Common sense tells us that verbal communication should be a central concern both for the study of communication and for the study of language. Language is the most pervasive means of communication in human societies, especially if we consider the huge gamut of communication phenomena where spoken and written language combines with other modalities, such as gestures or pictures. Most communication researchers have to deal with issues of language use in their work. Classic methods in communication research - from content analysis to interviews and questionnaires, not to mention the obvious cases of rhetorical analysis and discourse analysis - presuppose the understanding of the meaning of spontaneous or elicited verbal productions. Despite its pervasiveness, verbal communication does not currently define one cohesive and distinct subfield within the communication discipline. The Handbook of Verbal Communication seeks to address this gap. In doing so, it draws not only on the communication discipline, but also on the rich interdisciplinary research on language and communication that developed over the last fifty years as linguistics interacted with the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. The interaction of linguistic research with the social sciences has produced a plethora of approaches to the study of meanings in social context - from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, while cognitive research on verbal communication, carried out in cognitive pragmatics as well as in cognitive linguistics, has offered insights into the interaction between language, inference and persuasion and into cognitive processes such as framing or metaphorical mapping. The Handbook of Verbal Communication volume takes into account these two traditions selecting those issues and themes that are most relevant for communication scholars. It addresses background matters such as the evolution of human verbal communication and the relationship between verbal and non-verbal means of communication and offers a an extensive discussion of the explicit and implicit meanings of verbal messages, with a focus on emotive and figurative meanings. Conversation and fundamental types of discourse, such as argument and narrative, are presented in-depth, as is the key notion of discourse genre. The nature of writing systems as well as the interaction of spoken or written language with non-verbal modalities are devoted ample attention. Different contexts of language use are considered, from the mass media and the new media to the organizational contexts. Cultural and linguistic diversity is addressed, with a focus on phenomena such as multilingual communication and translation. A key feature of the volume is the coverage of verbal communication quality. Quality is examined both from a cognitive and from a social perspective. It covers topics that range from to the cognitive processes underlying deceptive communication to the methods that can be used to assess the quality of texts in an organizational context.

It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

It has long been received wisdom in semantics and pragmatics that 'the head' and 'the heart' are two opposing forces, a view that has led scholars, until now, to explore the mental processes behind cognition, and the mental processes behind emotion, as two separate entities. This bold, innovative book challenges this view, and provides an original study of how we communicate our emotions through language, drawing on both pragmatic theory and affective science. It begins with the assumption that emotional or expressive meaning plays such a central role in human interaction that any pragmatic theory worth its salt must account for it. It meets the associated challenges head-on and strives to integrate affect within one theory of utterance interpretation, showing that emotional meaning and rationality/reasoning can be analysed within one framework. Written in a clear and concise style, it is essential reading for anyone interested in communication and emotion.

Ce recueil met en lumiere quelques axes novateurs dans la recherche actuelle sur la diachronie du francais, presentes lors de la sixieme edition du colloque international Diachro, qui s'est tenue a Leuven en octobre 2012. Le premier axe, methodologique, a trait a la valeur heuristique de la traduction. Les textes traduits constituent en effet des sources privilegiees pour etudier le changement linguistique, surtout si la langue du texte cible constitue une etape evolutive ulterieure de la langue du texte source, comme c'est le cas de textes latins traduits en francais a differents moments de l'histoire. Ils permettent de saisir sur le vif les changements du latin au francais, ayant provoque l'emergence d'un nouveau systeme linguistique. Un second axe de recherche concerne la diachronie recente. L'approche historique etant souvent associee a l'etude de la langue medievale et (pre-)classique, la periode recente a ete peu exploree dans cette perspective. Plusieurs contributions dans ce volume mettent en evidence tout l'interet que peut presenter la recherche sur la langue des 18e et 19e siecles. Un dernier volet de ce recueil apporte un nouvel eclairage sur des sujets de morphosyntaxe deja plus largement debattus tels l'ordre des mots, la subordination, les temps verbaux et les demonstratifs.

This book considers linguistic and mental representations of time. Prominent linguists and philosophers from all over the world examine and report on recent work on the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, temporal adverbials, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between events and states, as well as between facts, propositions, sentences, and utterances. They link this to current research on the cognitive processing of temporal reference, linguistic and philosophical semantics, psychology, and anthropology. The book is divided into three parts: Time, Tense, and Temporal Reference in Discourse; Time and Modality; and Cognition and Metaphysics of Time. It will interest scholars and advanced students of time and temporal reference in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.

Cet ouvrage presente une nouvelle approche originelle a la vielle question de la variation du ne de negation en francais moderne. Soigneusement etablie sur un corpus de langue parlee, l'auteur presente l'hypothese de la variation linguistique pluridimensionnelle: le clitique negatif ne est parfois realise, comme dans la phrase ma mere ne vient pas, mais tres souvent omis, surtout dans la communication informelle: je viens pas. Comme toute variable linguistique, le ne de negation est soumis a un ensemble d'influences potentielles. A l'aide d'une analyse multifactorielle, Charlotte Meisner montre que la variation pluridimensionnelle du ne de negation est determinee par un facteur-cle sous-jacent: la prosodie du francais moderne.

Longtemps limitee a une simple perspective textualiste, l'anaphore a, ces vingt dernieres annees, ete l'enjeu de nombreux travaux influences par les forts courants de la linguistique du discours ainsi que par les approches cognitives, pragmatiques et, plus recemment encore, interactionnelles de la reference. Phenomene discursif eminemment complexe, l'anaphore met en jeu des mecanismes informationnels, memoriels et inferentiels varies, que de nombreux modeles, linguistiques et psycholinguistiques, ont cherche a capter. Le propos du present ouvrage est double: proposer un bilan epistemologique mettant au jour, parmi les modeles et approches proposes, ceux qui ont resiste au temps (et aux modes); pointer les aspects du phenomene anaphorique qui necessiteraient des investigations complementaires. En abordant l'anaphore de maniere interdisciplinaire, ce livre vise aussi a decloisonner des domaines de recherche qui trop souvent s'ignorent: il retablit le dialogue entre approches linguistiques, psycholinguistiques et acquisitionnelles, tout en faisant place aux perspectives orientees vers la logopedie et le TAL (Traitement Automatique du Langage).

Du fait de leur intrigante variete formelle, les interrogatives totales et partielles du francais ont fait l'objet, au cours des annees ecoulees, d'une foule de recherches en syntaxe et en sociolinguistique, alors que d'autres courants tels que la rhetorique ou la pragmatique rivalisaient d'ingeniosite pour rendre compte de leur variabilite semantique. Afin d'enrichir le debat, le present ouvrage propose une reflexion a large spectre sur les tours interrogatifs du francais, leur marquage syntaxique et intonatif, les parametres linguistiques ou sociaux susceptibles de declencher, dans un contexte donne, le choix d'une variante interrogative plutot qu'une autre; l'ouvrage traite en outre des proprietes semantiques et inferentielles des interrogatives, ainsi que des fonctions discursives et narratologiques qui leur sont devolues. Les auteurs appuient leurs analyses sur des exemples attestes, parfois tires de corpus specifiques (dialogues de films de banlieue, textos, Fables de La Fontaine, bandes dessinees...). Ils manifestent un eclectisme theorique qui nous semble necessaire pour apprehender de maniere non reductrice cet objet complexe, aux multiples facettes.