysemy, the figure/ground gestalt, the usage-based conception of grammar, the radial organization of categories, metaphors, and cultural scripts. The Cognitive Linguistics paradigm has already shown its viability to analyze a wide array of linguistic phenomena. This book establishes its relevance in the areas of second language acquisition and language pedagogy. Its intended public is composed of Cognitive Linguists, Second Language Acquisition specialists, as well as foreign language pedagogy researchers, instructors, and students.

`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

In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda, John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process. Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse. By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating America's recent military interventions.

In this highly interdisciplinary work, linguist Anna Wierzbicka casts new light on the words of Jesus by taking her well-known semantic theory of "universal human concepts"- concepts which are intuitively understandable and self-explanatory across languages-and bringing it to bear on Jesus' parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Her approach results in strikingly novel interpretations of the Gospels. Written in dialogue with other biblical commentators, What Did Jesus Mean? is scholarly, rigorous, and yet accessible.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview, as well as breaking new ground, in a versatile and fast growing field. It contains four sections: Contrastive, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing of Second/Foreign Language Pragmatics, and Pragmatics in Corporate Culture Communication, covering a wide range of topics, from speech acts and politeness issues to Lingua Franca and Corporate Crises Communication. The approach is theoretical, methodological as well as applied, with a focus on authentic, interactional data. All articles are written by renowned leading specialists, who provide in-depth, up-to-date overviews, and view new directions and visions for future research.

This study shows that women involved in National Socialism in the years 1924 - 1934 developed and shaped a recognizable discourse which communicated and reflected their position and status within the NS movement. The analysis is based on a variety of text-types produced by members of NS women's organisations, and includes official correspondence, circulars, reports, pamphlets, monographs and articles from NS women's journals. It draws upon several areas of linguistic theory, including feminist linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, and the salient features identified in the female discourse are placed within a sociolinguistic framework. While previous research into the language of the NS-system has largely ignored the possibility of a cohesive female discourse, the study supports the idea that this discourse was dynamic, and at times heterogeneous, whilst also displaying many self-defining and self-referential features. It is characterised by its ambiguities and apparent contradictions, which expresses separateness and difference, yet also solidarity with the NSDAP.

The exponential growth and development of modern technologies in all sectors has made it increasingly difficult for students, teachers and teacher educators to know which technologies to employ and how best to take advantage of them. The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology brings together experts in a number of key areas of development and change, and opens the field of language learning by exploring the pedagogical importance of technological innovation. The handbook is structured around six themes: historical and conceptual contexts core issues interactive and collaborative technologies for language learning corpora and data driven learning gaming and language learning purpose designed language learning resources. Led by fundamental concepts, theories and frameworks from language learning and teaching research rather than by specific technologies, this handbook is the essential reference for all students, teachers and researchers of Language Learning and TESOL. Those working in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Education and Media Studies will also find this a valuable book.

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.

Inspired by Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, Mick Short's classic introduction to stylistics, Language and Style represents the state-of-the-art in literary stylistics and encompasses the full breadth of current research in the discipline. Written by leading scholars in the field, chapters cover a variety of methodological and analytical approaches, from traditional qualitative analysis to more recent developments in cognitive and corpus stylistics. Addressing the three, key literary genres of poetry, drama and narrative, Language and Style is divided into carefully balanced sections. Based on original research, each chapter demonstrates a particular analytic technique and explains how this might be applied to a text from one of the literary genres. Framed by helpful introductory material covering the foundational principles of stylistics, the chapters act as practical exemplars of how to carry out stylistic analysis. Comprehensive and engaging, this invaluable resource is essential reading for anyone interested in stylistics.

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 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.

This book represents the most comprehensive account to date of foreign language (FL) writing. Its basic aim is to reflect critically on where the field is now and where it needs need to go next in the exploration of FL writing at the levels of theory, research, and pedagogy, hence the two parts of the book: 'Looking back' and 'Looking ahead'. The chapters in Part I offer accounts of both the inquiry process followed and the main insights gained in various long-term research programs. The chapters in Part 2 contribute a retrospective analysis of the available empirical research and of professional experiences in an attempt to move forward. The book invites the reader to step back and rethink seemingly well established knowledge about L2 writing in light of what is known about writing in FL contexts.

This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain must be given due recognition in linguistic theory, on a par with domains such as time and number. The relevant domain is coherent, but at the same time complex in that it consists of two subdomains: one which comprises degree-of-certainty meanings, and one which comprises information-source meanings. The book offers three arguments for giving recognition to such a meaning domain. The first argument concerns the clustering of linguistic expressions with epistemic meaning into morphosyntactically delimited systems of elements. The second argument has to do with the variation pertaining to the coding of epistemic meanings, as highlighted in a semantic map of epistemic expressions. The third argument turns upon the scope properties of epistemic meanings and the morphosyntactic reflections of these properties. Finally, the book proposes a unified cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning in terms of which it attempts to account for the properties of the epistemic meaning domain as well as of individual epistemic meanings.

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.

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.

This volume edited by Tabea Ihsane focuses on different aspects of the distribution, semantics, and internal structure of nominal constituents with a "partitive article" in its indefinite interpretation and of potentially corresponding bare nouns. It further deals with diachronic issues, such as grammaticalization and evolution in the use of "partitive articles". The outcome is a snapshot of current research into "partitive articles" and the way they relate to bare nouns, in a cross-linguistic perspective and on new data: the research covers noteworthy data (fieldwork data and corpora) from Standard languages - like French and Italian, but also German - to dialectal and regional varieties, including endangered ones like Francoprovencal.

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).

"Indefinites and the Type of Sets" explores a new theory of indefinite noun phrase interpretation and definiteness effects. The book provides an introduction to aspects of the semantics of noun phrases, as well as comparing alternate theories; and, explores a new theory of indefinite noun phrase interpretation and definiteness effects. It is written accessibly by one of the world's most prominent formal semanticists. The book is useful for students and scholars in formal semantics as well as the neighboring fields of syntax, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language.

Plato in the Third Sophistic examines the influence and impact of Plato and Platonism in the era of Byzantine and Christian rhetoric. The volume brings together specially commissioned articles from leading scholars of late antique philosophy and literature. Their examinations show that Plato is the single most important and influential literary figure used to frame the literature of this time. Plato in the Third Sophistic will help scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to better understand the development of Christian literature in this era as an essential link in the history of Platonism as well as that of Christianity.

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.

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.