Language Arts & Disciplines : Semantics

Ephemeral Territories weaves together narratives and representations of Canadian identity—from political philosophy and cultural theory to art and films—to develop and complicate familiar views of identity and selfhood. In a critical engagement with notions of territory, identity, racial difference, separatism, multiculturalism, and homelessness, Manning delves into the question of what it means to be at home in Canada. more...

Price: $60.00

This is the first comprehensive study of evaluative phenomena, from connotations to judgement of value, in language and discourse. It explores the cognitive foundations of evaluation, and emphasises its social dimension. more...

Price: $165.00

Evidentiality is one of the most fascinating categories of human languages. In a number of languages, scattered across the world, every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based - whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from somebody else. This is a very powerful device for human communication. Many people think that it would be a good thing if our politicians had to talk in this way. The book investigates a variety of other grammatical categories related to evidentiality, such as aspect and person. It will be of interest to any grammarian. It also discusses the cognitive and sociolinguistic consequences of evidentiality in a language. This will make it of interest to a wider audience, including psychologists and philosophers. - ;In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or. reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as &q more...

Price: $70.00

The papers in this volume reflect current trends in international research in pragmatics over recent years. The unique feature of the book is that the authors coming from ten different countries represent all aspects of pragmatics and address issues that have emerged as the result of recent research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, and communication. Recent theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface, empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology, intercultural communication and bilingual pragmatics have directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination and revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. In addition, cultural changes originating from globalization have affected the relation of language to the wider world. In particular, the spread of English as a global language has led to the emergence of issues of usage, power, and control that must be dealt with in a comprehensive pragmatics of language. Pragmatic theories have traditionally emphasized the importance of intention, rationality, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in the formation and execution of communicative acts. The new approaches to pragmatic research reflected in this volume, while not questioning the central role of these factors, extend the purview of the discipline to allow for a more comprehensive picture of their functioning and interrelationship within the dynamics of communication. The papers address these issues from a variety of directions. In Part I, Searle and Horn examine language use and pragmatics from a philosophical perspective. In Part II, the cognitive aspect of pragmatics is represented in the papers of Moeschler, Ruiz de Mendoza  & Baicchi, and Giora. They focus on well-known domains such as illocutionary constructions, the pragmatics of negation, and the relevance-theoretic concept of explicature. However, each paper more...

Price: $176.00

This book covers the essentials of modality and offers both foundational ideas and cutting edge advances. The book consists of what are essentially tutorials on modality and modal notions, covering definitions of modality, morphosyntactic form, conceptual more...

Price: $132.30