Semantics

This is the first book to address formulaic language directly and provide a foundation of knowledge for graduates and researchers in early stages of study of this important language phenomenon. It is also suitable for students of linguistics, applied...

This book reimagines the compositional semantics of comparative sentences using words such as more, as, too, and others. The book's central thesis entails a rejection of a fundamental assumption of degree semantic frameworks: that gradable adjectives...

Winner of the British Society of Criminology 'Criminology Book Prize 2012' This book uses transcripts from real UK police interviews, investigating previously unexplored and under-explored areas of the process. It illustrates the way in which...

Politicians enact three main roles in political discourse - narrator, interlocutor and character - to achieve specific goals. This book explains these roles and how they constitute discursive strategies, correlating with political aims. In short:...

Can we reasonably speak of 'linguistic realities'? Do theoretical linguists devise accounts of a reality which exists outside of their theories? In this provocative and insightful study of the philosophy of linguistics, the author first investigates the...

In recent years the idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. Speaking of Events offers a vivid and up-to-date indication of this debate, with...

This volume discusses methodological issues in conducting elicitation on semantic topics in a fieldwork situation. In twelve chapters discussing 11 language families from four continents, authors draw on their own fieldwork experience, pairing explicit...

Stewart Shapiro's aim in Vagueness in Context is to develop both a philosophical and a formal, model-theoretic account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that...

Since the publication of his Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968), Sir John Lyons became one of the most important and internationally renowned contributors to the study of linguistics. In a career which spanned several decades, he addressed...

In this volume, Gregory Matoesian uses the notorious 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to provide an in-depth analysis of language use and its role in that specific trial as well as in the law in general. He draws on the fields of conversation...

This book reimagines the compositional semantics of comparative sentences using words such as more, as, too, and others. The book's central thesis entails a rejection of a fundamental assumption of degree semantic frameworks: that gradable adjectives...

Academic discourse is a rapidly growing area of study, attracting researchers and students from a diverse range of fields. This is partly due to the growing awareness that knowledge is socially constructed through language and partly because of the...

This book is all about ellipsis in natural language - the phenomena in which words and phrases go missing in the linguistic signal, but are nonethe less interpreted by the receiver, eg in the following sentence, the second instance of read is understood...

This 1996 volume brings together ten chapters on the Celtic languages using the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. The leading researchers in the field examine Welsh, Irish, Breton and Scots Gaelic in comparative perspective, making reference...

Semantic Relations and the Lexicon explores the many paradigmatic semantic relations between words, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, and their relevance to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Drawing on a century's research in...

In this pioneering book Kasia Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She...

Depictive secondary predicates, such as 'raw' in 'George ate the fish raw', are central to current issues in syntactic and semantic theory - in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and...

This book considers the phenomenon of sluicing. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing...

In recent years the idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. Speaking of Events offers a vivid and up-to-date indication of this debate, with...

This book considers important aspects of the syntax of sentences and their relation to the extra-sentential context. The relation between a sentence and the context is frequently reckoned to be in some sense syntax-free, in that it is not syntactically...

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting...

This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by...

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and...

This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the...

The Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre was established in the University of Cambridge in 1964. The work of the Centre was concentrated on the production of word-indexed, concordances and lexico-graphical materials in several languages for scholars...

The purpose clause is a common fonn of adverbial modification in English. The bracketed phrases below are purpose clauses, and they look and sound unremarkable. We hear and see these things all the time. John came [to play with the children] [to play...

The view that questions are 'requests for missing information' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally, utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such, or by prosodic marking. Functionally, questions request that...

Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as 'want',...

There are some 6,500 different languages in the world, belonging to around 250 distinct families and conforming to numerous grammatical types. This book explains why. Given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal...

The use of numerals in counting differs quite dramatically across languages. Some languages grammaticalise a contrast between count nouns (three cats, three books) vs 'non-count' or mass nouns (milk, mud), marking this distinction in different ways...

This is a book about semantic theories of modality. Its main goal is to explain and evaluate important contemporary theories within linguistics and to discuss a wide range of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of these theories. The introduction...

This readable introductory textbook presents a concise survey of lexicology. The first section of the book is a survey of the study of words, providing students with an overview of basic issues in defining and understanding the word as a unit of language...

This volume comprises thirteen original research papers and three overview papers presenting new work using a number of experimental techniques from psycho- and neurolinguistics in the three key areas of current semantics and pragmatics: implicature,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780986076428Author Martin H LevinsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 148Imprint Institute of General SemanticsPublisher Institute of General...

This book addresses one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and mind, the Poverty of the Stimulus. Presented by Chomsky in 1968, the argument holds that children do not receive enough evidence to infer the existence of...

Reference is a central topic in philosophy of language, and has been the main focus of discussion about how language relates to the world. R. M. Sainsbury sets out a new approach to the concept, which promises to bring to an end some long-standing...

The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize...

Dr Thrane makes an original contribution to one of the central topics in syntax and semantics: the nature and mechanisms of reference in natural language. He makes a fundamental distinction between syntactic analyses that are internal to the structure of...

JERUSALEM LECTURES In 1992, I was a Lady Davis Fellow in the English Department at the Hebrew Univer sity of Jerusalem. In the context of this, Edit Doron asked me to present a series of weekly evening lectures. The idea was that I would be talking...

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, or Licorice is tasty. Standard semantic theories explain the meanings of sentences by specifying the conditions...