Semantics

Natural Language Semantics discusses fundamental concepts for linguistic semantics. This book combines theoretical explanations of several methods of inquiry with detailed semantic analysis and emphasises the philosophy that semantics is about meaning in...

This book presents and exemplifies the theory of grammar called Semantic Syntax. The grammar, which offers a syntactic theory closely connected with semantic analyses, is a direct continuation of Generative Semantics; it will re-ignite interest in that...

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of...

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify...

Languages around the world organise their lexicons, or vocabularies, in a myriad of different ways. This book is a celebration of global linguistic diversity, bringing together fascinating cases from a wide range of languages to explore how and why this...

This open access book focuses on the textual features, or ‘strategies’, which form popularization discourse. In popularization discourse, research findings from academia are re-presented to make them noteworthy to society and influential for everyday...

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing.Drawing on scholarship from economics,...

A study of how the climate crisis is changing human communication from a celebrated rhetorician.   Why is it difficult to talk about climate change? Debra Hawhee argues that contemporary rhetoric relies on classical assumptions about humanity and history...

This book provides a systematic study of three foundational issues in the semantics of natural language that have been relatively neglected in the past few decades. focuses on the formal characterization of intensions, the nature of an adequate type...

An Introduction to Lexical Semantics provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of lexical semantics, analysing the major lexical categories in English: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. The book illustrates step-by-step how to use...

Temporality surveys the ways in which languages of different types refer to past, present, and future events, through an in-depth examination of four major language types: tense-based English, tense-aspect-based Polish, aspect-based Chinese, and...

The idea that the expression of radical beliefs is a predictor to future acts of political violence has been a central tenet of counter-extremism over the last two decades. Not only has this imposed a duty upon doctors, lecturers and teachers to inform...

This book presents the creation of a bilingual thesaurus (Italian and English), and its conversion into an ontology system, oriented to the Cybersecurity field of knowledge term management and the identification of a replicable method over other...

This book integrates theoretical and practical perspectives on computer-assisted analysis of spoken discourse, reflecting recent important developments in speech analysis for language teaching and assessment. Bringing together into one volume the methods...

This book describes and analyzes the lexical phonology and morphology of the verb stem in Ciyao, a Bantu language spoken in Southern Malawi, Northwestern Mozambique, and Southern Tanzania. This is the most complete and authoritative treatment to date of...

This book explores the context around why English prepositions are used in figurative language more frequently than nouns and verbs, using corpus-based evidence to examine the most often used prepositions and how they are employed and for what purpose...

First published in 1992, Vocabularies of Public Life explores the revolution that has taken place in our understanding of contemporary culture and decodes a number of the symbols which now dominate public life. Wuthnow divides the essays collected here...

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment.The debate...

Without assuming arbitrary restrictions on grammar notation at the outset, 'Bare Grammars' aim to provide the most straightforward definitions of the constructions present in human languages, together with a compositional semantics. A simple generative...

Quantification forms a significant aspect of cross-linguistic research into both sentence structure and meaning. This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized...

The phenomenon of case has long been a central topic of study in linguistics. While the majority of the literature so far has been on the syntax of case, semantics also has a crucial role to play in how case operates. This book investigates the...

Human societies name and classify colours in various ways. Knowing this, is it possible to retrieve colour systems from the past? This book presents the basic principles of modern colour semantics, including the recognition of basic vocabulary, subsets,...

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The major principles and systems of C. S. Peirce's ground-breaking theory of signs and signification are now generally well known. Less well...

The extent to which language is inseparable from thought has long been a major subject of debate across linguistics, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines. In this study, Wallace Chafe presents a thought-based theory of language that goes beyond...

Discourse-pragmatic markers are central to everyday language, yet many aspects of their use and functions remain elusive or under-investigated. Bringing together a global team of leading scholars, this volume presents a representative showcase of work...

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express...

Politeness is key to all of our relationships and plays a fundamental part in the way we communicate with each other and the way we define ourselves. It is not limited only to conventional aspects of linguistic etiquette, but encompasses all types of...

Discourse markers constitute an important part of linguistic communication, and research on this phenomenon has been a thriving field of study over the past three decades. However, a problem that has plagued this research is that these markers exhibit a...

This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examines the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many...

French is a syntactically interesting language, with aspects of its word order and clause structure triggering a variety of important developments in syntactic theory. This is a concise and accessible guide to the syntax of Modern French, providing a...

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the...

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This...

Meaning in the Media addresses the issue of how we should respond to competing claims about meaning put forward in confrontations between people or organisations in highly charged circumstances such as bitter public controversies and expensive legal...

Chapter 1 of this text introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses, in detail, the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the...

Irony is an intriguing topic, central to the study of meaning in language. This book provides an introduction to the pragmatics of irony. It surveys key work carried out on irony in a range of disciplines such as semantics, pragmatics, philosophy and...

Taking as its starting point what is sometimes called 'the prison house of language' - the widespread feeling that language falls terribly short when it comes to articulating the rich and disparate contents of the human mental tapestry - this book sets...

This pioneering study combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context -...

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as...

Languages around the world organize their lexicons, or vocabularies, in a myriad of different ways. This book is a celebration of global linguistic diversity, bringing together fascinating cases from a wide range of languages to explore how and why this...

Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up...