Semantics

This book considers how expressions involving number are used by speakers and understood by hearers. A speaker's choice of expression can be a complex problem even in relatively simple-looking domains. In the case of numerical expressions, there are...

This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing more than a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the...

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...

This volume brings together the latest research on the semantics of nouns in both familiar and less well-documented languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and...

This is a book about the multi-faceted notion of gender. Gender differences form the basis for family life, patterns of socialization, distribution of tasks, and spheres of responsibilities. The way gender is articulated shapes the world of individuals,...

This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive...

This book focuses on the semantic phenomenon of evaluativity and its consequences across constructions. Evaluativity has traditionally been associated exclusively with the positive construction, a term for sentences with a gradable adjective but with no...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides an...

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies...

In The Black God Trope and Rhetorical Resistance: A Tradition of Race and Religion, Armondo R. Collins theorizes Black Nationalist rhetorical strategies as an avenue to better understanding African American communication practices. The author...

A classic introduction to the study of meaning, revitalised for a new generation of linguistsIdeal for undergraduate students exploring English linguistics for the first time, the new edition of this successful textbook is compact and self-contained,...

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...

This book investigates the nature and properties of roots, the core elements of word meaning. In particular, chapters examine the interaction of roots with syntactic structure, and the role of their semantic and morpho-phonological properties in that...

In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions. The book begins by focusing on the psychological constraints...

Abstract objects have been a central topic in philosophy since antiquity. Philosophers have defended various views about abstract objects by appealing to metaphysical considerations, considerations regarding mathematics or science, and, not infrequently,...

Pragmatics is a core discipline within linguistics, but is without an introduction organised by key terms - until now. Key Terms In Pragmatics succeeds in tackling this problem by giving students clear, explanatory definitions of over 300 key terms in...

Focusing on Slavic languages, Danko Sipka provides a systematic approach to lexical indicators of cultural identity. In contrast to existing research, which focuses heavily on syntactic and phonological approaches, Sipka's approach is novel, more...

This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought...

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...

The phenomenon of multimodality is central to our everyday interaction. 'Hybrid' modes of communication that combine traditional uses of language with imagery, tagging, hashtags and voice-recognition tools have become the norm. Bringing together concepts...

An accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures, a key topic in all frameworks of pragmatics. Starting with a definition of the various types of implicatures in Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, the book covers many important...

Politeness plays a vital role in maintaining class differences. In this highly original account, Sara Mills analyses the interrelationship between class and linguistic interaction, uncovering the linguistic ideologies behind politeness in British English...

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is a term used to describe the use of English as a common language for communication between speakers whose first language is not English. Providing a unique and original perspective on this subject, Istvan Kecskes...

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...

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...

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of...

Much contemporary thinking about language is animated by the idea that the core function of language is to represent how the world is and that therefore the notion of representation should play a fundamental explanatory role in any explanation of...

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...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book introduces a systematic...

Pragmatics - the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say - is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including...

In "Theory and Evidence in Semantics", editors Erhard W. Hinrichs and John Nerbonne present a series of state-of-the-art papers that investigate the interface of natural language semantics with other modules of grammar - such as morphology, syntax, and...

An accessible and important look at what is truly behind our digital outrageOn any given day, at any given hour, across the various platforms constituting what we call social media, someone is angry. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit. 4Chan. In The...

The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology draws on nearly 7,000 published MLB game summaries to explore the contours of baseball terminology in Spanish. Organized in a logical sequence that corresponds to various aspects of...

This book presents an analysis of how speakers of typologically diverse languages report present-time situations. It begins from the assumption that there is a restriction on the use of the present tense to report present-time dynamic/perfective...

This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor in English. Metaphor is one of the hot topics in present-day linguistics, with a huge range of research focusing on the systematic connections between...

Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Language and Linguistics Data. Suddenly it is everywhere, and more and more of it is about us. The computing revolution has transformed our understanding of nature. Now it is transforming human behaviour. For some,...

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of...

This book presents a typological survey and analysis of the co-compound construction. This understudied phenomenon is essentially a compound whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meanings of its components, as when in some varieties of English...

Humankind has always been fascinated and troubled by the way languages and dialects differ. Linguistically based differences in point of view have preoccupied many original minds of the past, such as Kant, and remain at the forefront of language study:...

Reference is a major theme in the study of language and language use. Providing a relevance-theoretic account of reference resolution, this book develops our understanding of procedurally encoded meaning by exploring its function and role in reference...