Language Arts & Disciplines : Semantics

Deals with pragmatic factors involved in the evolution of grammatical or lexical forms or in the emergence of complex syntactic structures in various languages (Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish). more...

Price: $114.95

The Handbook of Business Discourse is the most comprehensive overview of the field to date. It offers an accessible and authoritative introduction to a range of historical, disciplinary, methodological and cultural perspectives on business discourse and addresses many of the pressing issues facing a growing, varied and increasingly international field of research. The collection also illustrates some of the challenges of defining and delimiting a relatively recent and eclectic field of studies, including debates on the very definition of 'business discourse'. Part One includes chapters on the origins, advances and features of business discourse in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Part Two covers methodological approaches such as mediated communication, corpus linguistics, organisational discourse, multimodality, race and management communication, and rhetorical analysis. Part Three moves on to look at disciplinary perspectives such as sociology, pragmatics, gender studies, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology and business communication. Part Four looks at cultural perspectives across a range of geographical areas including Spain, Brazil, Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. The concluding section reflects on future developments in Europe, North America and Asia.Key Features:*Consists of newly commissioned chapters, authored by a vibrant group of internationally-known experts and emerging younger scholars, representing more than twenty countries.* Individual chapters aim to offer breadth, depth and, where appropriate, illustrative analytical examples, and can be read as self-contained, mini-introductions to each topic.*A valuable resource for students, researchers, teachers and trainers looking for a research-based, wide-ranging introduction to business discourse in a single volume. more...

Price: $185.00

Ever since Darwin, animal behavior has intrigued and perplexed human observers. The elaborate mating rituals, lavish decorative displays, complex songs, calls, dances and many other forms of animal signaling raise fascinating questions. To what degree can animals communicate within their own species and even between species? What evolutionary purpose do such communications serve? Perhaps most importantly, what can animal signaling tell us about our own non-verbal forms of communication? In The Handicap Principle, Amotz and Ashivag Zahavi offer a unifying theory that brilliantly explains many previously baffling aspects of animal signaling and holds up a mirror in which ordinary human behaviors take on surprising new significance. The wide-ranging implications of the Zahavis' new theory make it arguably the most important advance in animal behavior in decades. Based on 20 years of painstaking observation, the Handicap Principle illuminates an astonishing variety of signaling behaviors in animals ranging from ants and ameba to peacocks and gazelles. Essentially, the theory asserts that for animal signals to be effective they must be reliable, and to be reliable they must impose a cost, or handicap, on the signaler. When a gazelle sights a wolf, for instance, and jumps high into the air several times before fleeing, it is signaling, in a reliable way, that it is in tip-top condition, easily able to outrun the wolf. (A human parallel occurs in children's games of tag, where faster children will often taunt their pursuer before running). By momentarily handicapping itself--expending precious time and energy in this display--the gazelle underscores the truthfulness of its signal. Such signaling, the authors suggest, serves the interests of both predator and prey, sparing each the exhaustion of a pointless chase. Similarly, the enormous cost a peacock incurs by carrying its elaborate and weighty tail-feathers, which interfere with food gathering, reliably communica more...

Price: $26.00

Drawing on the disciplines of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Minchin studies the speeches that Homer attributes to his characters. She describes how the poet may have used his memory for everyday talk to construct such speeches, and examines how they reflect the speaker's age, status, and gender. - ;Homeric Voices is a study, from a compositional point of view, of the substantial speeches and exchanges of speech that Homer depicts in his songs. Drawing on research in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive psychology, Elizabeth Minchin considers the words that Homer attributes to his characters from two perspectives, as cognitive and as social phenomena. She asks how the poet worked with memory to generate the speech forms that he represents; and how. Homeric speech constructs and reveals the social hierarchies that are bound up with age, status, and gender - with particular interest in gender - in the world of the poems. - ;All Homerists and all scholars of oral epic will want to add this book to their personal libraries. - Jonathan Ready, Bryn Mawr Classical Review more...

Price: $133.65

Plenty of people want to write poetry - yet while it is not necessarily difficult to write poetry badly, it is harder to write it well. In this guide Fred Sedgwick explains - with numerous examples from successful poets - how the creative process works, from the initial impulse to write all the way through to the crafted and expressive poetry at the end. more...

Price: $90.00