The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)

It is by now commonly agreed that the proper study of consciousness requires a multidisciplinary approach which focuses on the varieties and dimensions of conscious experience from different angles. This book, which is based on a workshop held at the University of Skövde, Sweden, provides a microcosm of the emerging discipline of consciousness studies and focuses on some important but neglected aspects of consciousness. The book brings together philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive and computer science, biology, physics, art and the new media. It contains critical studies of subjectivity vs objectivity, nonconceptuality vs conceptuality, language, evolutionary aspects, neural correlates, microphysical level, creativity, visual arts and dreams. It is suitable as a text-book for a third-year undergraduate or a graduate seminar on consciousness studies. (Series A)

Hate speech has been extensively studied by disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, history, politics and law. Some significant areas of study have been the origins of hate speech in past and modern societies around the world; the way hate speech paves the way for harmful social movements; the socially destructive force of propaganda; and the legal responses to hate speech. On reviewing the literature, one major weakness stands out: hate speech, a crime perpetrated primarily by malicious and damaging language use, has no significant study in the field of linguistics. Historically, pragmatic theories have tended to address language as cooperative action, geared to reciprocally informative polite understanding. As a result of this idealized view of language, negative types of discourse such as harassment, defamation, hate speech, etc. have been neglected as objects of linguistic study. Since they go against social, moral and legal norms, many linguists have wrongly depicted those acts of wrong communication as unusual, anomalous or deviant when they are, in fact, usual and common in modern societies all over the world. The book analyses the challenges legal practitioners and linguists must meet when dealing with hate speech, especially with the advent of new technologies and social networks, and takes a linguistic perspective by targeting the knowledge the linguist can provide that makes harassment actionable.

The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one's own. The metaphor of 'mirror' aptly comes to mind.Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to 'mirror' other's actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: 'mirror neurons'. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person 'intersubjectivity' of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans. The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.(Series B)

The book presents new issues and areas of work in modality and evidentiality in English(es), and in relation to other European languages (French, Galician, Lithuanian, Spanish). Given the complexity of the relations among modal and evidential expressions, their constant diachronic evolution, and the variation found in different English-speaking areas, and in different genres and discourse domains, the volume addresses the following issues: the conceptual nature of modality, the relationship between the domains of modality and evidentiality, the evolution and current status of the modal auxiliaries and other modal expressions, the relationship with neighbouring grammatical categories (tense, aspect, mood), and the variation in different discourse domains and genres, in modelling stance and discourse identities.

Wolfgang Wildgen presents three perspectives on the evolution of language as a key element in the evolution of mankind in terms of the development of human symbol use. (1) He approaches this question by constructing possible scenarios in which mechanisms necessary for symbolic behavior could have developed, on the basis of the state of the art in evolutionary anthropology and genetics. (2) Non-linguistic symbolic behavior such as cave art is investigated as an important clue to the developmental background to the origin of language. Creativity and innovation and a population's ability to integrate individual experiments are considered with regard to historical examples of symbolic creativity in the visual arts and natural sciences. (3) Probable linguistic 'fossils' of such linguistic innovations are examined. The results of this study allow for new proposals for a 'protolanguage' and for a theory of language within a broader philosophical and semiotic framework, and raises interesting questions as to human consciousness, universal grammar, and linguistic methodology. (Series B)

Language, vision and music: what common cognitive patterns underlie our competence in these disparate modes of thought? Language (natural & formal), vision and music seem to share at least the following attributes: a hierarchical organisation of constituents, recursivity, metaphor, the possibility of self-reference, ambiguity, and systematicity. Can we propose the existence of a general symbol system with instantiations in these three modes or is the only commonality to be found at the level of such entities as cerebral columnar automata? Answers are to be found in this international collection of work which recognises that one of the basic features of consciousness is its MultiModality, that there are possibilities to model this with contemporary technology, and that cross-cultural commonalities in the experience of, and creativity within, the various modalities are significant. With the advent of Intelligent MultiMedia this aspect of consciousness implementation in mind/brain acquires new significance. (Series B)

Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry examines representations of philosophical discourses in Modernist women's writing. Philosophers argued in the early twentieth century for an understanding of the self as both corporeal and relational, shaped and reshaped by interactions within a community. The once clear distinction between self and other was increasingly called into question. This breakdown of boundaries between self and world often manifested in the style of early twentieth-century literary works. Modernist poetry, like stream of consciousness fiction, used metaphor, sound, and a revision of received grammatical structures to blur the boundaries between the individual and collective. This book explores the ways that feminist writers like Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore used style and technique to respond to these philosophical debates, reclaiming agency over a predominantly male philosophical discourse. While many critics have addressed the thematic content of these writers' work, few scholars have taken up this question while focusing on the style of the writing. This book shows how these feminist poets used seemingly small stylistic choices in poetry to make necessary contributions to contemporary philosophical discourses, ultimately rendering these philosophical conversations more inclusive.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook now contains nearly 5,000 pages. It provides easy access — for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language — to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of Pragmatics, broadly conceived as “the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication”. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers: the main body of the Handbook is produced in loose-leaf format in 3-ring binders and is accompanied by the bound Manual. The loose-leaf Handbook forms the basis of the Handbook proper giving an overview of the subfields, traditions, methodologies and concepts of Pragmatics. The Handbook is used as a basis for the online version: the Handbook of Pragmatics Online has been expanded and revised annually since 2003. Future versions will add further records and will include updates, rewritings and extensive revisions of already existing records. The Handbook of Pragmatics Online is available from www.benjamins.com/online with a free 90-day trial. The Handbook is also available in combination with the Bibliography of Pragmatics Online at a discounted rate. SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (Manual + Installments 1995-2009).

This volume addresses problems of semantics regarding the analysis of tense and aspect (TA) markers in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Croatian, English, French, German, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. Its main interest goes out to epistemic uses of such markers, whereby epistemic modality is understood as indicating “a degree of compatibility between the modal world and the factual world” (Declerck). All contributions, moreover, tackle these problems from a more or less cognitive point of view, with some of them insisting on the need to provide a unifying explanation for all usage types, temporal and non-temporal, and all of them accepting the premise that the semantics of TA categories essentially refers to subjective, rather than objective, concerns. The volume also represents one of the first attempts to gather accounts of TA marking (in various languages) that are explicitly set within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to establishing an awareness that modal meaning elements are directly relevant to the analysis of the grammar of time.