This is the first book to collect research on game-theoretic tools in the analysis of language with particular reference to semantics and pragmatics. Games are significant, because they pertain equally to pragmatics and semantics of natural language. The book provides an overview of the variety of ways in which game theory is used in the analysis of linguistic meaning and shows how games arise in pragmatic as well as semantic investigations. The book is a balanced combination of philosophical, linguistic, logical and mathematical argumentation.
The book has an introductory and a concluding chapter, written by the editor, to give a gentle introduction to the topics covered in the book and to provide wider conclusions and prospects arising from the individual essays.
Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together van Leeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years. Discourse, van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledge about some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of reality has to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they are plural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of the same aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be used in different social contexts.
This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.
The ability to use vague language ("bags of time", "doing stuff", "sort of thing", "and all that") is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. This volume explores the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests applications in TOEFL, asking questions such as "What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?" and suggesting directions for future research.
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