Modifiers and modification have been a major focus of inquiry for as long as the formal study of semantics has existed, and remain at the heart of major theoretical debates in the field. Modification offers comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics, including vagueness and gradability, comparatives and degree constructions, the lexical semantics of adjectives and adverbs, crosscategorial regularities, and the relation between meaning and syntactic category. Morzycki guides the reade...

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that...

Although there is no shortage of definitions for pragmatics the received wisdom is that 'pragmatics' simply cannot be coherently defined. In this groundbreaking book Mira Ariel challenges the prominent definitions of pragmatics, as well as the widely-held assumption that specific topics – implicatures, deixis, speech acts, politeness – naturally and uniformly belong on the pragmatics turf. She reconstitutes the field, defining grammar as a set of conventional codes, and pragmatics as a set...

The contributors in this collection question what kinds of relationships hold between narrative studies and the recently established field of multimodality, evaluate how we might develop an analytical vocabulary which recognizes that stories do not consist of words alone, and demonstrate the ways in which multimodality brings into fresh focus the embodied nature of narrative production and processing. Engaging with a spectrum of multimodal storytelling, from ‘low tech’ examples encompassin...

This book provides useful strategies for language learning, researching and the understanding of social factors that influence human behavior. It offers an account of how we use human, animal and plant fixed expressions every day and the cultural aspects hidden behind them. These fixed expressions include various linguistic vehicles, such as fruit, jokes and taboos that are related to speakers’ use in the real world. The linguistic research in Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, German and English fu...

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 Handbook of Contemporary Semantic TheoryFeatures contributions by leading semanticists, who introduce core areas of contemporary semantic research, while discussing current researchSuitable for ...

What can the philosophy of language learn from the classical Indian philosophical tradition? As recently as twenty or thirty years ago this question simply would not have arisen. If a practitioner of analytic philosophy of language of that time had any view of Indian philosophy at all, it was most likely to be the stereotyped picture of a gaggle of navel gazing mystics making vaguely Bradley-esque pronouncements on the oneness of the one that was one once. Much work has been done in the in...

This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning – one which foregrounds a reasoning subject’s individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distincti...

The research and its outcomes presented in this book, is about lexicon-based sentiment analysis. It uses single-, and multi-word concepts from the SenticNet sentiment lexicon as the source of sentiment information for the purpose of sentiment classification.In 6 chapters the book sheds light on the comparison of sentiment classification accuracy between single-word and multi-word concepts, for which a bespoke sentiment analysis system developed by the author was used.This b...

First published in 1993, this book provides clear illustrations of discourse analytic work and empirical critiques of the traditional psychological approaches. Drawing on a range of examples, the contributors argue that identity, deeply felt emotions, prejudice, and attitudes to social issues are created by the language that describes them rather than being intrinsic to the individual. In illustrating the variety of methods available through their studies of punk identity, sexual jealousy,...

This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making ne...

This book focuses on case studies of vocabulary strategy use and presents an in-depth account of the vocabulary learning experiences of Chinese students in the UK. It challenges the view that vocabulary strategies result only from learners’ cognitive choices, and provides insightful analysis of the interplay between learner characteristics, agency and context in the process of strategic learning. The author makes a strong case for using qualitative methodologies to examine the dynamic, com...