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The focus of this volume is on the business letter genre, a seminal and widely used genre in business communication. Since the introduction of the Internet, interest in this genre has increased once again, because of the digital format of the letter. E-mail has partially taken over the multiple functions of the traditional business letter and bypassed, again partially, the fax. However, the letter has also survived in its written form. Since the 1990s, genre theory has been receiving a lot of attention, both in academic and pedagogical circles. Discourse analysts have increasingly discovered the importance of the genre concept for the understanding of discourse. Not only do we get a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics (register, lexico-grammatical features) of texts, but we also become aware of their macrostructures which appear to be organised according to genre expectations and conventions rooted in the socio-cultural context. This evolution is also reflected in the different research approaches to the business letter, as shown by the various chapters of this volume.
In view of the considerable number of recent publications devoted to various applications of Cognitive Linguistics, the book focusses on fields that have not been extensively dealt with within the CL framework. The book gathers presentations that deal with fields of application as defined in the introduction to the first volume in the ACL series (Kristiansen et al 2006). The articles in the first section ("From loop to cycle") are defining papers written by eminent scholars whose position within the field of CL has been firmly established. They touch upon issues of continuing relevance to the discipline and introduce thematic areas covered in the next four sections of the volume. Papers in t...
Can a culture have a theme that unifies seemingly unrelated practices? In this volume, Collins suggests that Maya-Mam customs as different as constructing a house, staying healthy, seeking God, disciplining children, agreeing to a contract, or just speaking the language, all originate from the same concept- a search for the center. This is far more than mere balance, long recognized as a Mayan cultural value. Rather, center space is a place of physical and metaphysical peace, acceptance, meaning, health, happiness and "home." Collins also shows how cenderedness is deeply embedded in the grammar of Mam- its lexicon, morphology, syntax, and discourse structure. This relatedness of Mam culture ...
Discourse, of Course comes after Jan Renkema’s Introduction to Discourse Studies (2004) for undergraduates. The new book is a collection of twenty short papers. It is a capita selecta course and meant for graduate programs. The aim of this book is threefold: • to present material for advanced courses in discourse studies; • to unfold a stimulating display of research projects to future PhD students; • to give an overview of new developments after the 2004 Introduction to Discourse Studies. This publication fulfills both the teacher's need for a state-of-the-art overview of the main topics in discourse, and the student's need to acquire standards for developing research plans in theses and dissertations. It gives a combination of approaches from very different schools in discourse studies, ranging from argumentation theory to genre theory, from the study of multimodal metaphors to cognitive approaches to coherence analysis. This book is not only meant to serve as a textbook, but also as a reference book for researchers who want an update for various main topics in the field.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. The first twenty chapters give readers the opportunity to acquire a thorough knowledge of the fundamental analytic concepts and descriptive models of Cognitive Linguistics and their background. The book starts with a set of chapters discussing different conceptual phenomena that are recognized as key concepts in Cognitive Linguistics: prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, perspectivization, mental spaces, etc. A second set of chapters deals with ...
This volume contains contributions to the "systematic study of knowledge." They suggest both an extension and a new path for classical epistemology. The topics in the first volume are the following: concepts and forms of knowledge, epistemic perspectivism, knowledge and world-views, perceptual knowledge, scientific knowledge, models in science, distributed and integrated knowledge, interaction of forms of knowledge, and relation between forms of knowledge and forms of representation.
All languages of the world provide their speakers with linguistic means to express causal relations in discourse. Causal connectives and causative auxiliaries are among the salient markers of causal construals. Cognitive scientists and linguists are interested in how much of this causal modeling is specific to a given culture and language, and how much is characteristic of general human cognition. Speakers of English, for example, can choose between because and since or between therefore and so. How different are these from the choices made by Dutch speakers, who speak a closely related language, but (unlike English speakers) have a dedicated marker for non-volitional causality (daardoor)? T...
The book focuses on the question of how and to what extent cognitive semantic approaches can contribute to the new field of the cognitive science of science. The argumentation is based on a series of instructive case studies which are intended to test the prospects and limits of the metascientific application of both holistic and modular cognitive semantics. The case studies show that, while cognitive semantic research is able to solve problems which have traditionally been the domain of the philosophy of science, it also encounters serious limits. The prospects and the limits thus revealed suggest new research topics which in future can be tackled by cognitive semantic approaches to the cognitive science of science.
Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors-who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education-focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. Authors cover topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.
This timely collection explores how children display social competence in talking about their mental health and wellbeing. The authors analyse recorded conversations of young people’s interactions with professionals in which they disclose particular mental health concerns and their ways of coping, drawing on insights from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and discursive psychology. Across a diverse range of institutional and international settings, chapters examine how children and young people employ interactional strategies to demonstrate their competence. The research reveals how young people resist or protect claims that they lack competence, especially in contexts where they mig...