2017 collection (152 titles)

Contextualizing Pragma-Dialectics contains a selection of 18 article reporting on research conducted in the past decade in which the institutional context in which argumentative discourse takes place is systematically taken into account. Some articles provide relevant theoretical backgrounds, other articles make clear how the extended pragma-dialectical theory can be used to analyse and evaluate argumentative discourse in specific institutional contexts. Next to argumentative discourse in the legal domain and the medical context of health communication, a great deal of attention is paid to various argumentative practices in the political domain or dealing with specific social issues. A contribution on multimodal argumentation is also included. All contributing authors are actively engaged in the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS).

This unique volume brings together various academic voices and critical reflections on discursive manifestations of hate and radicalism in contemporary public discourses. The authors venture into an array of socio-political contexts and public spaces, providing a compelling overview of similarities and divergences, continuities and discontinuities, outward hatred and the “politics of denial”, the use of collective symbols and construction of individual identities. Multiple genres are taken under scrutiny, including blogs, forums, internet websites and newspaper coverage, political speeches and debates, news reports and broadcast interactions, with a view to capturing the themes and pragma-rhetorical strategies within texts abundant with radical and hateful messages. In addition to examining discourse dynamics and the underlying logic of such texts, the contributors to this monograph explore the ideological motivations and the consequences they might have for social actions on both an individual and collective level.

Highly relevant in the contemporary world, divided by conflicts, power and resource struggles, right-wing extremism, and crusades against the imaginary Other, the book presents state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that should be of interest to specialists in pragmatics, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, as well as media and communication studies.

Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3:1 (2015).

What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made of that object. Consciousness is physical but not neural.

This groundbreaking hypothesis is supported by recent empirical findings in both perception and neuroscience, and is herein tested against a series of objections of both conceptual and empirical nature: the traditional mind-brain identity arguments from illusion, hallucinations, dreams, and mental imagery. The theory is then compared with existing externalist approaches including disjunctivism, realism, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind. Can experience and objects be one and the same?

This ground-breaking book marks a milestone in the history of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics, a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. The most authoritative book in the field to date, it outlines the theoretical and analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics, elaborating on its key theoretical/analytical notions of cultural cognition, cultural schema, cultural category, and cultural metaphor. In addition, it brings to light a wide array of cultural conceptualisations drawn from many different languages and language varieties. The book reveals how the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics can produce in-depth and insightful investigations into the cultural grounding of language in several domains and subdisciplines, including embodiment, emotion, religion, World Englishes, pragmatics, intercultural communication, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), and political discourse analysis. By presenting a comprehensive survey of recent research in Cultural Linguistics, this book demonstrates the relevance of the cultural conceptualisations encoded in language to all aspects of human life, from the very conceptualisations of life and death, to conceptualisations of emotion, body, humour, religion, gender, kinship, ageing, marriage, and politics. This book, in short, is a must-have reference work for scholars and students interested in Cultural Linguistics.

This book investigates the role that ambiguous evidence can play in the acquisition of syntax. To illustrate this, the book introduces a probabilistic learning model for syntactic parameters that learns a grammar of best fit to the learner’s evidence. The model is then applied to a range of cross-linguistic case studies – in Swiss German, Korean, and English – involving child errors, grammatical variability, and implicit negative evidence. Building on earlier work on language modeling, this book is unique for its focus on ambiguous evidence and its careful attention to the effects of parameters interacting with each other. This allows for a novel and principled account of several acquisition puzzles. With its inter-disciplinary approach, this book will be of broad interest to syntacticians, language acquisitionists, and cognitive scientists of language.

The fourth volume in the VARGReB series presents an in-depth investigation of Lithuanian copular constructions from the viewpoint of Cognitive Grammar. Apart from the fundamental problems of the ontology and taxonomy of copular sentences, the author also discusses a number of more specific questions on which the Lithuanian data, contrasted with those of English and other languages hitherto dealt with in the literature, can shed an interesting light, such as the nature and distinctive features of specificationals, the problem of subjecthood in this subtype of copular constructions, the aspectual semantics of copular sentences, etc. The attention given to the grammatical context of copular constructions and the multifarious relationships linking them to other construction types enhances the book’s relevance to the field of Lithuanian studies, whereas the dialogue and confrontation between the Cognitive perspective adopted by the author and the more formal approaches hitherto applied to the problem of copular sentences will add to its interest for the general reader.

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction.

As language is a multifaceted phenomenon, the study of language, as long as it is geared at providing a comprehensive picture of it, cannot be restricted to one component or one approach. This applies to the many different components of language as well, including semantics.

If we want to fully understand the phenomenon of language meaning, we must not limit our research to lexical semantics, syntax-induced meaning or pragmatics. In order to enable ourselves to construct a consistent account of meaning, we need to extract relevant information from research done in different frameworks and from different theoretical standpoints.

This volume brings together a number of computational, psycholinguistic as well as theoretical studies, which highlight and illustrate how research done in one subfield of linguistics can be relevant to others.

The articles highlight the different ways in which one can work with different aspects of language meaning.

This book is the result of intensive and continued discussions about the social role of language and its conceptualisations in societies other than Northern (European-American) ones. Language as a means of expressing as well as evoking both interiority and community has been in the focus of these discussions, led among linguists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists, and leading to a collection of essays that provide studies that transcend previously considered approaches. Its contributions are in particular interested in understanding how the attitude of the individual towards societal processes and strategies of norming is negotiated emotionally, and how individual interests and attitudes can be articulated. Discourses on public spaces are in the focus, in order to analyse those strategies that are employed to articulate dissent (for example, in the sense of face-threatening acts). This raises a number of questions on the spatial and public situatedness of emotions and language: How is the public space dealt with and reflected in language as property, heritage, and as a part of ascribed identities? Which role do emotions play in this space? How is emotion employed there as part of place making in relation to identity constructions? What is the connection between emotion, performance and emblematic spaces and places? Which opportunities of the violation of norms and transgression do such public spaces offer to actors and speakers? These questions intend to address the communicative representation of core cultural processes and concepts.