Semantics

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...

Over the past several decades, linguistic theorizing of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), along with an intensely growing body of crosslinguistic studies, have revealed complexity in the data that challenges traditional distinctions and treatments of these...

This book steers a middle course between two opposing conceptions that currently dominate the field of semantics, the logical and cognitive approaches. Patrick Duffley brings to light the inadequacies of both of these frameworks, arguing that linguistic...

Bringing together work by leading scholars in relevance theory, this volume showcases cutting-edge research within the theory, and demonstrates its influence across a range of fields including linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, literary...

General extenders are phrases like 'or something', 'and everything', 'and things (like that)', 'and stuff (like that)', and 'and so on'. Although they are an everyday feature of spoken language, are crucial in successful interpersonal communication, and...

To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these...

Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical...

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than three years (in cloth and paper) and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often...

This lively textbook introduces students and scholars to practical and precise methods for articulating the meanings of words and sentences, and for revealing connections between language and culture. Topics range over emotions, speech acts, words for...

This book tracks the developmental changes in writing across the schools curriculum, enhancing a key area of research in applied linguistics. Writing development has been a key area of research in applied linguistics for some time, but most work has...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262539951Author Richard K. LarsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 432Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

The relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. This comprehensive 2005 survey provides an overview of this important area of research, exploring theories of how a verb's semantics can determine the...

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of...

The second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory presents a comprehensive introduction to cutting-edge research in contemporary theoretical and computational semantics. Features completely new content from the first edition of The...

Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show...