Semantics

This volume presents the author's view of the scope of linguistic description, insofar as the field of linguistics touches on questions of the meanings of sentences. Fillmore takes the subject matter of linguistics, in its grammatical, semantic and...

The concept of 'strong generative capacity' (SGC) of a linguistic formalism was introduced by Chomsky in the early sixties in order to characterize descriptive capacity. However, the original definition proposed by Chomsky turned out to be unusable,...

Because of the ease of their implementation, attribute-value based theories of grammar are becoming increasingly popular in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts and in computational linguistics. This book provides a...

This book collects recent work in OT-LFG (Optimality Theoretic Lexical Functional Grammar) which is developing the empirical coverage of the approach as well as the formal foundations of the OT approach. The papers deal with phenomena in a wide range of...

In this book, Ben Voth argues that the centennial of the modern presidency embodied in the rhetoric of presidents Wilson, Harding and Coolidge provides an opportunity to re-examine our conventional understanding of U.S. presidents and presidential...

A new framework for understanding how algorithms influenceWeb applications offer us conclusions about science. Twitter bots generate art. Machine-learning systems satirize politicians. We live in an era where a substantial share of our private and public...

Examines emergent forms of creative civil disobedience that have arisen in response to digital tools of bodily surveillance and control The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data...

Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves...

Delves into the rhetorical work of elective single mothers (ESMs) in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries as they sought-and continue to seek-to legitimize their maternal identities and family formations. Scholars of rhetoric have largely...

Examines emergent forms of creative civil disobedience that have arisen in response to digital tools of bodily surveillance and control The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data...

Whenever political and social decisions use categories of identity such as race, religion, social class, or nationality to distinguish groups of people, they risk holding certain groups as inferior and culturally "Other." When people employ ideologies of...

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either...

This book is the first systematic account of the syntax and semantics of names. Drawing on work in onomastics, philosophy, and linguistics John Anderson examines the distribution and subcategorization of names within a framework of syntactic categories,...

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...

In 1852 Peter Mark Roget eclipsed a rich tradition of topically based dictionaries with the publication of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas. Based on intuition as much as on...

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig examine the foundations and applications of Davidson's influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages. The program uses an axiomatic truth theory for a language, which meets certain constraints, to...

This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related phenomena. Pronominal resumption is the realization of the base of a syntactic dependency as a bound pronoun. Resumption occurs in unbounded dependencies, such as relative...

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish,...

Antonymy is recongized as an important type of meaning relation in natural languages, yet there are very few detailed empirical studies of the topic. Through an analysis of a corpus of 43 contemporary English-language novels Dr Mettinger isolates ten...

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...

Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic...

This book offers a Minimalist analysis of certain syntactic phenomena in Russian associated with negation. These phenomena include the distribution of morphologically negative words and the pattern of Negative Concord they exhibit (whereby multiple...

This volume has brought together research from both 'cognitive' and 'functional' approaches to linguistics. The collection includes work from cognitive science disciplines whose concerns overlap with linguistics, such as artificial intelligence,...

In this book, two related phenomena are studied: presupposition and anaphora. Dynamic semantics is by now widely accepted as a first-rate foundation for such an exercise and it forms the backbone of most of the work in this book. A recurring additional...

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by...

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically-in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youthDreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex...

Women candidates are under more pressure to communicate competence and likability than men. And when women balance these rhetorical pressures, charges of inauthenticity creep in, suggesting the structural and strategic anti-woman backlash at play in...

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic...

This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German...

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...

Beyond Alternations provides a unified account of the semantic effects of the German applicative ("be-") construction. Using natural data from a varietyof corpora, the authors propose that this pattern is inherently meaningful and that its meaning...

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically-in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youthDreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex...

How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline-the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times...

How the syntax used in US political discourse creates the very crises it describes American public culture is obsessed with crisis. Political polarization, economic collapse, moral decline-the worst seems always yet to come and already here. Tense Times...

At the turn of the twentieth century, the white slavery panic pervaded American politics, influencing the creation of the FBI, the enactment of immigration law, and the content of international treaties. At the core of this controversy was the...

The past 20 years have witnessed an ever-increasing number of interdisciplinay research collaborations as computer scientists, logicians, linguists, philosophers, and psychologists all explore the same question: how can logic illuminate the nature of...

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...

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue...

Delves into the rhetorical work of elective single mothers (ESMs) in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries as they sought-and continue to seek-to legitimize their maternal identities and family formations Scholars of rhetoric have largely...