How do meaningless marks and sounds become the meaningful words of a natural language? To what do words having referential significance refer? What is the meaning of the words that do not have referential significance? Can ordinary language really do what it appears to do, or is this an illusion? Dr. Adler maintains that these fundamental questions are not satisfactorily treated in the two main philosophies of language that have dominated twentieth-century thinking on the subject - the syntactical and 'ordinary language' approaches. Drawing upon the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, Poinsot, and Husserl, Dr. Adler's own discussion exemplifies the third approach, which he describes as "semantic and lexical." In this now -classic work, the fruit of more than 50 years' concern with the philosophy of language, Dr. Adler advances a powerful theory of meaning and applies it to some outstanding philosophical problems. In unpretentious and uncluttered prose, he provides a limpid introduction to a number of knotty philosophical issues and at the same time issues a challenge to some of the most tenacious doctrines of the modern world.

This comprehensive study of the psychology of language explores how we speak, read, remember, learn and understand language. The author examines each of these aspects in detail.

With only one learner, it is possible for the teacher to give serious attention to principles of second language acquisition such as motivation, error treatment, and learner autonomy, which are more difficult to address in classroom learning. This book combines theory with practical suggestions, making it invaluable for language tutors.

Preliminary material /Editors Theory of Questions -- INTRODUCTION /Editors Theory of Questions -- ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SENTENCES AND PICTURES OF SITUATIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICO-CATEGORIAL ANALYSIS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE STRUCTURE OF NATURAL-LANGUAGE QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICO-CATEGORIAL DESCRIPTION OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- COGNITIVE CONTENT AND COGNITIVE CONTEXT OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- ANSWERS /Editors Theory of Questions -- EMBEDDED QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE ANALYSIS OF EROTETIC SITUATION /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN SCIENCE /Editors Theory of Questions -- EROTETIC REASONING /Editors Theory of Questions -- PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN SURVEYS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN DIDACTIC TESTS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS /Editors Theory of Questions -- PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- CONCLUSIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- FROM THE HISTORY OF EROTETICS IN POLAND IN THE 20TH CENTURY144 /Editors Theory of Questions -- REFERENCES /Editors Theory of Questions -- NAME INDEX /Editors Theory of Questions.

Revised and updated, the 2nd Edition of Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology presents an accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world through the contemporary theory and practice of linguistic anthropology. Presents a highly accessible introduction to the study of language in real-life social contexts around the world Combines classic studies on language and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship and assumes no prior knowledge in linguistics or anthropology Features a series of updates and revisions for this new edition, including an all-new chapter on forms of nonverbal language Provides a unifying synthesis of current research and considers future directions for the field

Explores the role language plays in the relationship between reality and utterance.

Newspaper coverage of world events is presented as the unbiased recording of `hard facts`. In an incisive study of both the quality and the popular press, Roger Fowler challenges this perception, arguing that news is a practice, a product of the social and political world on which it reports. Writing from the perspective of critical linguistics, Fowler examines the crucial role of language in mediating reality. Starting with a general account of news values and the processes of selection and transformation which go to make up the news, Fowler goes on to consider newspaper representations of gender, power, authority and law and order. He discusses stereotyping, terms of abuse and endearment, the editorial voice and the formation of consensus. Fowler's analysis takes in some of the major news stories of the Thatcher decade - the American bombing of Libya in 1986, the salmonella-in-eggs affair, the problems of the National Health Service and the controversy of youth and contraception.

This book takes the form of a dialogue. It presents two authors, specialized in the phenomenologу, posing questions to each other and offering complex answers for critical discussion. The book includes both presentation of different communication schools and philosophizing on the issues of communication. The authors debate numerous topics by providing the definition and etymology of communication, examining the limits of communication, and using a poli-logical base of communication. The issue which pervades all domains is that of mediation: how things, such as identities, styles, and bodies are mediated by culture, history, and tradition, and what the limits are of such mediation. This question leads to more complex issues of “mediated mediations” such that an explication of one medium is framed by another medium, leading to a question of meta-language as a fundamental, unmediated medium. This involves some fine points of mediation: perspectivity, discursivity, ethics of communication, ideology, private and public. Throughout the mutual, interrogative dialogue, the authors touch upon, but avoid the daunting commitment to, a theory of metacommunication, as well as the “transcendental” problematic of accessing the numerous theoretical, thematic, and historical aspects of communication.

What blocks the way to a better understanding of language evolution, it is widely held, is above all a paucity of factual evidence. Not so, argues Unravelling the Evolution of Language. This book finds the main obstacle, instead, in a poverty of a specific kind of theory—restrictive theory. It shows, too, that this poverty of restrictive theory is one of the root causes of the paucity of factual evidence. "Unravelling"...takes it that a theory of a thing T—for example, language—is restrictive if it gives us a basis for distinguishing T in a non-arbitrary way from all things that are in fact distinct from it, including those that happen to be related to it. The book then argues in detail that much of the recent work on language evolution proceeds from loose assumptions, rather than restrictive theories, about a number of crucial "things": The entities, prelinguistic or linguistic, that are believed to have undergone evolution; the processes by which these entities are believed to have evolved; the ways in which these (pre)linguistic entities link up with entities that are believed to be correlates of them; the sources of data that are believed to yield indirect evidence about the evolution of language; and the factors that add to or subtract from the scientific substance of accounts of language evolution. In support of its main argument, Unravelling the Evolution of Language puts forward detailed analyses of various recent accounts of language evolution, including co-optationist accounts by Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Lyle Jenkins preadaptationist accounts by Philip Lieberman, Wendy Wilkins, Jenny Wakefield, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, William Calvin and Derek Bickerton adaptationist accounts by Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom and others. This means that Unravelling...as it builds its main argument, also offers an appraisal of some significant contributions to recent work on language evolution.