"We use politeness every day when interacting with other people. Yet politeness is an impressively complex linguistic process, and studying it can tell us a lot about the social and cultural values of social groups or even a whole society, helping us to understand how humans 'en…
"Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics …
"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 linguist…
"Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phen…
"Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phen…
"Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phen…
"Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phen…
"Verbal silence touches on every possible aspect of daily life. This book provides a full linguistic analysis of the role of silence in language, exploring perspectives from semantics, semiotics, pragmatics, phonetics, syntax, grammar and poetics, and taking into account a range…
"Verbal silence touches on every possible aspect of daily life. This book provides a full linguistic analysis of the role of silence in language, exploring perspectives from semantics, semiotics, pragmatics, phonetics, syntax, grammar and poetics, and taking into account a range…
Elastic language is a phenomenon in linguistics that refers to how we stretch the meanings of words, depending on the context in which they are used - for example many, about 20, perhaps, could be. This study looks specifically at elastic language in the fields of medicine and h…
"This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting a…
"This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting a…
"This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting a…
Argues that the "locus and focus" of differences among languages lies not so much in practical or rational aspects as in the complexity and richness of more poetic dimensions--in the nuances of words, or the style and voice of an author. This poetic reformulation of what has bee…
A biography of two troublesome words. Isn't it ironic Or is it Never mind, I'm just being sarcastic (or am I ). Irony and sarcasm are two of the most misused, misapplied, and misunderstood words in our conversational lexicon. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge s…
