Implicit Meanings was first published to great acclaim in 1975. It includes writings on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas' work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought, such as food, pollution, risk, animals and myth. The papers in this text demonstrate the importance of seeking to understand beliefs and practices that are implicit and a priori within what might seem to be alien cultures.
What is meaning? Paul Horwich presents an original philosophical theory, demonstrates its richness, and reconciles his theory with a rational view of meaning derived from its use, thereby vindicating his standpoint.
Our ability to acquire a language – one of the most complex semiotic systems – is stunning. However, to describe and explain even a small fraction of this system and of this ability is a great challenge. This book brings together modified papers of seventeen university scholars from Belarus, Germany, Russia and Lithuania originally presented at an international conference held in Minsk, Belarus, in 2017, on different hidden and implicit aspects of language and the ways of disclosing and explicating them. Language is understood by them differently as a cognitive ability, a specific semiotic structure interwoven with culture, and a discourse. This book will be of great interest to a wide range of linguist-theoreticians, specialists in applied linguistics, and the general reader with an interest in understanding what exactly language is.
Inferencing is defined as 'the act of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true', and it is one of the most important processes necessary for successful comprehension during reading. This volume features contributions by distinguished researchers in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience on topics central to our understanding of the inferential process during reading. The chapters cover aspects of inferencing that range from the fundamental bottom-up processes that form the basis for an inference to occur, to the more strategic processes that transpire when a reader is engaged in literary understanding of a text. Basic activation mechanisms, word-level inferencing, methodological considerations, inference validation, causal inferencing, emotion, development of inferences processes as a skill, embodiment, contributions from neuroscience, and applications to naturalistic text are all covered as well as expository text, online learning materials, and literary immersion.
Prejudice is often not a conscious attitude: because of ingrained habits in relating to the world, one may act in prejudiced ways toward others without explicitly understanding the meaning of one’s actions. Similarly, one may know how to do certain things, like ride a bicycle, without being able to articulate in words what that knowledge is. These are examples of what Alexis Shotwell discusses in Knowing Otherwise as phenomena of “implicit understanding.” Presenting a systematic analysis of this concept, she highlights how this kind of understanding may be used to ground positive political and social change, such as combating racism in its less overt and more deep-rooted forms. Shotwell begins by distinguishing four basic types of implicit understanding: nonpropositional, skill-based, or practical knowledge; embodied knowledge; potentially propositional knowledge; and affective knowledge. She then develops the notion of a racialized and gendered “common sense,” drawing on Gramsci and critical race theorists, and clarifies the idea of embodied knowledge by showing how it operates in the realm of aesthetics. She also examines the role that both negative affects, like shame, and positive affects, like sympathy, can play in moving us away from racism and toward political solidarity and social justice. Finally, Shotwell looks at the politicized experience of one’s body in feminist and transgender theories of liberation in order to elucidate the role of situated sensuous knowledge in bringing about social change and political transformation.
Discourse Interpretation: Approaches and Applications provides new insights into the complex area of discourse interpretation in a wide range of discourse types and genres. The authors adopt a variety of approaches to the representation and interpretation of meaning in discourse to share the understanding that discourse interpretation is a dynamic construct constantly open to reinterpretation in the light of the intentions and purposes of in particular social, historical and situational contexts. The chapters of the book comprise essays by linguists working in the fields of (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics and sociolinguistics which address methodological issues in discourse interpretation (Part I) and explore various aspects of representation and interpretation of meaning in different genres of spoken and written discourse, namely conversational, academic, media, political and fictional discourse (Part II). This volume, which combines theoretical insights with empirical investigations, contributes to a better understanding of the interpretative process and will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of English.
'Jean-Jacques Lecercle's remarkable Philosophy of Nonsense offers a sustained and important account of an area that is usually hastily dismissed. Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - he manages to bring out the importance of nonsense' - Andrew Benjamin, University of Warwick Why are we, and in particular why are philosophers and linguists, so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? This amusing, yet rigorous new book by Jean-Jacques Lecercle shows how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy.
Reconsiders the role of formal logic in the analytic approach to philosophy, using cutting-edge mathematical techniques to elucidate twentieth-century debates.
Delo odpira nekatere temeljne dileme razmerja med resničnostjo in njenim ubesedovanjem. Osvetlili so jih strokovnjaki različnih disciplin, ki jih povezuje temeljno semiotično stališče o tekstu kot kompleksnem znaku, katerega funkciji sta reprezentiranje resničnosti in pragmatično umeščanje govorečega/spoznavajočega subjekta v to resničnost.
Narrative Inquiry provides both a new theoretical orientation and a set of practical techniques that students and experienced researchers can use to conduct narrative research. Explaining the principles of what she terms “dynamic narrating,” author Colette Daiute provides an approach to narrative inquiry that builds on practices of daily life where we use storytelling to connect with other people, deal with social structures, make sense of surrounding events, and craft our own way of fitting in with various contexts. Throughout the book, Daiute illustrates and applies narrative inquiry with a wide variety of examples, practical activities, charts, suggestions for interpreting analyses, and tips on writing up results. Narrative Inquiry integrates cultural-historical activity, discourse theories (including critical discourse theory and conversation analysis), and interdisciplinary research on narrative as applied to a range of research projects in different cultural settings.
