Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Semantics

This book presents a study of meaning relations, linking the philosophical tradition of conceptual analysis with recent theories and methodologies in cognitive semantics. Its main concern is the extent to which analyzing meaning relations between cognate words reveal the infrastructure of the actual and mental lexicon, assuming that language mirrors thought. Sovran aims to elucidate their infrastructure and the metaphorical and perceptual models that constitute abstract concepts, dealing finally with the role of abstraction in poetic metaphors. Overall, this volume addresses major...

Introducing English Semantics, Second Edition is a practical introduction to understanding how meanings are expressed in the English language. Presenting the basic principles of the discipline of semantics, this newly revised edition explores the knowledge of language that speakers have which enables them to communicate - to express observations, opinions, intentions and the products of their imagination. The text emphasises pragmatic investigation with numerous illustrative examples of concepts and ample exercises to help students develop and improve their linguistic analysis skills....

This book contributes to the analysis of film from a multimodal and textual perspective by extending formal semantics into the realm of multimodal discourse analysis. It accounts for both the inferential as well as intersemiotic meaning making processes in filmic discourse and therefore addresses one of the main questions that have been asked within film theory and multimodal analysis: How do we understand film and multimodal texts? The book offers an analytical answer to this question by providing a systematic tool for the description of this comprehension process. It aims to advance...

This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and wh-), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes Split-DP structures or Floating quantification.

Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of wh in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their...

Der offentlichen Diskussion um den Islam liegt ein Konzept 'Islam' zugrunde, das im Diskurs gespiegelt wird und zugleich dort auch entsteht. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht diesen Entstehungsprozess und zeigt, dass Bedeutung nicht nur an einzelne Ausdrucke geknupft, sondern auch ein flachiges Phanomen ist. Dabei bewegt sich der analysierende Blick graduell gestuft auf die Texte (Zeitungen, Stellungnahmen, Abhandlungen usw.) zu: Der zu untersuchende Textausschnitt wird immer kleiner gewahlt, um ihn bei jedem Schritt genauer betrachten zu konnen.
Jede der in der Studie angewandten...

Dieser Band zu Ehren von Klaus Baumgartners 65. Geburtstag versammelt 15 Beitrage zu aktuellen Problemen der (lexikalischen) Semantik: dem Zusammenhang zwischen Syntax und Semantik, zum Problem einer reprasentationalen versus einer dynamischen Bedeutungskonzeption sowie zur Frage der konzeptuellen Basis der Semantik. Der Gegenstand der Untersuchungen ist breit gefachert: von Prapositionen uber temporale Konjunktionen, Verben und ihrer Argumentstruktur bis hin zu textuellen Zusammenhangen.

There are fewer distinctions in any language than there are distinct things in the universe. If, therefore, languages are ways of representing the universe, a primary function of their elements must be to allow the much more varied kinds of elements out of which the universe is made to be categorized in specific ways. A prototype approach to linguistic categories is a particular way of answering the question of how this categorization operates. It involves two claims. First, that linguistic categorization exploits principles that are not specific to language but characterize most,...

Corpus linguistics uses specialist software to identify linguistic patterns in large computerised collections of text - patterns which then must be interpreted and explained by human researchers.
This book critically explores how corpus linguistics techniques can help analysis of language and gender by conducting a number of case studies on topics which include: directives in spoken conversations, changes in sexist and non-sexist language use over time, personal adverts, press representation of gay men, and the ways that boys and girls are constructed through language. The book thus...

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives--until now.

This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language...