Linguistic Supertypes
Linguistic Supertypes

Author: Per Durst-Andersen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-02-28

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 3110253151

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The book offers a completely new view of language and of languages such as Russian, Chinese, Bulgarian, Georgian, Danish and English by dividing them into three supertypes on the basis of a step-by-step examination of their relationship to perception and cognition, their representation of situations and their use in oral and written discourse. The dynamic processing of visual stimuli involves three stages: input (experience), intake (understanding) and outcome (a combination). The very choice among three modalities of existence gives a language a certain voice -- either the voice of reality based on situations, the speaker's voice involving experiences or the hearer's voice grounded on information. This makes grammar a prime index: all symbols are static and impotent and need a vehicle, i.e. grammar, which can bring them to the proper point of reference. Language is shown to be a living organism with a determinant category, aspect, mood or tense, which conquers territory from other potential competitors trying to create harmony between verbal and nominal categories. It is demonstrated that the communication processes are different in the three supertypes, although in all three cases the speaker must choose between a public and a private voice before the grammar is put into use.

Mentality and Thought
Mentality and Thought

Author: Per Durst-Andersen

Publisher: Copenhagen Business School Press DK

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9788763002318

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"Mentality and Thought - North, South, East and West presents the reader with an informed pluri-disciplinary discussion of the concept of mentality, its relevance and its interconnection with culture past and present, on the one hand, and cognition and mental frames on the other. The exploration is one of both theoretical depth and socio-historical width, each paper providing its own synthetic combination of conceptual and empirical analysis." --Book Jacket.

Linguistics Inside Out
Linguistics Inside Out

Author: George Wolf

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 9027236526

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Roy Harris's thoroughgoing attack on the presuppositions underpinning the dominant traditions of Western thought about language, and his advocacy of a radically reconceived linguistics focused on the idea that the linguistic sign is contextually created and interpreted as a function of the meaningful integration of communicative behaviour, have made him one of the most controversial figures in the field today. In the essays in this volume Naomi S. Baron, Bob Borsley, Philip Carr, David Fleming, Rom Harré, Anthony Holiday, John E. Joseph, Frederick J. Newmeyer, David R. Olson, Trevor Pateman, John Sören Pettersson and John R. Taylor offer a critical examination of various aspects and implications of Harris's views, in reponse to which Harris contributes an article that both engages with his critics and develops some of the major themes of his work.

Questions
Questions

Author: Pia Lauritzen

Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 8771844848

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Questions: Between Identity and Difference is in many ways a curious book. It is a scholarly book, but tests the boundaries of traditional academic methods. It is a philosophical book, but bases its arguments on observational studies in classrooms where Danish, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese schoolchildren are taught in their native languages. It is a demanding book, one that assumes its readers think for themselves. Yes it is also a generous book, which draws on the author's own experience in researching and exploring what it means to be human across a variety of thoughts and behavioural patterns.

Cognitive Linguistics and the Study of Chinese
Cognitive Linguistics and the Study of Chinese

Author: Dingfang Shu

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 902726208X

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Bringing together contributions from a group of prominent researchers, within a cognitive-linguistic framework, this volume sheds light on linguistic structures and usages characteristic of the Chinese language, including noun-verb inclusion, the conceptual spatialization of actions, existential constructions, conceptual structures and coherence, idioms and metaphors, language acquisition of caused motion, etc. The contributions are committed to the principle of “converging evidence” that has been advocated in Cognitive Linguistics since its inception. Some studies in this volume combine introspective methods with theoretical analysis, while others rely on corpus-based, experimental and neuroscientific methods. Featuring diverse topics and multiple methods, this collection will be useful to readers who are interested in the grammatical and conceptual structure of Chinese, as well as in the state-of-the-art of Cognitive Linguistics in China.

Sign Studies and Semioethics
Sign Studies and Semioethics

Author: Susan Petrilli

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-10-09

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1614519129

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This book examines the issues surrounding the problematic perpetuation of dominant sign systems through the framework of ‘semioethics’. Semioethics is concerned with using semiotics as a powerful tool to critique the status quo and move beyond the reproduction of the dominant order of communication. The aim is to present semioethics as a method to engage semiotics in an active rethink of our ability as humans to affect change.

Stories of Home
Stories of Home

Author: Devika Chawla

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-09-17

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0739194933

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Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people “speak” and “story” home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is home—as a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absence—central to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a “unit of analysis” in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Home—how we experience it and what it that says about the “selves” we come to occupy—is an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions.

Connecting Grammaticalisation
Connecting Grammaticalisation

Author: Jens Nørgård-Sørensen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2011-12-21

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 902728413X

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This monograph presents a view on grammaticalisation radically different from standard views centering around the cline of grammaticality. Grammar is seen as a complex sign system, and, as a consequence, grammatical change always comprises semantic change. What unites morphology, topology (word order), constructional syntax and other grammatical subsystems is their paradigmatic organisation. The traditional concept of an inflexional paradigm is generalised as the structuring principle of grammar. Grammatical change involves paradigmatic restructuring, and in the process of grammatical change morphological, topological and constructional paradigms often connect to form complex paradigms. The book introduces the concept of connecting grammaticalisation to describe the formation, restructuring and dismantling of such complex paradigms. Drawing primarily on data from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, the book offers both a broad general discussion of theoretical issues (part one) and three case studies (part two).

Formal and Functional Perspectives on Tense and Related Categories
Formal and Functional Perspectives on Tense and Related Categories

Author: Christian Heyde Petersen

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9783039103676

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This book explores the gap that has developed between two sides in linguistics: the formal tradition and the functional tradition. It discusses fundamental issues such as tense, aspect and action by examining and comparing insights from the two traditions with a view to determining whether there are any possibilities of future bridge-building between the two approaches. This study focuses on comparing the actual output of different linguistic approaches and examines their 'usefulness'. A major aim is, therefore, to evaluate and identify the most useful approach.

Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition
Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition

Author: Carsten Levisen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 3110294656

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Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.