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This book provides a general survey of the life and work of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Ortega y Gasset (1183-1955), author of the widely read The Revolt of the Masses. Dr Dobson divides his study into sections devoted to Ortega's political thinking and to his philosophy, rooting these in the context of contemporary Spain and discussing the wider implications of their influence. He examines Ortega's position with regard to the Civil War, his ambivalent espousal of socialism, his emphasis on the importance of the select individual in the modernisation of society and creation of a nació vital; the appropriation of his ideas by Primo de Rivera in the cause of fascism. This book is intended to be accessible to both Hispanists and general readers with an interest in literature, history, intellectual and political thought and philosophy.
About fifty years ago, Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy is 'the pivot of semantic analysis'. Fifty years on, polysemy has become one of the hottest topics in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences at large. The book deals with the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints. The cognitive approach is supplemented and supported by diachronic, psycholinguistic, developmental, comparative, and computational perspectives. The chapters, written by some of the most eminent specialists in the field, are all underpinned by detailed discussions of methodology and theory.
This book approaches the topic of false friends from a theoretical perspective, arguing that false friends carry out a positive role as a cognitive device, mainly in literature and jokes, and suggesting some pragmatic strategies in order to restore the original sense of a text/utterance when a given translator (or a foreign speaker) falls victim to false friends. This theoretical account is successively verified by appealing to texts from the fields of literature, science, philosophy, journalism, and everyday speech.
This book approaches the topic of false friends from a theoretical perspective, arguing that false friends carry out a positive role as a cognitive device, mainly in literature and jokes, and suggesting some pragmatic strategies in order to restore the original sense of a text/utterance when a given translator (or a foreign speaker) falls victim to false friends. This theoretical account is successively verified by appealing to texts from the fields of literature, science, philosophy, journalism, and everyday speech.
Tropes are not only rhetorical means, which are used as a creative and / or persuasive linguistic means in poetry and public speech. They are also a cognitive tool which helps people to understand the world and to express their world. As they are the basis on which our worldview and even our everyday speech is founded, the question must be posed as to whether utterances containing tropes can be said to be true. This has been an epistemological problem since Nietzsche expressed his doubts about the possibility that figurative language could give access to truth. However, since then research has paid little attention to this question. ‐18 papers by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and literary scholars have been collected in this volume. Their 21 authors use various approaches or paradigms in order to define metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole and find an answer to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.
Linguistic taboo has been relegated for a long time to a peripheral position within Linguistics, due to its social stigmatization and inherent linguistic complexity. Recently, though, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting the phenomenon, especially from cognitive frameworks. This volume is the first collection of papers dealing with linguistic taboo from that perspective. The volume gathers 15 chapters, which provide novel insights into a broad range of taboo phenomena (euphemism, dysphemism, swearing, political correctness, coprolalia, etc.) from the fields of sexuality, diseases, death, war, ageing or religion. With a special focus on lexical semantics, the authors in the volume ...
This book examines one of the allegedly unique features of human language: structure sensitivity. Its point of departure is the distinction between content and structural units, which are defined in psycholinguistic terms. The focus of the book is on structural representations, in particular their hierarchicalness and their branching direction. Structural representations reach variable levels of activation and are therefore gradient in nature. Their variable strength is claimed to account for numerous effects including differences between individual analytical levels, differences between languages as well as pathways of language acquisition and breakdown. English is found to be consistent in its branching direction and to have evolved its branching direction in line with the cross-level harmony constraint. Structure sensitivity is argued to be highly variable both within and across languages and consequently an unlikely candidate for a defining property of human language.
This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The ...
This volume brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines to define and describe taboo words and language and to investigate the reasons and beliefs behind them. It examines topics such as impoliteness, swearing, censorship, taboo in deaf communities, translation of tabooed words, and the use of taboo in banter and comedy.