The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its construal in context. Evidence is drawn from natura...

In this book one of the world's foremost philosophers of language presents his unifying vision of the field--its principal achievements, its most pressing current questions, and its most promising future directions. In addition to explaining the progress philosophers have made toward creating a theoretical framework for the study of language, Scott Soames investigates foundational concepts--such as truth, reference, and meaning--that are central to the philosophy of language and important ...

'Metaphor', a form of figurative language in which one thing or idea is expressed in terms of another, is becoming an increasingly popular area of study, as it is relevant to the work of semanticists, pragmatists, discourse analysts and also those working at the interface of language and literature and in other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. This book provides a summary, critique and comparison of the most important theories on how metaphors are used and understood, drawing...

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...

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersona...

A group of authors containing both leading authorities and young researchers addresses a number of issues of contrastiveness, polarity items and exhaustivity, quantificational expressions and the implicatures they generate, and the interaction between semantic operators and speech acts. The 19 contributions provide insights on the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. The volume’s reach is cross-linguistic and takes an unorthodox multi-paradigm approach. Languages studied range from ...

This book argues that a basic grasp of philosophy and logic can produce written and spoken material that is both grammatically correct and powerful. The author analyses errors in grammar, word choice, phrasing and sentences that even the finest writers can fail to notice; concentrating on subtle missteps and errors that can make the difference between good and excellent prose. Each chapter addresses how common words and long-established grammatical rules are often misused or ignored altoge...

This volume explores the interpretation of indefinites and the constraints on their distribution by paying particular attention to key issues in the interface between syntax and semantics: the relation between the semantic properties of indefinite determiners and the denotation of indefinite DPs, their scope, and their behaviour in generic and conditional sentences. Examples come from French, other Romance languages and English. Central to the proposed analyses is a distinction between two...

In this book Linda Zagzebski presents an original moral theory based on direct reference to exemplars of goodness, modeled on the Putnam-Kripke theory which revolutionized semantics in the seventies. In Exemplarist Moral Theory, exemplars are identified through the emotion of admiration, which Zagzebski argues is both a motivating emotion and an emotion whose cognitive content permits the mapping of the moral domain around the features of exemplars. Using examples of heroes, saint...

How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to s...

Researchers in critical discourse analysis (CDA) have often pointed to grammar as a locus of ideology in discourse. This book illustrates the role that grammars as models of language (and image) can play in revealing ideological properties of texts and discourse in social and political contexts.The book takes the reader through three distinct grammatical frameworks – functional grammar, multimodal grammar and cognitive grammar. Using examples taken from a range of discourses relati...

This volume is a selection of papers presented at a workshop entitled Predicative Forms in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases organized in Toulouse in August 1996. A predicate is a named relation that exists among one or more arguments. In natural language, predicates are realized as verbs, prepositions, nouns and adjectives, to cite the most frequent ones. Research on the identification, organization, and semantic representa tion of predicates in artificial intelligence and i...