This book provides a pragmatic analysis of presidential language. Pragmatics is concerned with "meaning in context," or the relationship between what we say and what we mean. John Wilson explores the various ways in which U.S. Presidents have used language within specific social contexts to achieve specific objectives. This includes obfuscation, misdirection, the use of metaphor or ambiguity, or in some cases simply lying.
This is a lively, comprehensive introduction to current morphological theory and analysis is designed to take absolute beginners to a point where they can approach the current literature in the subject. This updated second edition contains numerous in-text exercises that involve the reader in doing morphology by formulating hypotheses and testing them against data from English and numerous other languages, as well as additional reading suggestions to take the student further into a particular area.
Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and Czech pronunciation. Along the way we learn why Esperanto will never catch on, how the language of William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands and why Finnish is the easiest European language.
Great for Med Students. The classic leading-edge guide to heart surgery in adults -- completely updated by leaders in the field In this trusted reference, renowned cardiac surgeon and Harvard professor Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn takes you through all aspects of heart surgery in adults.
Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents offers a radical shift in the analysis of discourse anaphora, from a purely pragmatic account to a cognitive account, in terms of processing procedures. Mira Ariel defines referring expressions as markers signalling the degree of Accessibility in memory of the antecedent. The notion of Accessibility is explicitly defined, the crucial factors being the Salience of the antecedent, and the Unity between the antecedent and the anaphor.
The Perfect and the Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English
In this study the author discusses various theories that have been put forward to account for the choice between the present perfect and the preterite in expressions of past time in English. The distribution between the two verb forms is examined in a varied corpus consisting of more than 13,000 recorded verb forms, a little more than half of them from present-day English (British and American, spoken and written), the rest from earlier English all the way back to Old English. The analysis of the contemporary corpus is supplemented by elicitation test carried out with British and American informants.
Signalling nouns (SNs) are abstract nouns like 'fact', 'idea', 'problem' and 'result', which are non-specific in their meaning when considered in isolation and specific in their meaning by reference to their linguistic context. SNs contribute to cohesion and evaluation in discourse. This work offers the first book-length study of the SN phenomenon to treat the functional and discourse features of the category as primary. Using a balanced corpus of authentic data, the book explores the lexicogrammatical and discourse features of SNs in academic journal articles, textbooks, and lectures across a range of disciplines in the natural and social sciences.